I started watching Scream again. You probably know the franchise, made famous by Wes Carpenter of Nightmare On Elm Street. The young woman alone at home gets the dread phone call asking, “What’s your favorite scary movie?”

Yeah. It was a killer when it first hit, and spawned five sequels plus some spoofs. But I have been watching some of them, along with other horrorific gems, because I just laid down the first words for my first horror novel. Sort of. I do put a foot into horror with my dieselpunk Down Jersey Driveshaft, but not fully.

Now, this is the first book for me in the genre, and it will fall into a specific subgenre (more on that below), but it isn’t my first horror story.

Some time back, the geniuses at Wattpad were laying out offers to write various punk fiction short stories based not only off of a predetermined punk, but also had to funnel out from a given song. Now, if you don’t know me, I am an indie author of punk fiction. Steampunk. Dieselpunk. Decopunk. Gothpunk. Atompunk. Keep going, LOL, because there’s a lot. I’ve covered a lot over the last nine years.

But then Wattpad gave me the Michael Jackson song, ‘Blood On The Dance Floor,’ and the quaint lil’ subgenre called splatterpunk.

I got very, very happy.

One, I’m always up to try a new punk. Second, I love Michael’s music, and the combo of punk+song track did a rare thing: an immediate story idea. A horror tale, similar to the zombie apocalypse oversaturation but without really doing zombies, and let’s set it in my birthplace.

Delaware. The First State. Don’t ask me why, but throughout my journey as an author, I often think of what genre is this place/person/thing. Delaware, to me, would be excellent for horror. It’s low key. Not overly populated. Mostly rural. People keep to themselves. Let’s not forget the history of enslavement, Native genocide, sexism, colonialism, etc. In those dark truths, horror reigns.

From all of this, in the snap of a single synapse, the short story ‘Drinken Alive‘ was born. Tap the title and give her a read. But it’s splatterpunk, so be warned. If I did the subgenre right, it’s less tension and dread, more, well, bloody.

As in by the bucket.

Truckload.

You get the idea.

That’s what splatterpunk is. It sort of says nay to the regular tenets of horror. Tension. Dread. A creature coming at you in slow motion. Those things can be there. But splatterpunk is more concerned with over the top, bloody, disgusting, wretched killing. It’s Kill Bill, but in horror instead of action/drama. It’s extreme horror, almost to the point of tragic absurdity.

So I was super happy to try it out. I feel like I got the gist of it, but I also felt that, once it was done, the story was really just getting started. It needed more. More telling. More depth. More characters.

It needs a full blown, bloodletting novel that drips in your hands.

Something that will make you feel like even three showers taken after you read it, the blood remains in the pores.

Sound good?

If you need more splatterpunk imagery to understand it, try Evil Dead 2, the beautifully hideous Evil Dead (2013) I also watched for the first time in between Scream flicks. Oh, and try the splatterpunk list on Wattpad to keep you busy.

As this is my first post for Threads, let this be my introduction as well as a discourse on splatterpunk and horror. I will gladly discuss any punk subgenre. But for now, my brain is deep in hemoglobin and plotting out the fate of my homeland. The blood, like inspiration, must flow, even if it’s in random spurts.

Speaking of, if you love horror, what’s your favorite book or film? If you write horror, would you try splatterpunk, and who are your fave horror authors?