My daughter (age 15) is taking a film appreciation class for college credit, and as a project, she has to outline a film. She chose horror because it has well-defined rules and tropes. The rough arc she sketched was that the workers on a certain cruise ship are monsters and they eat the gradually eat more passengers over the trip. The table-ready passengers are inept and cannot defend themselves, rather like Wall-E. Three stumble across the meat-packing room. In the end, those who know the secret die in different ways to demonstrate their unsuitability for the gene pool. She came to me because she didn't know what to call it or how to flesh it out from the outline.
Ah, I felt like Christopher Marlowe when Shakespeare approached him for advice at the bar. We discussed back and forth.
Me: are they zombies who just each the brain, or vampires who just drink the blood?
Em: no. they eat the whole person. It's their buffet.
Me: Hmm... that would put them in the ghoul/shinen gaki catergory. Investigators would notice the bad breath. What's the theme? Why doesn't the captain put a stop to this?
Em: they only eat really annoying people. Like that woman who got caught smoking marijuana and playing her TV too loud at 3 am--the one we never saw again after day three of the cruise, and everyone cheered.
Me: Or the drunk rich guy who spilled his chilled champagne bottle all over the stone dance floor on New Years' Eve. Ah... so your theme is to make the audience cheer the monsters because they're striking back against smug white privilege. That's your name then: Wight Privilege. Wights are a vague British flesh-eating fairy. They could be like the Morlocks in Time Machine who eat the upper class Eloi like cattle.
Em: The second group of people eaten could be the group at port who came back from their tour half an hour late, making the whole ship wait. The captain explains to anyone who asks that they missed the boat and all their belongings leave the ship at the next stop. But someone sees the blood.
Me: The old person with the heart condition who has to be evacuated by helicopter. He's so drugged no one will believe him.
Em: Now we know the real reason the decks were closed and nobody was allowed to watch or film from their balconies.
Me: I'm so proud of you, planning justifiable and neat mass murders.
Em: And because it is on a cruise ship, there aren't police to stop them.
Here are a few photos from our cruise.
New Years' Eve at sea:
Rainbow Falls:
Ukelele practice:
Hula:
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