Helen Vaughn, Wilbur Whateley and the Frankenstein Monster hunt a team of Nazi vampires during the Blitz in WW2

There’s a sub-genre of fiction that involves throwing various public domain characters (and/or historic figures) together and sending them on an adventure. If you’ve read my sketchblog much you’re probably aware of my fondness for Frankenstein’s Monster. He’ll definitely show up in few more story seeds.

Helen Vaughn was the unfortunate child resulting from an encounter with The Great God Pan in the story by Arthur Machen. Wilbur Whately is another unfortunate result of a mating between a human and Something From Beyond. He’s from HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror.

All three characters were the spawn of experiments by men who were messing the realms of Things Men Were Not Meant to Know. (Yeah, whatever.) They seem like they’d make a good team of grumpy misanthropes.

A family of cannibals roams the freeways in an 18 wheel truck and trailer. They hunt their victims at rest stops and motels all across America.

For some reason the cannibal families in horror movies live on the outskirts of society. Physically as well as socially. They live off in the woods or the desert and wait for their food to come to them.

They must not be committed to their life style. If you want a steady supply of human meat you’re more likely to find it where there’s a lot of it. In cities. There are an unfortunate number of real life examples of people who managed to live in the city and eat a few fellow citizens before their neighbors finally noticed.

A better way to keep up the life style would be to stay on the move. Harvest your victims and sell their stuff in the next town down the road. Or, for greater anonymity, sell it on ebay.

One fine Tuesday every human being on earth develops the ability to fly. No wings. No machines. Just up, up and away.

I suspect that only someone who is afraid of heights wouldn’t want the ability to fly. And that person, after they actually flew once, might start to get over that fear.

I’d certainly love to fly. I’d love to rise up with the birds and look out at a larger view of the world.

And what would happen to the world if suddenly borders meant nothing? If the starving could fly to where there was food? If the cold and sick could fly to where there was warmth and comfort? If the oppressed and the imprisoned could simply leave? What would we do with that kind of freedom?

Farmer settlers on a distant world are threatened, when after 40 safe years, the native wildlife evolves a taste for human flesh.

I love Alien, Pitch Black and other movies with malevolent extraterrestrial life. But, for the most part, I have to watch them with part of my brain off. Any alien lifeforms that we encounter out there are unlikely to think of us as food. A few critters might try eating a person or two but it’s highly unlikely that any species will decide human beings will be a staple of their diet. Earth life is just not going to be that compatible with the life of other worlds. We’re likely to be unappetizing, indigestible or just plain poisonous.

At first.

The great thing about life is that it evolves. It adapts to changing circumstances. If the native ecology started being slashed and burned and replaced by some other biosphere the native wildlife wouldn’t have a lot of choice. (Not that evolution is a conscious thing. That we know of.) Adapt or die.

During the Mormon Migration, in desolate Nebraska, a party of Saints are hunted by a misplaced Aztec sorcerer.

It’s a little surprising to me that there aren’t more horror westerns. The Old West seems like the perfect environment for stories of monsters and madman, terror and desperation. The Mormon Migration happened between 1846 to about 1869. A lot of those Saints, as the Mormons called themselves, traveled, not on horseback accompanying covered wagons, but on foot, pushing and pulling handcarts. That’s pretty crazy all by itself.

Group of foreign exchange (Asian? French?) students studying (and partying) in major US city are targeted by Masked Killer

What’s the basic plot of a slasher movie? A bunch of horny teenagers or twentysomethings go out to the woods to party and get horribly murdered by some psycho in a mask? A slight variation is having the kids vacationing in some foreign (not USA) country and getting targeted by psychos there.

Let’s change things up a little okay? The urban environment is way creepier than the forest and it’s filled with hundreds, thousands, millions of examples of the deadliest creatures on the planet. Human beings.

Fictional characters, tired of being trapped by extended copyright, escape into the general media.

For many of us, characters in stories can be almost as real as the people we know in life. We enjoy spending time with them. When the story ends we wish for a sequel or ten so we can spend more time with the characters. When we don’t like how the story turned out many of us want to create our own version of the story. If the story is old enough, if it’s in the public domain, we can do that. If a story is still under copyright we are limited by what we can do with that story and the characters within it.

In recent years, media corporations have fought to extend the copyrights of the works they own in order to continue to profit from those works. Fictional people are keeping other fictional people as indentured servants. The creators of the stories that featured the characters are all dead. They can no longer profit from those stories.

What happens when the fictionals get tired of living in their corporate prisons and decide to romp in the greater imagination?

A supersoldier formula is invented. It’s only effective on women. It drives men mad when it doesn’t kill them outright.

Women are the weaker sex. That’s not a moral judgment. That’s if we just compare the average man to the average woman on a physical level. Let’s leave aside any questions of spiritual or emotional strength or the long term ability to endure pain. Or just to endure. The average man is bigger and stronger than the average woman.

Now, what if there were a way to make women faster and stronger than men? What if the process only worked on women? How many women would take advantage of it? What kind of people would they become when a big man is no longer something to be afraid of?

A wendigo is killing people in the Pacific Northwest. A detective teams up with a Sasquatch to hunt it down.

The wendigo is a hunger spirit. It is said to possess a man who eats the flesh of another human being. The wendigo comes from Algonquin mythology so it’s a little out of place in the Pacific Northwest but … Bigfoot vs. Wendigo? It’s a natural.

Fictional characters, tired of being trapped by extended copyright, escape into the general media.

For many of us, characters in stories can be almost as real as the people we know in life. We enjoy spending time with them. When the story ends we wish for a sequel or ten so we can spend more time with the characters. When we don’t like how the story turned out many of us want to create our own version of the story. If the story is old enough, if it’s in the public domain, we can do that. If a story is still under copyright we are limited by what we can do with that story and the characters within it.

In recent years, media corporations have fought to extend the copyrights of the works they own in order to continue to profit from those works. Fictional people are keeping other fictional people as indentured servants. The creators of the stories that featured the characters are all dead. They can no longer profit from those stories.

What happens when the fictionals get tired of living in their corporate prisons and decide to romp in the greater imagination?