oh you’re in a horror film/book and your phone died/has no bars? how boring. I think phones in horror SHOULD work. they should ding only to have the protagonist check and find nothing. they should get calls from somebody you don’t know but is still somehow in your contacts. google maps should lead you to one place, no matter what address you type in.
phones are such a big part of our daily lives, removing them from horror removes the horror from our experience. what if the horror felt like it could happen to you, right here, right now? what if it felt like it was already happening?
call 911 and something that is definitely not a person picks up.
call 911 and get an operator only for the call to become increasingly weirder and more sinister until you realize that whatever picked up is not there to help.
text messages from someone who’s dead. voicemails that sound like dead air until you turn the volume all the way up.
emergency alerts for weather that doesn’t happen on earth.
Your phone rings - but it’s your phone number on the screen. You answer it, but all you hear is heavy, laboured breathing. You go to say something, only to hear your voice on the other end tell you “It’s too late,” and hang up.
You get a message from a number you don’t recognise. It’s a picture of you from behind. You turn and see there’s nobody there. When you look back at your phone, you see the sender has sent another text - “Sorry, wrong number.”
Your phone rings - it’s a private number. You answer it, only to feel the sensation of something licking your ear.
You wake up to find a voicemail. You play it back, only to hear an autotuned version of your own voice reciting a Bible passage - 1 Peter 2: 18-20.
You get an emergency alert. It says “I’m sorry.”
This is literally the plot of an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and lemme tell you, to this day I still look sideways at pizza delivery cars.
whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions
Meanwhile every time I watch a video clearly made by one guy in his living room and it has complete descriptive subtitles, I feel more love in me than I can contain.
[Images: Two screenshots from a Tom Scott video. The first screenshot’s subtitles read: “Oh, look at me I’ve bought a Lamborghini!” and the next screenshot’s subtitles read: “Buy some damn subtitles. Also…”]
I dreamed that I was playing mariokart and there was a track that took 3 days to complete and when I somehow managed to get 1st place a popup came onscreen that had a pic of koopa troopa and text that read “congratulations!! you’re gonna have so much sex” and I started laughing so hard I woke up