This Halloween a new brand of horror stamped their mark on horror fandom festivities. Authors Valkyrie and Brett Dyer, collectively known as Immortalis, regaled the Twitterverse with an amusing and entertaining spin on modern and traditional horror through an absolutely over the top retelling of Rocky Horror and the classic horror anthologies like Creepshow and The Twilight Zone.
Immortalis, best-selling authors of Ultimate Horrotica, and The Thorn and His Rose, and regular contributors to Tigershark and other horror ezines set a new standard in role-playing and fanfiction. Taking time zones and varied Halloween traditions into account, they wrote a seven-chapter rendition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, replacing key characters with well-known horror figures such as Art the Clown, Pinhead, Jason Voorhees and Ash Williams. Incorporating videos, interactive posts, images and music they set themselves apart from traditional horror RP and content creation.
With forethought and planning they adapted and tied the narratives to compliment their own Friday the 13th stories, including an equally over the top Jason X tale, a current Hellraiser story, and their own original Immortalis stories. Their Halloween saga featured cameos from horror legends Felissa Rose, Malcolm McDowell, Tony Todd, C.J. Graham, David Howard Thornton, and others. The final product proved a successful use of all potential resources at their disposal and stretched the limits of modern fandom.
Kerry and Brett are not strangers to pushing the boundaries of creativity, their book The Thorn and His Rose dispenses with traditional prose and is instead structured to reflect a theatrical living art gallery, extreme horror at its finest and most aesthetically pleasing! It is the story of two serial killers who recognise each other and form a relationship. The characters are named after the authors. The book is divided into two acts and an interval. The first act sees a counsellor invite her maniacal client for dinner, and openly informs him that she sees his penchant for murder. They reach an accord, and a game ensues where each challenges the other to kill in an artistic manner. Towards the end of the first act paranoia grows and both actors fear the other.
The interval offers a nightmarish interpretation of how they view their reality, juxtaposed against the garish scenes of the first act. The first act climaxes as one of the duo takes control in a callous and horrific manner. The second act builds on the first in that the challenge is taken from the arts to the classic horror movies. Each attack basing itself on well-known horrors, but just as the paranoia grew in the first, so too does abject fear in the sequel until the couple reach an impasse and a gruesome finale is realised.
When asked about their dynamic practices Brett explained, ‘we have a lot planned for the future, and even more under wraps and in progress. Immortalis is our brand, but it is also our story. There is much more to come. This is barely the prologue.’
And it seems the horror world is interested given the breadth of journals and ezines that have published their work. Watch this space and expect the unexpected as these two always seem to give more than anticipated.
Follow Kerry and Brett:
Twitter
@Ashy_slashee
@JasonVoorheesIM
@ImmortalisIM
