I love thinking about “lost episode” creepypastas from a production pipeline POV. I wanna be the guy who gets handed a script about a main character brutally dying with no actual plot and is like “Yeah sure. Greenlighted.”
“Everyone who watches this cursed Simpsons episode dies immediately afterwards” The storyboarder died on the spot right after they finished their work. Every single animator dies after they finish their cut, the studio just has to keep hiring new animators to replace the dead ones. They lost too much money already they HAVE to finish the episode that kills people.
I can’t imagine being the person who has to track down what lost media is cursed in a setting where cursed media is dangerous.
There is so much lost media in this world. So many college video assignments. Senior films. Teaser videos for things that never happened. Things that aired and never got recorded.
Imagine being the investigator who has to take twenty incidents of Death By Cursed Media, and trying to parse what piece of cursed media, whether it’s multiple pieces of cursed media in play, what if there’s no living person with a record of what the piece was or who showed it to who…
This is giving lovely plotbunnies.
and then where’s the preventative measures? If a piece of media can become cursed, where’s the liability check? The actors talking about roles they didn’t accept because they thought something seemed off? The insurance dude reading through things to ask whether a project will become dangerous? The executives having conniptions because sure,S&P at the network passed it, but is it just too dark? What about jerks trying to deliberately invoke a cursed media item’s creation as revenge or malice?
(a tangent that I find important: …..on the other hand, as hilarious as this plotbunny is to me. I don’t like that narratively, because that’s giving “people who are against dark stories are right actually” and I don’t want that. I think it’s important to be able to find work you enjoy, and say things you want to with stories; that spooky creepy stuff plays a completely valid role in storytelling, and that the real world is scarier than any horror story can be (which is why we should be able to talk about it and sublimate it in fiction).)Ok that last addition is VERY inspiring because the obvious plotbunny from that is, what if the curse has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the fiction
What if cursed media is cursed because it was filmed on a sacred burial ground. Or because it was filmed on a type of film that The Faeries disapprove of. Or because one of the producers is an evil wizard and just decided to curse it
“this movie is cursed”
“oh it’s got morbid stuff in it?”
“nah it’s a kid’s cartoon, no one dies or even bleeds”
“so everyone who watches it dies?”
“no, not any sooner than they would otherwise”
“so what’s the curse”
“if you watch it, Disney gets some money”