Six Classic Horror Stories Reimagined for 2015's Millennial Cry-Babies

It is Halloween, a holiday it's getting harder to relate to. You're a millennial, probably—quick test to see if you are a millennial: Can you recount, when pressed, a top five favorite emojis list? Then yes, you are a millennial—and the good old ghost stories just don't appeal to you anymore.

If Dr. Frankenstein had a "Find Your Friends" iPhone app he wouldn't have had to chase his awful monster across the frigid Arctic tundra. The Woman in Black wouldn't have resorted to killing children in her deathly misery if she had Candy Crush Saga and Mom Facebook to keep her busy. Would Sadako have copped Yeezys, and will we ever know?

Anyway, here are some ghostly ghost stories updated to suit your short attention span:

And Dracula did feast upon the neck-tinted blood of a virgin, and did throw her carcass high from the castle keep, and did sleep deeply for 100 days and 100 nights, and did wake on a Sunday and was, like, totally in the mood for brunch? Like: ugh, really craving some avocado toast right now! And so Dracula did hop on the WhatsApp group with Debbie, Eddie, and his one gay friend, Carl, and did see if anyone was down for Breakfast Club, and Dracula did queue for 45 minutes outside Breakfast Club, and was baffled to find himself seated by a window.

"Excuse me?" Dracula said. "Hi? Can we—hi? I need to move." And Dracula did explain that he was sensitive to light, and so could not sit by the window because it was bright today, and the waitress had to ask sweetly if another table of four nearby would mind sitting by the window in the sunlight, and they agreed that they did not mind.

"Ughhhhh!" Dracula said. "So hungry!" And Dracula beheld the menu, and did read aloud from it, and did say that everything looked "so good." And Dracula did announce to the table that he could totally crush a fruit smoothie right now because he had had "like, the heaviest sleep," and could like really use the vitamins.

"Hi?" Dracula did say to the waitress, "Hi? Yeah, hi: Do you have any rice milk, for the smoothies? Only, I can't drink soya, and the almond alternative will aggravate my mild nut allergy, and so I cannot drink that either." And the waitress did ask him to explain how Dracula cannot drink soy milk, because everyone can drink soy milk, and he did smile tightly and say, "Soya's fine," and then did turn to the table and dramatically mouth the words: "How rude." But the table did not really understand him, and so Dracula this time said the words, very loudly indeed. "HOW," Dracula said, in that kind of loud whisper people do when they have absolutely zero tact at all, "RUDE."

When it came time to order the main, Dracula made a whole thing about GM and did say chorizo with a "th."

During the course of the 40-minute brunch, Dracula asked the waitress for: "more napkins," "a clean knife, please? I think your dishwasher needs descaling, because this is a very smudgy knife," "ketchup, for my friend," "just, like, five or six more napkins," "a little doggy bag for this croissant," "[an extremely long enquiry about whether the restaurant offers a 20 percent discount for Yelp Power Reviewers]," whether the waitress could ask a mother whose baby was crying to stop her baby from crying ("Only it's very annoying," Dracula whispered), to switch tables again now the sun had gone in, "just, ten to twelve more napkins."

When the bill arrived Dracula wrote and underlined the words "RUDE SKANK" on the receipt, and did not tip, and did review Breakfast Club unfavorably on Yelp before bedding down for a thousand-year slumber.

They were running through the forest, through the trees, pursued distantly and silently by the man with the axe—blood smearing their clothes and their faces, their bodies whipped by sprinting through brambles and sticks—when they came upon a cliff face.

"I thought this was the road?" she said.

"Yeah it said… the map said the road was this way."

There was a pause and their hearts throbbed like drums.

"Did—are you still using Apple Maps?"

"I am still using Apple Maps, yes."

She made a very frustrated noise.

"What's that?"

"What do you mean?"

"What was that noise?"

"It's just—and I said this to you before—Apple Maps is the worst. Remember when we were trying to find that Kasabian gig and ended up back in Bristol? I said then. I told you then. You need to download the Google Maps app."

He held his phone as far over the cliff as he could.

"I'm not getting reception," he said. "I'm just getting that 'E.' What network are you on?"

"I'm on giffgaff."

"Well can we use your phone? I'm on EE."

"I've only got, like, 8 percent battery left," she said. "I was watching all those YouTubes about how to start a fire."

"I'll turn it off and on. Sometimes that helps it find the satellites."

"Just go on Airplane Mode."

"How do I do that?"

"Just d—"

And they heard running behind them, and panting, and screaming, and their bodies were never found by the police.

"Uber is actually bad," says a girl dressed as a vampire at a Halloween party you are at, right as you click the Uber app and prepare to wait between 30 and 40 minutes for it to actually fucking load up. You, for the record, are dressed as a sexy cat. "Didn't you know?"

"How," you say. "How is it bad?"

"Because of… there are loads of articles," she says. "Do you like Wired on Facebook?"

You do not like Wired on Facebook.

"Well, that'll tell you. Plus, my friend got an Uber once and it took her a really weird route home."

2.8x surge fare. Give it a minute.

She is saying: "Did you not see all the black cab drivers protest in Trafalgar Square?" We respect the opinions of black cab drivers, now. The real horror is every day.

How has it gone up to 3.2x? It's 2 AM. Oh no, someone else is getting involved.

"Hey, have you ever done that thing where you check your Uber rating?" a dude dressed as Cruella de Vil is saying. "You check in settings. They email it to you. Look: I'm 4.9!" Society is a prison, and you are locked in it. You are cursed to have this conversation again and again and again until you die. You just tried to order an Uber, but the bar kept doing that thing where it bloops infinitely and doesn't order a cab even though you can see a Prius on the map two streets away. Reboot the app. Oh no, your phone is ringing—

"Yeah, hello?" an angry cabby is saying (3.5 stars). "Did you just cancel your Uber?"

"Oh, I didn't realize I ordered one. No, the app did the—"

"You just cancelled your fucking Uber. Cunt."

"Wait, where are you—"

The line goes dead. You watch a Prius turn around on the map. You get an email saying you have been charged a £5 cancellation charge. Halloween is the day the spirits cross over from the incorporeal realm and visit us on Earth—jangling their undead bones in a grotesque dance, stroking their spectral hands across our shoulders and our legs, rejoicing in graveyards, clotting together in misty fields and glens—and then they fuck right off again, back into the abyss, because anything is better than here, because being on Earth is hell.

Oh no, a mummy. You cracked open that sealed golden room in that pyramid that one time, didn't you, and took the riches hidden deep within, and then you thought everything was alright—you traded the gold for money bought all those mansions and gear—but then, right when you thought you were safe, you get a notification:

And then, like a second later:

And then:

You sense that you are being followed, but you ignore it. Until, the next day:

Wait, are they… are they following and unfollowing you? Your phone again: Snapchat. It's a fucking mummy wearing a hat and making a "woooOOooOOOooo" sound, big ghost emoji floating in front of their face. Tagged you in an inspirational quote on Instagram. You take a handful of diamonds and toss them furiously into your swimming pool, which is also full of diamonds. Oh, you've got an e—

This motherfucke—

AGAIN WITH THIS. For courtesy, you check their tweets—a couple of four-day-old meme retweets, a change.org petition, an @ complaint to South West Trains that starts with the word "really?," and then— oh. Oh no. You've accidentally pressed that little follow button in the bottom left-hand corner. Dude: you followed the mummy back.

The mummy slides into your DMs, like, immediately. "Haha thanks for the follow and welcome to my twitter page :+)"

And just like that you're stuck: stuck in a loose, uneasy friendship with a haunting, screaming ghoul from beyond the abyss, occasional exchange of favs, begrudgingly accepting their Facebook request, dozens of swiftly cancelled party invites every month, occasional DMs about how you should "meet up irl one time," and you're too polite to leave, locked into being at best acquaintances with a shriveled carcass wrapped in stinking bandages, dutifully answering "Maybe" to their Facebook invite to attend a nearby jumble sale next Sunday, occasionally liking their status about a new job.

Oh man, her bones grew huge in her skin and thick bristles of fur pushed through her dermis and she howled in agony at the moon, and she ran and she ran all night, the taste of blood on the air, panting and slobbering, shitting in bushes, scratching, and killing, and clawing at the sky, the agony of it all, the pain. Then she woke up, human again, shivering on a park bench, then booted up her phone and checked the BuzzFeed app and got in line for a coffee at Starbucks.

Oh, shit, weird: someone must've taken a photo of her as she transformed? Kind of a weird thing to do, but whatever. No distinguishing features. Very hard to trace it back to her job at the bank. Should be fine. Should get away with it. Weird that it would be on BuzzFeed, though—

Oh no. Oh, oh no. Her quickly sprouting armpit and torso hair has been classified as brave and inspiring, and now her body is clickbait.

Oh no, not the Huffington Post—anything but the Huffington Po—

No not… no please Upworthy:

No; it's only 10 AM and the think-pieces are already happening:

Oh no, even deeply unpopular Comment Is Free writer Joel Golby is in on the act:

And now the counter-pieces:

But then, like all our hopes and dreams, the clickbait cycle soon died and ebbed to nothing, and she was left alone to eat animal bones whole and bark wildly at the moon, just as unremarkable as ever.

"Heh," a ghost from a distant past says behind you. "What is this, Narcos?" The ghost from a distant past sits on the sofa next to you. "I heard about this. Is it good?" You do not know if it is good yet. This is the first episode. "You mind if I…?" And the ghost from a distant past, slain in battle, an arrow running out of its heart, sits and watches Narcos with you. Three episodes in and you are ready for bed. "Do you mind if I…?" you say, and the ghost motions to leave. "Oh, right, sure. Do you… would it be OK if I slept on the sofa?" the ghost asks. "My soul was torn from my body and I've been shuttling around a sort of intangible cosmic realm for 400 years and now I haunt your flat, and it would be cool to sort of stretch out and get some shut-eye, you know?" It is fine. The ghost sleeps on the sofa.

When you wake up there is cereal on the floor and a dirty bowl in the sink and the cereal that you were going to eat for breakfast—Sugar Puffs—is no longer in the box—or, to be more specific, there is a half-handful of cereal in the box, enough to not say the box is empty, but certainly not enough for an actual bowl of cereal. "I hope you don't mind," the ghost from the distant past says. "I ate some cereal."

The next day you have to leave a passive-aggressive note taped above the sink reminding the ghost to do its washing up.

The day after that you come home and the ghost from a distant past has skipped three episodes ahead of you in Narcos and you accidentally see a plot-dependent shoot-out. The ghost from a distant past has used all the milk. You find an ethereal used condom in your bed. The ghost from a distant past has definitely shagged in your bed. This has to stop.

You ask the ghost from a distant past to put the recycling out and it does not put the recycling out and it is another week until the recycling lorry comes again, and so, in desperation, you pay a man from the church to spray your flat with holy water and condemn the wretched soul back to hell, and you sleep peacefully that night, quietly, and then in the morning you open the fridge, and there is a tin there—just a simple biscuit tin, with a handwritten note saying, 'Sorry I've been a bit of a nightmare to live with, mate, tough week'—and inside the tin is a lovingly baked cake, and you sit on the floor and weep. The ghost from a distant past is chained to a rock being whipped into agony in a distant hellscape, and here you are eating Victoria sponge alone. Maybe the real monster was here all along. Maybe the real monster is you.

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