Credits

Contest: IT Halloween Contest 2020
Author:

Dr Pisy
Original: Concorso Halloween 2020
Translator:

Roberto Turati

Halloween Contest 2020

Our most warm welcome to all dear SCP Foundation users. We're back, at the end of this hot August, to announce the beginning of the Halloween Contest 2020. To celebrate the scariest night of the year, we'll be writing an SCP entry capable of anguishing you and giving you goosebumps for the next two months. Let's see the rules of the contest together.

Rules:

The contest entry must stick to the “horror” theme, intended in all of its variations: from psychological horror to slasher horror, from Lovecraft's cosmic horror to Mary Shelley's Gothic horror. By the way, we suggest you read the guides on the website to write down a first-rate work: “Essays by a Hack: Terror”, and “How to Be Scary Without Saying Anything”.
We set up thirty pictures and thirty themed quotes. The challenge in this contest consists of picking a picture or a sentence and using them as a source of inspiration for your story. For example, you may interpret their general concept in an original way, or you may steal their setting and subject. Warning: you can't put the pictures directly into the entry. Point out to us which picture or sentence you've picked in the comments to this page.
The entry must be set in the IT fictional universe.
Only main series SCP entries are allowed, meaning that tales, GoI entries or joke SCPs are excluded.
You may participate either alone or in a group.
Every user may be part of one group only: those who participate alone may not participate in a team, or the other way around.
You may participate with more than one entry.
The entries which don't stick to the guidelines above and aren't included among the "Participants" before the end of the contest won't count. Furthermore, you may not edit your entry after the contest is over, not even to correct any typos.
The jury will consist of eleven users who won't participate in the contest, chosen between staff and regular users. They will be selected after the end of the writing phase and will pick the contest winner.
The winner will secure the chance to insert their entry in the SCP-100-IT slot. Moreover, their entry will be exhibited in the IT home page, in the IT newspaper and in the IT social media accounts.

Pictures and Quotes

The thirty pictures chosen for the contest. You can zoom them out by clicking on "Files" at the bottom of the page.

DISPLAY THE THIRTY QUOTES FOR THE CONTEST

HIDE THE THIRTY QUOTES

1) We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking the final plunge into the abyss. (quote from E. A. Poe)

2) The best place to hide is in plain sight. (quote from E. A. Poe)

3) The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? (quote from E. A. Poe)

4) The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room being small, not very far from the table. (from The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce)

5) All true sorrows are written on slabs of a mysterious substance, compared to which granite is as soft as butter. And eternity isn't long enough to erase them. (from "The Mystery Boutique" by Dino Buzzati)

6) The clock's ticking, its silent beat marking life more and more hastily, and we can't stop even for a moment, not even to look back. (from "The Tatars' Desert" by Dino Buzzati)

7) Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. (from "The Tomb" by H. P. Lovecraft)

8) Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet. (from "Till A’ the Seas" by H. P. Lovecraft)

9) When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled. (from "Azathot" by H. P. Lovecraft)

10) The only certain thing in life is death, which is the only thing about which we can know nothing for sure. (quote by S. A. Kierkegaard)

11) The truth is a secret which dying men take with them. (quote from S. A. Kierkegaard)

12) Nothing finite, not even the entire world, can satisfy the human soul feeling the need for infinity. (quote from S. A. Kierkegaard)

13) As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. (from "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka)

14) Water, water, every where, | And all the boards did shrink; | Water, water, every where, | Nor any drop to drink. (from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by S. T. Coleridge)

15) The very deep did rot: O Christ! | That ever this should be! | Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs | Upon the slimy sea. (from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by S. T. Coleridge)

16) Where there is no imagination, there is no horror. (quote from A. C. Doyle)

17) But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. […] They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (from "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley):

18) Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. (from "Apocalypse Now" by F. F. Coppola)

19) Now that you’ve seen what I’m really like, can you still bear to look at me? (from "1984" by G. Orwell)

20) If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever. (from "1984" by G. Orwell)

21) We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. (from "1984" by G. Orwell)

22) He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He's always outside. He came out of time. He doesn't know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He's afraid of us. We're inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He's the king of nowhere. But he's afraid of us. He's afraid of… inside. (from "The Stand" by S. King)

23) We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. (from "Cell" by S. King)

24) The clown, Hagarty said, looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and that old TV clown, Bozo — or so he thought at first. It was the wild tufts of orange hair that brought such comparisons to mind. […] The smile painted over the white pancake was red, not orange, and the eyes were a weird shiny silver. […] He wore a baggy suit with big orange-pompom buttons; on his hands were cartoon gloves. (from "It" by S. King)

25) The essence of the worst in the human spirit is not found in the crazy sons-of-bitches. Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd. (from "Hannibal" by B. Fuller)

26) Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under “Acts of God”. (from "Hannibal" by B. Fuller)

27) Death's doctor cooked his victims, then served them to his friends for dinner. Il dottore della morte ha cucinato le sue vittime e poi le ha servite per cena ai suoi amici. (from "The Silence of the Lambs" by J. Demme)

28) Essentially - he went on slowly - the evil is the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will. (from "The Haunting of Hill House" by S. Jackson)

29) La casa era abominevole. Rabbrividì e pensò, mentre le parole si affacciavano libere alla sua mente, Hill House è abominevole, è infetta; vattene subito di qui. (da L'incubo di Hill House" di S. Jackson)

30) Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead. (from "A Graveyard for Lunatics" by R. Bradbury)

Dates:

Start: 1^st September 2020
End: 27^th October 2020 at 20:00
Winner Nomination: 31^st October 2020 at 18:00

How to Participate:

Once your work is done, post a new page titled “it-halloween-contest-2020<username>”, where <username> must be replaced with your Wikidot username. Afterwards, once published, you may rename it by clicking on “Edit” at the bottom of the page, so as to display the desired title in the table. In case you're part of a group, specify the name of the person designated group leader. The rest of the participating users must be listed in a comment to the page.

If you wish to participate with more than one SCP entry or more than one tale, you need to post the page and name it “it-halloween-contest-2020<username><entry number>”.

The entry doesn't have to be fully reviewed or approved to participate in the contest, but a honed work will be better-regarded than one which wasn't fully revised.

After posting the page, add the "it-halloween-contest-2020" tag.