SOULLESS
Share
Have an account? Sign In Now
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
This concept has interesting possibilities in that it reverses the usual body-soul duality. In religion and philosophy (see Plato) the soul is cast as the better part of one’s self. (The evil aspect is often characterized as the daemon (Plato again) or shadow (Jung) but that’s getting bogged down in taxonomy. Suffice it to say that untethered from the soul, one would expect the carnal body to be the one to galavant around, pursue the lusts and fantasies of the flesh. But you have reversed polarities and have the soul pursuing the lusts and fantasies of the flesh.
(In your first iteration, you tagged the logline for the horror genre. But I think it would also work as a comedy. fwiw.)
Thanks dpg. I liked the idea of reversing it, and also turning the whole ‘hero dies and brings back a malevolent spirit from the other side’ thing on its head. The main character is haunted by a spirit that he believes he brought back from the other side, but the ironic twist is that it’s his own soul. In essence, he’s being haunted by himself.
You are turning 2,500 years of religious and philosophical exegesis of the soul on its head. Which works for me. But, out of curiosity, why is he cursed with a dirty, rotten soul instead of a goody-two-shoes, squeaky clean one like everyone else has? I mean you’re going to have to write some exposition to explain why it’s possible and why it’s happening to him, right?
Hi dpg
I’ve not really fully fleshed it out yet, but my starting point is his repression. His catharsis is to write out all the bad urges and ideas he has in his novels (I’m sure many writers will empathise with that), but really all he’s doing is burying them deep down inside him, within his soul. I figured that if he did this for long enough it would really dirty his soul, and once his soul broke free it would just rampage, totally uninhibited, to do everything the writer has always wanted to do but dare not.
I could have gone the traditional route and, once he was soulless, allow him to be free of all inhibitions, but that seemed to be the expected thing to do, so I considered it to be stale and cliched and to be avoided.
It’s an interesting flip. I presume you are still thinking of it as a horror story, but as I indicated I also think it would work splendidly as a comedy. Best wishes whichever way you go.
Yeah, I can see that it would work great as a comedy, but other than writing characters for comic relief in more serious fiction, I’ve never attempted a full-on comedy genre piece.
This is a little shorter but I believe still works.
“When a repressed writer is revived after dying, he must stop his disembodied soul inflicting the dark fantasies from his novels on the woman he loves”
Soulless is a good title, you could also call the movie “Id” as well.