Most Halloween stories couldn’t be more repeated clichés if they were murdered and returned to life a dozen times on the exact same night each year. In fact, most Halloween stories were described by exactly that sentence. So I’ve come up with some more modern terrors:

• A group of teens are trapped in a house with a potential killer because they’re expecting an Amazon delivery.
• Every poltergeist in the world realizes that knocking over wine glasses and rattling windows just isn’t scary, and that with a thousandth of the telekinetic they can break some random tiny chip inside wifi routers.
• A mad zoologist cures the problem of panda extinction (specifically, the fact they barely eat a terrible plant and never want to seek their opposite gender) by infecting them vampirism. The world is soon under the thrall of bloodthirsty Vampire Pandas: super-strong super-fast flying bears who are still too cute to shoot at.
• A crazed slasher starts killing anyone who doesn’t respond to facebook Farm Gang War invites.
• A gypsy curses you to always dream of the latest YouTube comments.
• UKIP become werewolves. Every single on of them. This actually makes them less exclusionary, as there is now a mechanism where they can make sane people join them.

More unspeakable horror with

• New problems from Old Ones
• The Alien meets a non-idiotic astronaut

Okay, October, you want some really scary Halloween ideas? You asked for it:

• You receive an auto-generated copyright lawsuit for your Halloween costume, billing you a hundred dollars for each image bearing the character’s likeness. You have one week to file a brief disputing the claim. The letter is dated three days ago.
• A crazed psychopath breaks into your home while you’re asleep and replaces only one of your identity documents with a forgery almost good enough to fool an official.
• Skull insurance.
• After a day of pumpkin carving with friends and family, which involved some kids, which involved fragments of pumpkin getting into parts of your house even oxygen molecules haven’t seen, your vet calls with the results of the tests: your pet is deathly allergic to squashes.
• A wrinkled distant relative presses a bloodstained parchment into your hands before dying at your doorstep. It explains that you can avert the hereditary curse if you remit the second part of your first quarter’s non-refundable portion of your taxes, correctly, on the first try.
• A cursed puzzle box dripping with blood is the anti-bot check to unlock your e-mail account.
• A hungry vampire posts your home address on the front page of reddit.