Eurovision 2023 - as Horror Stories!
Something different this week. All of the 2023 Eurovision entries as horror stories with a little rant to kick it all off. Content warning for all of it, obviously.
As many of you know, for the last ten+ years I have written reviews of the Eurovision songs. This year I just don’t know how I feel about it. Bored mostly, I think. I listened to them all and jesus there just isn’t much there that makes me feel anything. This culminated when I went to Tesco the other day and saw that a tub of fucking Philadelphia cheese fucking spread was the official sponsor. I mean, shoot ourselves now, right?
Maybe my biggest problem with this year is that I see no difference with the UK hosting Eurovision and when Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics. The UK is so fundamentally broken and evil right now I find it jaw-dropping that anyone would let it host a contest while it simultaneously does all it can to boot out minorities. All while demonising strike workers who just want to be paid properly.
So fuck reviews. You get 37 fictional horror fantasy stories about each act instead. That’s right: THIRTY SEVEN. My hope is that they compliment your watching experience. I also have used Midjourney to generate AI art for some of them.
Fucking strap yourselves in…
EUROVISION 2023: YOU CAN STILL CHOOSE DEATH
SEMI FINAL 1
Alessandra - Queen Of Kings | Norway
Alessandra wakes on the day of the semi-final. She is bleeding out of her nose, mouth and ears. Her screams ring out - loud to her but muffled to everyone else. Desperately she reaches out to grab her phone, but her fingers meet an invisible wall. She is trapped in a glass prison, there is no escape. Outside she can see thousands of people watching her struggle. She wants to call out for help but all that pours from her lips is gore. The crowd applauds as the cubicle fills up with her own blood and drowns her.
3/5
The Busker - Dance (Our Own Party) | Malta
The band The Busker clamber off stage after their last rehearsal. They’re pleased with their performance: their song is fun, the chorus hook makes everyone happy, people smile at them as they pass. None of the band speak about the children’s bodies in their dressing room fridge. It was their saxophone player Sean who brought in the first one. He crept through the city of Liverpool with his saxophone playing the song’s main hook and, much like the Pied Piper, hypnotized a couple of kids to follow him back to their suite. Now their dead eyes stare back at them all.
It is time to feast.
4/5
Luke Black - Samo Mi Se Spava | Serbia
Luke was a coward. When Russia finally broke through Ukraine and spread out across the rest of Europe, Luke hid. Luke did nothing apart from a few anti-war tweets and changing his profile picture to have the Ukraine flag on. #FreeUkraine. He’d thought that was enough to solve the war. Now he lay in bed, scrunching his eyes closed: wishing it was all over while the world burned. When the soldiers finally burst into his home they found him like that: silent, pathetic, hopeless.
1/5
Sudden Lights - Aijā | Latvia
The text he’d sent stayed on unread. No blue ticks. She wasn’t responding. His anxiety engulfed him. The rejection stung. He was lost without her. He reached for his guitar. Maybe writing another forgettable piece of shit would change her mind.
1/5
Mimicat - Ai Coração | Portuga
She held the crowd in the palm of her hand. Imbeciles, all of them. They whooped and cheered her phoned-in facsimile of burlesque. The demon whispered behind her. ‘It’s nearly time,’ it hissed. Back in 1924 she’d been working in a burlesque club. Approaching her forties, she knew she couldn’t dance forever. Then she’d found him: a demon who promised her everything she ever wanted: stay this age for a hundred years. She’d agreed to it immediately. The flipside being that she had to perform burlesque for all that time. That was all she had. The dull emptiness of a bygone era performed as blandly and sexlessly as her jaded 137-year-old body could muster. 99 years had now passed. This was her last chance to be remembered before the deal came to a crashing end. The dreams had faded; she couldn’t even remember who she was anymore. She drank a shot and felt the hellfire in her lungs.
0/5
Wild Youth - We Are One | Ireland
They didn’t know where they’d gone wrong. One minute they were being applauded off stage and hurrying out to the tour bus, the next they were tied up in a factory. Their driver cackled. ‘We are one,’ he jabbered, spittle clinging to his lips.
‘Let us go!’ the band shrieked, but the maniac took a step closer before pushing them into the machine. Strewn together in a flail of limbs they struggled to separate themselves in the confined cylindrical space. Suddenly there was a piercing hiss from above and, as they turned, they saw the ceiling coming down on them. They were in a giant hydraulic press. They tried to clamber out, but it was useless. The metal arm crushed them into one another, bursting their insides out of their eye sockets and mouths, squeezing them together like four different brands of toothpaste.
‘You are one,’ the maniac cried, tears streaming down his face.
2/5
Let 3 - Mama ŠČ! | Croatia
He sat staring blankly back at himself in the mirror. He wondered again how events had brought him here. What roads he’d taken to get to this point. Had he enjoyed his life? Had it all been worth it? Did he still enjoy it? He looked down at the dressing table and at his two options. The microphone on the left, the razorblade on the right. Choosing the microphone meant he would push on, give it another whirl, go out in a blaze of glory. The blade was to take his eyes. This world was shit.
He made his decision and reached for one.
3/5
Remo Forrer - Watergun | Switzerland
As a child his voice was beautiful, angelic. At school plays he’d always be centre stage, bringing tears to the eyes of the parents, jealousy to everyone else. That was why they came for him. The bullies with dark green in their eyes. They held him down and forced fistfuls of gravel into his mouth. The sharp stones tore his vocal cords, drowned them in dirt. Now every breath hurt, every word on his lips a new agony as his tongue struggled to grind, to make the sounds to communicate. Every day for the rest of his life was pain.
2/5
Noa Kirel - Unicorn | Israel
When the lecherous beast that now wore the young woman’s skin had taken her over, it had gobbled down her meagre muscles, organs, and skeleton without much thought. If you looked closely you could see it’s cold dead eyes inside. Now it was hungry. It was always hungry. Like a deadly plant that captured insects, it used her body to attract its victims. It danced in her flesh. Seductive, sexy. Promising the world, promising fulfilment. Then when they got close, when they were alone, it pounced. Its strong thighs gripped tight around their waist, mid-penetration, the mouths hidden beneath its fingertips emerged and dug into their face. Pulsing, it fed on them, their body sagging under each gulp until only a husk of crisped flesh remained. Delicious.
5/5
Pasha Parfeni - Soarele şi Luna | Moldova
Pasha’s manbun hid a secret. Inside it lived a small faerie called Edith from the ghostlands. He’d found her in a crushed coffee bean when making a spiced oat latte as a teenager. Now they were inseparable. Was it love or was it desperation? Sometimes his own thoughts mixed with hers. Could he ever just be him again? One day they had an argument and she flew into his ear and scrambled his brains till they leaked out his nose.
4/5
Loreen - Tattoo | Sweden
Loreen got her first tattoo when she was seventeen. It was of a Patrick Wolf lyric: ‘Take a straw to the open sea, dreamers welcome, we've got a vacancy.’ Her parents disowned her for it, threw her out of their family home. Over years on the streets, she banded with a collective of homeless artists where she perfected her tattoo skills. She wanted to leave this world with a part of her. With a rusted needle and a Sprite bottle of swampy black ink, she pounced on unsuspecting members of the public. Those who’d taken a wrong turn down an alleyway, those who were lost, those she took a dislike to. The needle scrawled out her story, each victim another chapter in an encyclopaedia of her own agony, her life documented on countless people across the city. Soon. Soon she would be complete.
3/5
TuralTuranX - Tell Me More | Azerbaijan
When Tural and Turan found their granddad dead, they didn’t run straight to their mum and dad to tell them. Instead Tural took a final bite of the apple he was eating and pulled out a single seed. They looked down at the pale corpse and Turan opened his grandad’s mouth. On his tongue Tural placed the apple seed and closed it back up again.
Years later, Tural and Turan gathered apples from the tree that grew from their grandfather. They fed them to their wives and children and always made sure they ate the seeds.
1/5
Vesna - My Sister's Crown | Czechia
It was the end of the world of men. Every corpse as far as the eye could see had beards and plaid shirts. Choosing their death had not been easy, but it had been worth it. The six women shivered as the sun peeked over the horizon. Bloody, exhausted and bruised, they held each other, shivering. This was their future now. They would save this fucking world.
10 (TEN)/5
Mia Nicolai & Dion Cooper - Burning Daylight | Netherlands
Mia and Dion had never shit themselves in front of anyone before.
Together they stripped off their skins, the fibrous filth they excreted the only thing separating their bodies from touching. Slick and diseased they wallowed in their own organic faecal hunger.
1/5
Käärijä - Cha Cha Cha | Finland
Käärijä staggered away from the last punch. The lights in the club dimmed, and as he fell to the floor it felt like he’d flown back through several decades. When he came to his senses he had it: hyperpop. A new type of music that gathered up cool bits from all other genres and meshed them together. It was going to be wild. Change the world. With his bag of pop-metal riffs, Linkin Park rap and 90s Eurodance, he would be the next big thing.
The only thing he needed now was talent.
4/5
Still reading? You’re clearly a glutton for punishment. You should consider subscribing if you haven’t already!
SEMI-FINAL 2
Reiley - Breaking My Heart | Denmark
The baseball bat weighed heavy in his hands. Perhaps the last swing had taken too much out of him. Thankfully, the animal below him was silent. Its final struggle over. Its brains dashed in. Reiley smiled and went back to the pen to pick up another puppy.
1/5
Brunette - Future Lover | Armenia
The plastic steamed up again as he tried to take one last impossible breath. Brunette twisted the bag to cut off any chance of that. He’d been beautiful, of that she was sure, but what was that worth against his toxicity? He’d poisoned her life, her relationships, her friendships. There was no breaking up with someone like that. He just had to go. She knew she would find someone else. She would find a future lover.
5/5
Theodor Andrei - D.G.T. (Off And On) | Romania
Theodor was an accountant. He dressed like an accountant. He looked like an accountant. Everything about him screamed boring. Perhaps it was this that led to him dropping acid at a work party, to give his stale life a little bump. Unfortunately, it wasn’t acid he took but a nasty combo of uppers and Viagra.
No one ever spoke of the horrors of that night. Instead they silently remembered their colleagues who lost their sight when Theodor’s pelvic thrusts drilled out their eyeballs with his swollen erection as he skullfucked them to oblivion.
1/5
Alika - Bridges | Estonia
Her partner had cheated on her and Alika was devastated. Anger made her cruel, vengeance overtook her. No one would check the piano. No one would know that they had been stuffed inside, each hammer fitted with a razor to slice into their flesh with every keystroke. The blood pooled into the wood as she played. Each whimper from the carved-up monstrosity begging to be let go filled her with delight.
5/5
Gustaph - Because Of You | Belgium
No one ever found the culprit but the whole town knew about his injury. A young man with his whole life ahead of him, attacked maliciously with a volley of rocks on his way home from work. When he woke from his coma he started to write songs, hundreds of thousands of songs, and started playing them to people. Everyone was kind about them, smiling pleasantly like when a child shows you something they’ve made. No one told him they had already been written. That these were just other people’s songs his head injury had made him forget.
2/5
Andrew Lambrou - Break A Broken Heart | Cyprus
It was hushed up, of course, but the whole hospital knew why the famous heart surgeon Dr Lambrou was fired. The nurses couldn’t get enough of the story. ‘Wanking himself off in surgery!’ they giggled, while others pulled aghast faces. ‘I saw him finish in a patient’s chest,’ one said. ‘Right on the heart. It was like someone had put ranch sauce on a steak.’
2/5
Diljá - Power | Iceland
Sacrificing old people had become a bit of a thing for Diljá in her teenage years. The more old people she wiped from the earth, the better her singing voice got. Snorting their ashes helped keep her in key. That’s why she had to get into Eurovision. She had to murder all the old fuckers who still cared about it.
1/5
Victor Vernicos - What They Say | Greece
No one would admit to it, but somebody thought it was funny to put a Carolina reaper chili pepper in the pot of lube in Victor’s house.
No one would admit to it, but it was funny.
0/5
Blanka - Solo | Poland
She should clearly have gone to the doctors when the tips of her fingers went lime green. Instead she tried to wish it away, praying to her useless crystals in a room filled with candles. Before long she was bloating, her spine cracking under the huge weight gain and mutation of her skeleton. Soon her black hair turned bright orange, covering her eyes, casting everything in amber. Her friends were stunned when she quit singing and started streetfighting under the moniker Blanka, but they accepted it. Mostly because the ones who didn’t were smashed into the ground under her rainbow roll move.
0/5
Joker Out - Carpe Diem | Slovenia
There had always been something off about them. That was why they wore shades all the time: indoors and out, no matter the weather. Bojan was the first to slip up: he leant down to pick up a beer on stage and they slid right off his face. He tried to catch them mid-fall but missed and the sunglasses bounced down and into the crowd, who swept them up. Lost.
A ripple went through the audience as he looked up to face them. His eyes were mirrorballs, tiny squares of silver reflecting everything. They revolved in their sockets in time with the music, thin beams of disco light blasting into the crowd.
Entranced, they cheered. They loved it. Everything was beautiful.
4/5
Iru - Echo | Georgia
The first she knew something was wrong was when the sharp device slid over her skin and sheared off a two-foot length of her flesh. Her cries were piercing, but the madman only giggled at her struggle. He held up the wet strip and shook it before laying it flat on the table. Blood pooled out from its edges and dripped onto the carpet while he dipped his brush into a bucket. After applying the thick paste to the wall, he reached for the strip and arranged it neatly againstthe vertical surface. His fingers caressed the still warm flesh and he touched himself through his jeans.
‘You are going to be my wallpaper,’ he said, and came in for another piece of her stomach.
1/5
Piqued Jacks - Like An Animal | San Marino
It was their little secret. I mean, who would believe them? Just a few months earlier, their darling baby had transformed into a fully grown man. One day sucking on a dummy, the next howling into a microphone with a full-face beard. Of course they made him the singer of their band. Why wouldn’t they have?
0/5
Teya & Salena - Who The Hell Is Edgar? | Austria
They were so pleased with themselves. A song about a horror writer. It was a pure banger too. A sure winner, they thought.
It was only fitting that Andrew Donaldson took inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe and bricked them up in the wall of his home for all eternity. The Cask of Teya & Salena.
10/5 WIN
Albina & Familja Kelmendi - Duje | Albania
I sometimes wonder if I have Alzheimer’s. Early onset, you know? Or my brain could just be rotting - leaving soft-edged chunks that float around in the swampy juice of their skull prison. They say that can happen to humans with exposure to diseased cat shit. A brain like a dried-up sponge. Either way, sometimes people say things that I can’t remember, or I do things I can’t remember. And, completely unrelated, but sometimes if a song is really, really boring, I just can’t...
What was I saying again?
1/5
Monika Linkytė - Stay | Lithuania
It was a beautiful ballad. Conventional, but moving in all the right ways. However, any accusations of predictability were dismissed when Monika opened her mouth to sing at the final but only farts came out. She could still speak; it was only when she tried to sing that the flatulent rasps stung the air. Her lips crumpled and formed a tight puckered hole and her tongue coiled behind her teeth. All the lyrics were raspberries now. Twelve points from the UK.
3/5
Voyager - Promise | Australia
The hate bubbled underneath their skin. Their anger at the world, at the state of it, at the leaders making everything worse, drove them forward. The songs they wrote aimed to channel their fury. They would change the world with their words and emotions.
It was just a shame that their music sounded like someone pissing into a porcelain egg cup. Jaded and empty, they had failed.
0/5
Automatic Finalists
La Zarra - Évidemment | France
She spoke words no one understood. The dreadful UK audience assumed she was singing in French, mostly through xenophobia. But these words weren’t French. They were Cthulhu. Her hex weaved around them, snaking like fishhooks into their spirits. The song built to its crescendo and she raised her arms to release the spell. Phones fell to the stadium floor, jaws hung open. In that moment she yanked the souls out from every attendee who had one. The spell should have fed her for centuries. Unfortunately most of the crowd were conservatives so she barely had enough for a week.
4/5
Lord Of The Lost - Blood & Glitter | Germany
‘Hey,’ said the very boring man. ‘Do you remember Rammstein?’
‘I think so. They were kind of a thing twenty years ago, right?’
‘Yeah! Well, how about we start a band like that. But you know, not very good?’
‘Sounds great. I’m in!’
1/5
Marco Mengoni - Due Vite | Italy
Marco went to the bathroom the way he did any other day. He unzipped himself and flicked that internal switch to start the stream. Feeling the familiar sensation course through him, he tilted his head back in relief. Wait. Something was wrong. He looked down and nothing was coming out. He was relieving himself, though? Then he felt it, inside his legs. A warm flow in his thighs. Not on the outside. Inside. The urine pooled into his feet, swelling them up. His nails popped off as his toes puffed up. Screaming, he tried to run for help, but the wet flop of his baggy feet slapped on the bathroom floor. It was like walking on balloons. He fell into a cold, forever darkness.
0/5
Mae Muller - I Wrote A Song | United Kingdom
Instead I strung you along. You whispered your words of love into my ear. My heart never even fluttered. You were just something to fill my time. A release when I needed one. I know you wrote a song about me. It’s weird it didn’t make me feel anything. My ego is legendary, so I was excited to hear it, wanting to know how dreadful I had been to you. Like a photograph of a corpse I’d caused. Relive the agony of the victim. Pleased it was documented. Instead it was empty, a missed opportunity for your revenge. All that pain I inflicted was for nothing. If you write a song that doesn’t matter - did you really write a song?
0/5
Blanca Paloma - EAEA | Spain
The years that came after hurt the most. Sure, those fleeting moments of fame still sparkled in her memories, the height of her ego, but she’d not come to terms with the fall. As her body aged, her face wrinkled, her features warped, her follower numbers shrank. Every day another ten or twenty disappeared. Her beach selfies, her swimsuit poses, her workout stretches in yoga pants failed to bring them back. They’d moved onto younger flesh, and she didn’t have anything else to interest them. In a few days her follower count would hit zero and then every picture she posted would truly be worthless. Just her and her ego alone, forever.
-100/5
TVORCHI - Heart Of Steel | Ukraine
The Tin Man looked around. No cars. That was good. He could feel his pulse slowing, the petrol that fuelled him was running low. His jagged walk slowed as he reached the pump and he reached out to pull on the handle. The thin rubber pipe that connected the handle to the pump swang down and clattered into his chest. The Tin Man took another look around – no one – and got down on his hands and knees. Gently he relaxed his backside, his plated cheeks softening, and in a smooth singular motion he thrust the nozzle up his bottom. The metal of the handle scraped on the metal of his rusting rectum, and he pulled the trigger to start the flow. Relief flooded through him as the pipe unloaded into his body. His steel heart swelled, gasping on the cold petrol and drinking it in. The death of the planet was his fuel. He grinned.
2/5
Well, I think that’s quite enough of that. I hope you all enjoy Eurovision this year even though I sincerely hope I've ruined it for you.