Eurovision as Horror Stories: The Final
I'm glad many of you have enjoyed my strange Eurovision stories this year. For those of you watching the final, I wanted to provide an updated version that cut out all the ones that didn't make it.
EUROVISION 2023
This is an edited version of my short horror stories influenced by Eurovision 2023. If you'd like to read all of them, including the ones that didn’t make it past the semi-finals, click here.
Teya & Salena - Who The Hell Is Edgar? | AustriaÂ
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 (but I think they may be cringe live and them being first means they won’t win now. Boo.)
Mimicat - Ai Coração | Portugal
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
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
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
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
La Zarra - Évidemment | FranceÂ
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
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
Blanca Paloma - EAEA | SpainÂ
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
Loreen - Tattoo | SwedenÂ
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
Albina & Familja Kelmendi - Duje | AlbaniaÂ
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
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
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
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
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
Voyager - Promise | AustraliaÂ
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. The only people who liked their song were the sort of losers whose music taste hadn’t progressed from what they listened to in high school.
0/5
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
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
Pasha Parfeni - Soarele ÅŸi 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
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
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
Monika LinkytÄ— - 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
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
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
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
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 (Aside from any sympathy points for hosting it I genuinely think Mae is such a bad performer we have a chance to be last. Fingers crossed.)
Summary
Everything is dreadful.