I got a Wii on my 7th birthday on November 28th, 2006 (about 9 days after the Wii was released). I still remember the moment when my dad gave me the present and then I quickly ripped it open, “Wow, a Wii! Thanks, dad!” I exclaimed in happiness. After that, I begged my dad to help set it up. When he was done, he finally helped me set up the Wii in the living room. What surprised me about the Wii is the controller, because it reminded me so much of a TV remote. After my dad set it up he left me to play. I was going to play Wii Sports but something else caught my eye, the Mii…

Thursday morning. I awoke to the sounds of a siren blaring down the road. Great, another accident. The traffic was the last thing I wanted in the morning while going to work. Still, I had another hour before heading off, so I started my morning routine of taking a shower and brushing my teeth before heading downstairs for breakfast where I saw my son, Michael, eating cereal before breakfast. I grabbed a bagel and sat down on the couch, grabbing my iPad to read the news. “Terrorist leader Aamir Hadi has threatened the President!” The same old news… Nothing was “new” about it. All this drama for years between the Middle East and good old America. How long had we…

In 1988 an unknown broadcast overtook several UHF stations in the Midwestern United States for six consecutive nights. The broadcast would last for only a few minutes and consisted of white static with a gray silhouette of a person in the center of the screen. The shadowed figure spoke with a an androgynous but deep voice and always spoke in whispers. Those who witnessed the unknown broadcast reported that the figure would make bizarre statements that would influence one person but not another. It’s been confirmed by the witnesses that the figure had said the following: ‘Go to sleep’, ‘Don’t drink the water’, ‘Conceive’, ‘Don’t believe anyone’, ‘Don’t trust anyone’, ‘Save me’, ‘Use the knife’, ‘Bury him’, ‘Burn the evidence’…

“The year is nineteen-ninety-nine.” That sentence brings me back to my senior kindergarten class when I was five years old, where we used to read out the date on the blackboard every single day. The year 1999 exists as a stain in my mind however, as a memory that will not go away no matter how I try to forget it. 1999 marked the year I lost my first tooth, my first time on a plane, and unfortunately the early loss of my childhood innocence. That one memory that refuses to be wiped, it all started with that new (or old) TV. At that time Pokémon was the latest fad to hit the school. Pokémon cards, games, stickers, and the…

I sat down with my bowl of popcorn, drenched in butter, just the way I liked it. I picked up the TV remote and flipped throught the channels. It was the same old stuff as always, advertising for the newest toys, or soap operas about Italian families who never get along. I stopped at the news channel. “There have been reports of an escape from the Rockfield Prison. A man, who murdered 37 people, including three police officers, was reported missing from the prison today. He was last seen by inmates yesterday night at around 9:40. It is still uncertain if he escaped, or if he’s been killed and hidden by enemies in the prison, although another guard was found…

This is the story of Kelly Tristan, a 23-year-old woman who lived alone in a small house at 2605 Pine Road in the small town of Fairview, Oregon. Her disappearance had gone largely unnoticed until nearby residents started to go missing without a trace. When the police went to investigate the area, all the homes of the missing people were completely empty, as if no one had lived in them for quite a long time. Here is what happened… Sunday October 31, 2004 It was Halloween, Kelly’s favorite time of the year. She thought it would be a good idea to decorate her front door with some cheap decorations, to let kids know she was handing out candy. At 12:35…

We all know what Hollywood is; it’s the place of dreams and wonder, of glimmer and shine. At the same time, we know that behind the glittering façade, there’s a rotten waste that must be isolated and cut out like a cancer, so the fantasy can be maintained. Those surgeons who deal with Hollywood’s malignant backstage are known as ”the behind guys.” They’re a secretive bunch, obviously, and my father was one of them. To become one of the “Guys”, you must know or be related to one. My father always told me that those who have had a decent life and a balance of everything can truly rest in peace when his or her time comes, but those who…

YouTube is a pretty vicious place. Many violent and dreadful things are put up on YouTube for the whole world to watch, but there is a particular YouTube channel with a few million subscribers – all of its videos are of people being hurt and beaten, and some are even eaten alive by predatorial animals and cannibals. It’s disgusting; how and why does this YouTuber record these events instead of helping the people in danger? How does he find people in these deadly situations over and over again? And how does YouTube never manage to remove his videos? These questions have been circling in my mind ever since he touched my life. I must admit that I have watched many…

I must have been six or seven when I lived in Lebanon. The country was ravaged by war at the time, and murders were common and frequent. I remember during a particularly vicious era, when the bombings rarely stopped, I would stay at home sitting in front of my television watching a very, very strange show. It was a kids’ show that lasted about 30 minutes and contained strange and sinister images. To this day I believe it was a thinly veiled attempt on the part of the media to use scare tactics to keep kids in place, because the moral of every episode revolved around very uptight ideologies: stuff like, “bad kids stay up late,” “bad kids have their…

A lot of these stories start off with, “I don’t know why I’m writing this.” Well, this isn’t one of them tales. In fact, I knew full well I should be writing this, even though I was told not to. I can’t in good conscious not tell this story. It all started on the third day of submissions to the local Horror short film festival in western Sydney. It wasn’t a large festival and there had not been many entries, however, some of the films entered were actually pretty good. They ranged from thrillers, action, to science fiction, and it didn’t matter in this festival what genre it was. All that mattered was that the film did not go over…