SPECULATIVE HALLOWEEN BESTIARY:
BUGBOOS




As I've expressed mixed feelings about in the past, the Nightmare Before Christmas is inescapable these 'weens. Every major retailer carries Disney merchandise, and every fall, Jack comes back again to haunt Wal Mart and Rite Aid and Lowe's and Home Depot alongside, at bare minimum, his girlfriend and of course his arch nemesis The Boogieman.

Tim Burton admittedly struck gold when he decided the boogieman, or in fact any character at all, ought to be a living burlap bag filled with microfauna. It's such a uniquely bizarre, silly and fun monster concept, presumably even a "creepy" one to those who who don't like things you can describe as "swarming," and licensed facsimiles of this bug-bag-boogieman now continue to be strong sellers, decades later.

...So where, exactly, are all the knockoffs? Thirty years is more than enough time for an iconic film character to spawn a broader character archetype, yet the simple concept of bugs + sentient bag remain almost exclusive to Mister Boogie. Disney can't possibly copyright that basic combination alone, can they? Maybe a dirty judge would take the rodent's side if you framed your take on it as a boogieman, or gave it the same gambling addiction, or the same five-pointed design in the same blacklight green, but there's no way anybody can lay legal claim to a mere potato sack with centipedes in it. Literally give any ghostly looking critter a burlap texture, and throw a bunch of spiders or cockroaches all over it. Simple!

I made one of these entities "unintentionally" the day I threw a bunch of spare rubber creatures into a $1 trick-or-treat bag with big cartoon eyes on it, and I've left them in there for going on a decade because this is just kind of a "character" now. This is the Boo Bag of Bugs, who is his own original concept distinct from anything owned by Disney Corporation and its Subsidiaries. Clearly!

All a creature design needs to represent what we should definitely just call a "Bugboo" are three crucial elements:

-A cloth bag, preferably burlap.

-Invertebrates protruding from the bag in any way.

-Any indication that the bag itself is "alive," such as the presence of any facial feature(s) or unmistakable appendage(s).

There you go! Easy to draw, easy to make! Any shape will do! Apply burlap and bugs to pretty much anything "characterized" and you're good to go!

But you wanted to know their hypothetical lore?! I'm not sure we need to think about this one too hard, but how about this: a Bugboo begins when a restless soul possesses all the tiny creatures that fed on its rotting remains or on the tainted soil of its grave (so earthworms can get in on the fun), and all the creatures that ate any of those creatures, going further on up the food chain the stronger the spirit. The majority of those initial flies, maggots and hide beetles are going to get eaten by other arthropods, like spiders and scorpions, but surely a few small snakes, amphibians, rodents or birds get in the mix. Not too many!!! This is a bugs ghost! Let's say these little soul fragments are too weak to have much of their own consciousness left, but they're instinctively drawn back to the place where their body died, and creatures just give in to this compulsion the smaller they are. Something like a crow or a coyote won't always notice or succumb to the pull, but once that dies, the soul-crumb is probably going right back to the gut of a blowfly that's going to head right back to the same origin point.



Like microplastics, the fractured ghost might keep cycling around the same ecosystem for centuries before it finally fades away to nothing...unless somebody else steps in! This is where the bag come in. Let's say there's some ritual to gather all the fragments together again, but first you need to pinpoint the final resting place of the original body, possibly that one random patch of earth mysteriously crawling with a little more wildlife than any other random patch of earth. Then you have to fashion a containment vessel only from what grows out of the same soil, which is why a lot of people would use a burlap bag, because that's just dried and woven vegetable fibers, but sure, you could make a nice wicker-man version, or a carved wooden mannequin, or just a bunch of rotten wood and leaves bundled together with some vines I guess. You know beehives used to be wicker, right?! What happens when bees are making honey from collectively haunted flowers???



The last key ingredient would have to be something personal to the original subject, if not a surviving fragment of their physical form; a finger bone, a tooth, even so much as one grimy coin recovered from the grave, and I suppose any treasured enough object should still count regardless of whether they died with it. You know, like a locket they left with a loved one or a piece of artwork they made. Placed in the new vessel, this object would act as the focal point of the enchantment, the "magnet" that calls every possessed vessel together and the new hub of the reawakened personality.



Once you bring the Bugboo to life, it's probably bound by ghostly laws to do whatever you ask, but there's probably a bunch of rules you have to follow to keep it under control. It probably also starts growing, of course, whether you want it to or not, adding to its mass as it consumes whatever its constituent creatures are capable of breaking down. The tiniest nervous systems are still the easiest for it to keep synchronized in one collective body, but larger, stronger specimens can probably send portions of their swarm to remotely animate other objects, especially corpses, and maybe exert some sort of hypnotic influence over living hosts through subtler, stealthier infestation? Maybe this is where the myths about earwigs really come from, because an earwig is simply the most convenient way one of these entities might sneak its way into somebody's brain at night?




PAST HALLOWEEN BESTIARIES:



THE HALLOWEEN BESTIARY BOOK:

Written by me with illustrations by our friend Bynine, this little book collects thirteen monsters inspired by Halloween decorations. Get a real copy here while they last, or a digital version on my ko-fi.



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