Catalogue / Plate 17← All plates

Don't fall asleep

A sleep clinic at three in the morning, and a figure that glides down the corridor towards you.

17 / Canvas 2D · stills

First person, in a sleep clinic bed at three in the morning, your eyelids drooping. Go to sleep, and you wake in a steaming boiler-room corridor. A tall figure with a pillowcase over its head and long steel needles for fingers stands at the far end, and glides towards you, its needles screeching along the pipes, louder as it nears. You can tap to try to wake, but you cannot. When it reaches you it screams at your face and rakes three cuts across the picture, and then it is dark.

Sampleton Sleep Clinicawake

Halloween horror: a monster, sudden fright, a scream. No flashing. Sound only if you turn it on.

Don't fall asleep.

Go to sleep. It is waiting where you wake. If you wait, your eyes will close by themselves.

pictures decoded in … · in the room

Remake it

Build one interactive web page: You are in a bed in a sleep clinic at three in the morning, and your eyelids are getting heavy. Go to sleep, and you wake in a boiler-room corridor in steam. At the far end a tall figure with a pillowcase over its head and steel needles for fingers is standing in the red light, and then it is coming. It does not jump: the camera keeps moving in on it while each picture dissolves into the nearer one, and the metal of its needles screeches along the pipes, higher and more often the closer it gets. You can tap to try to wake, and the ring climbs and falls back, and never fills. When it reaches you it screams in your face and rakes three cuts across the picture. Then it is dark.

Set it on an invented business called Sampleton, with its own drawn or generated pictures and no one else's files. It suits: A Halloween event, a horror film or game launch, a haunted attraction: anywhere a visitor has come to be properly frightened, and will take a minute and a half over it. The glide, a threat that keeps closing in with no cut to rest on, and sound that climbs with it, suits any piece that needs dread to build. Do not let it fail the way this kind of piece usually does: A scare that ambushes with no warning, flashes, or cannot be stopped. Here a content note comes first, there is never a flash, the whole thing can be watched hands-free, sound is off until you turn it on, and Try again returns to the room. Reduced motion stops the shake, the flicker, the drift and the push-in, and the close-up always fits the screen whole.

It must work with the keyboard, on a phone, with reduced motion respected and no text under 12px. Tell me which libraries you chose and why.
Notes: when it suits, when it does not, how it fails
When it suits
A Halloween event, a horror film or game launch, a haunted attraction: anywhere a visitor has come to be properly frightened, and will take a minute and a half over it. The glide, a threat that keeps closing in with no cut to rest on, and sound that climbs with it, suits any piece that needs dread to build.
When it does not
Anywhere a fright would be unwelcome, anyone who has told you they are easily frightened, and any page the visitor needs to use: it is made to be hard to put down, and to end in a scream.
How it fails
A scare that ambushes with no warning, flashes, or cannot be stopped. Here a content note comes first, there is never a flash, the whole thing can be watched hands-free, sound is off until you turn it on, and Try again returns to the room. Reduced motion stops the shake, the flicker, the drift and the push-in, and the close-up always fits the screen whole.

Built from scratch for an invented business; nothing here comes from the site studied.