I’m a huge fan of body horror. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s what it sounds like: horror that comes from some aspect of the body, be it deterioration from a disease, mutation, etc. If you’ve seen The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum slowly changes into a monstrous fly, or Cabin Fever, where a flesh eating virus kills numerous college students, then you’ve seen body horror. I love this genre so much that Greg and I wrote one of the stories for the Drive-In Horrorshow film in this vein (so to speak): Fall Apart, about a doctor who gets a disease that, well, makes him fall apart in gruesome fashion.

I bring this up, because although this story isn’t pure body horror it creates the same mood for me: the uncomfortable feeling that there is something foreign inside you that is hurting you in inexplicable ways. Jim doesn’t know what’s going on in his veins, but he knows it can’t be good. For the audience, who can see what Jim can’t, the thought of some sort of creature forcing its way through his body is unsettling on it’s own, but even more so because it’s unpredictable: there’s no way to know what it will do next.

I think it’s human nature, for some people anyway (me included), to assume the worst when confronted with something wrong with us that we can’t identify. It’s like those stories of people who hear buzzing in their ears, only to find out that they have cockroach eggs hatching in their brain. That dread is what attracted me to this story in the first place. The Good Luck Charm changed a lot over its many drafts, but that core dread remained.

This tale plays off of some of my own deepest fears. I think it’s really important for a horror writer to write about what scares them, because I believe that the details will ring true to the reader, even if they don’t share those same fears. If you creep yourself out, then chances are you’ll creep someone else out too.