I Was Tortured Last Night
Imagine walking down the street on a cool evening. Suddenly, from behind you, you hear a familiar voice calling your name. You turn your head to observe a familiar outline: the silhouette of a close friend of yours. You smile, return their greeting, and begin to approach.
But as the form of your friend crosses the threshold of where the shadows end and the sickly yellow light of the street lamps begin, you start feeling a tad queasy. A bit nervous. And when your eyes finally adjust and you can see the figure with clarity and detail, you realize it isn't your friend at all. It SOUNDS like your friend, except your friend is speaking in gibberish, spouting nonsense. Not just spouting nonsense, but declaring it in a tone that borders between commanding and condescending. And at first glance it LOOKS like your friend, except that it appears as if some bulging, disproportionate monstrosity of a body builder who has long since passed the point of no return, a thing that has miniature mountains for arms and torpedo shells for legs; it's as if this THING from beyond our dimension carved the very epidermis from your good friend's body and is now WEARING it like a crude Halloween costume. And it certainly tries to ACT like your friend; not just in the sense that this doppelganger is closely mimicking your friend's mannerisms, but also in the sense that this demonic PANTOMIME of a loved one wants you to earnestly believe that it has your best intentions at heart.
And then, like a dream where you know what's about to happen but there's nothing you can do to stop it, this distorted fiend you once trusted clumsily rapes you for thirty minutes.
You're embarrassed. And you realize you're not just embarrassed for you, you're embarrassed for the remains of your friend, whose face is sagging off of your assailant's head, contorted into an apologetic cry of horror. The devil-rapist himself continues ranting and raving as if it's only context for human interaction was film noir and the dialogue one finds in pornographic films that attempt to have a story. You find yourself wondering, amidst the blinding pain, if this crime against God and Man was once human, in the way that Jason Voorhees and Leatherface were once human.
Then, as if through divine intervention, the attacker is knocked on its ass and you are roughly yanked to your feet by another friend, one whose skin and mind are clearly intact. He leads you away from the beast to a place of safety, and your friend's confident and mirthful nature allows you to forget, if only briefly, about the attrocity you have just suffered.
Just when you're getting to the point where you think you might be able to go on living as a whole person again, and at the point where you're CERTAIN you and your friend are about to gather the townsfolk and a slough of shotguns and baseball bats, marching down the street towards the hulking horror crying, "Kill it! YOU'VE GOT TO KILL IT NOW!!", just at the point where you think you might be able to slay the rape dragon disguised as your friend, you feel a sharp pain at the back of your skull, and you hear a thud that echoes through your skull. The man who saved you has just bludgeoned you with a brick.
When you awake, you find yourself face to face with the rape goblin and your friend, who was truly in league with the beast all along, and who has betrayed you to further his own selfish ends.
Then the two begin to rape you in unison; one taking your mouth, the other taking your rear, occasionally pausing to jab you in the eye. An hour later, the rape troll vaults off in search of new victims, and your friend-turned-Judas explodes into a cloud of smoke.
You are left there on the cold concrete, bloody and broken, naked, sobbing, ashamed to be alive, ashamed to be part of a race that could visit such horrors upon its own brothers and sisters. There is nothing left of the person you once were. You hate the world, you hate the people in it, and they deserve to be burned alive for allowing such horrors to exist and walk among them.
If you can vividly imagine everything I've just described, then you've just saved yourself eight to ten bucks on a ticket to Frank Miller's "The Spirit," and while you'll never regain your humanity or your dignity, at least you'll still have your money.