Alright, alright, I've got another bad pitch. Just keep in mind I'm not very creative, so as a minigame here, try to guess the horror movie I'm ripping off the most:
It's about a character joining a mysterious commune in the middle of some desolate, unreachable region. She's there to look for her sister, who went missing along with some friends while going on a hiking trip near the commune, and who sent her a text begging her to come help her as her last sign of life. As she's about to find out though, the commune is home to a bizarre and terrifying cult, obsessed with... You guessed it.
Upon her arrival, she's forced to part with her possessions and she's given some weirdly revealing clothes. Not only that, but the strangely paranoid women of the cult, who are always smiling, give her and the other new arrivals the usual initiation ritual, meaning, they start tickling them, very, very aggressively. Our MC freaks out, screaming for them to stop, but it's a different woman who makes them. She puts one of them in an armlock, which is not good: no matter what, violence is not allowed there, and everybody subdues her.
She's ganged on upon and taken to the public plaza, where she's forced into stocks, and tickle tortured brutally by some of the overseers of the cult. The really fucked up part though, is our MC seeing that one of the other women being tickle tortured publicly until they're screaming for mercy is none other than her sister, who is being questioned about the location of her family, and specifically her sister.
Then, the situation quickly unravels. She learns of the beliefs of the cult, who profess their adoration towards 'The Tickle Goddess'. Their way of worship consists of eliminating all appearance of suffering and all inadequate behavior by way of tickle torture. Which, in practice, means their members tickle the shit out of each other every time one of them doesn't exactly fit in to the image of a blissful, smiling young woman. A nightmare for our protagonist, who we soon learns has an intense hatred and fear of tickling.
Too bad though. In the cult, every act that isn't fitting with their fucked up worldview is punished with heavy tickle torture, perpetrated by the other members, no less. The women are made to work for the survival of the cult, and any kind of underperformance is tickled out of them. They're also forced to perform strange, nonsensical acts though, like playing competitive games or engaging in unsolvable puzzles and unbeatable challenges, and failing any of them mean their 'sisters' are entitled to pin them down and tickle them until they're crying for mercy, no matter how ridiculous.
Failed to leave the floor as sparkling clean as it should be? Spend the next hour having your feet polished clean, no matter how much it makes you scream. The food you cooked wasn't as delicious as they expected? Now your tummy and your ribs are going to be squeezed and poked until you swear on your life you'll do better next time. Waken in the middle of the night to be forced to make a house of cards? If yours tumbles down, the fingers digging into your armpits for hours on end will make sure you never let it happen again.
It's all overseen by the higher ups, and any of the women who don't fully engage in tickling their fellow members is made a target next. Our protagonist refuses to tickle others, which only makes her suffer through more and more unbearable torture. The other members have either been broken into believing into their way of being, or are terrified of being the next target, so they all gang up on whoever has the misfortune of playing the victim on that instance. Not only that, but if a group isn't capable of breaking a member after they've performed a misdeed, they could then become targets next, meaning the incentive to be as cruel and merciless as possible is unavoidable. It also means all of the women our MC tries to protect by not tickling them are eager to tickle her instead once the opportunity arises. Hatred and mistrusts builds, making the women desperate for a chance to tickle one another into submission, if only it means they're not the ones being targeted instead.
Our protagonist holds as best she can, begging the others to stop and help each other instead, not realizing her pleas fall in deaf ears. No matter what though, she begins to crack. She finds herself smiling to anything the others say, and soon, she starts hating some of the more cruel members of the group, wishing to tickle them until they piss themselves whenever they mess up instead of her. And all the while, she has to witness her sister getting publicly tickled, in the most brutal and merciless way, with the express intent of getting her to confess where her sister, our MC, is.
The intense tickle torture is worse than any beating though, and she realizes she can't take it for long, her indoctrination well under way, and she has to try and escape soon. She finds herself making an ally of the other new arrival who joined alongside her, the brutish woman who was tickled publicly alongside her sister once, but who, just like her, refuses to tickle others to avoid the ticklish torture. They try and escape, making use of the secret tunnels the cult hides underneath their headquarters. The situation falls apart, however, when they make a terrifying discovery inside the dark, twisted tunnels.
The cult isn't entirely crazy. Down there, they find a horrifying eldritch truth. A nightmarish mass of writhing tentacles grows under the ground, an unnatural being obsessed with tickling people into submission. The cult has been feeding it young, ticklish women for who knows how long, and they're all in there, laughing, screaming, being sacrificed to a force beyond nature, beyond humanity. The nightmare reaches its peak when they're discovered by the higher ups, among which, is our MC's sister.
She reveals herself to have joined them way, way before, after she promised to deliver them her own sister, if it meant escaping the ticklish punishment. Her torture can now end, since our MC is finally there, about to be consumed by their Goddess. Her sister turns around, leaving her behind, as her one ally is captured, and her tickle torture begins.
The last shots of the movie are of the sister of our MC being anointed as a member of the higher ups, with a pained, unnatural grin on her face, and of the dark tunnels underneath the cult's chambers, where the writhing tentacles continue to expand, growing ever larger, where now, the desperate laughter of our MC can be heard distinctly and clearly.
- And that's it, what do you think? I did try to cut it short, I swear, if you'd read the complete thing, it'd been pretty much a full script. I'm also having some trouble coming up with the casting, honestly. The only one I've got settled down is Margaret Qualley as our main girl. She's beautiful but kinda vulnerable, and also not a super popular actress who might be considered too overused. Any suggestions for the rest?