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📺 Channel 13's Creature Feature, live in your terminal
📺 "Good evening, creatures of the night, and welcome to the Channel 13 Creature Feature. I'm your host, Count Cathode, broadcasting from beyond the static."
Terminal of Terror brings the classic Universal monsters, creatures from world folklore, the cryptids people swear they have seen, the great literary monsters, the beasts of Greek myth and the first monsters ever filmed to your terminal. Meet 55 monsters in six packs, learn the real history behind them (where the legends began, who played them on screen, and which "facts" Hollywood simply made up), then prove what you know in the Midnight Quiz and fill your crypt.
[!WARNING]
Viewer discretion is advised. Side effects may include knowing far too much about 1930s makeup artists, a sudden distrust of huts with chicken legs, and correcting your friends about silver bullets.
📅 Tonight's Programme
🔮 Summon it
On macOS or Linux, install it with Homebrew (brew upgrade picks up new releases):
brew install hungovercoders/tap/terminal-of-terror
On Windows, or without Homebrew, download it from the latest release: there are builds for Linux, macOS and Windows, on Intel and ARM. Unpack it and put terminal-of-terror somewhere on your PATH.
# e.g. Linux on Intel/AMD, version 1.1.0
tar xzf terminal-of-terror_1.1.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv terminal-of-terror /usr/local/bin/
# e.g. Windows on Intel/AMD: unpack, then add the folder to your PATH
Expand-Archive terminal-of-terror_1.1.0_windows_amd64.zip "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\terminal-of-terror"
[!NOTE]
On macOS, the downloaded binary isn't signed, so the first run may be blocked. Run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine terminal-of-terror to let it through. Homebrew does this for you.
Or, with Go 1.25+, install it into $(go env GOPATH)/bin, which needs to be on your PATH:
go install github.com/hungovercoders/terminal-of-terror@latest
Or build it from source:
git clone https://github.com/hungovercoders/terminal-of-terror.git
cd terminal-of-terror
go build -o terminal-of-terror
Check it worked with terminal-of-terror --version.
Tab completion and man pages. Homebrew installs both. Otherwise, completion for monster names, pack ids and every flag comes from the binary:
source <(terminal-of-terror completion bash) # or: terminal-of-terror completion zsh|fish|powershell
terminal-of-terror monster dra<TAB> # dracula Dracula
Put that line in your shell's startup file to keep it, and terminal-of-terror completion --help has the per-shell details. The release archives carry the same scripts under completions/ and a man page per command under man/ (man -l man/terminal-of-terror.1).
🌙 Your first night
terminal-of-terror monster # tune in to the Creature Feature
terminal-of-terror quiz # test yourself in the Midnight Quiz
terminal-of-terror tonight # see tonight's double bill
terminal-of-terror countdown # how many nights until Halloween?
terminal-of-terror random --daily # the Fact of the Night
[!TIP]
Add terminal-of-terror random --daily to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc and every new terminal opens with the Fact of the Night.
🧛 The Creature Feature
terminal-of-terror monster
Count Cathode opens the broadcast through a wall of TV static, then hands you the keys to the vault. Every monster has its own colours and a page full of sections:
| Section | What you'll learn |
|---|
| Facts | Terrifying facts, origin and first appearance |
| Legend | The real folklore and history behind the monster |
| The Film | For screen monsters: the classic film's director, star, makeup artist and release date |
| Myth vs Movie | True or false? Make your guesses, then press r for the verdicts. Monsters outside the screen packs get Myth or Fact instead |
| Quotes | Lines from the original public-domain novels |
| Stat Card | Strength, speed, cunning and dread, plus powers and weaknesses |
| Legacy | Sequels, remakes and crossovers |
🎞️ The silent-era monsters, from the Phantom and the Hunchback to Count Orlok and the whole Silent Screen pack, flicker in black and white with title cards and film grain, just as they did in the silent era.
Jump straight to a monster by name, nickname or even part of a name:
terminal-of-terror monster dracula
terminal-of-terror monster wolfman
terminal-of-terror monster quasimodo
terminal-of-terror monster --all # open on the gallery of every monster
terminal-of-terror monster --no-intro # skip the static
| Key | Action |
|---|
← → / h l / p n | Previous / next monster |
tab shift+tab / 1-7 | Switch section |
↑ ↓ / j k, space, pgup/pgdn | Scroll |
r | Reveal the Myth vs Movie verdicts |
/ | Search names, facts, films and legends |
g / esc | Back to the gallery |
? | Full help |
q / Ctrl+C | Quit |
The explorer fills the terminal and adapts to its size. On wide screens the portrait sits beside the text.
🧠 Games
The Midnight Quiz
Questions built from the monster data: facts, film credits, lines from the novels and myth checks. Every answer explains itself, so you learn as you play. Finish with a rank from Ghoul-in-Training to Master of Horror.
terminal-of-terror quiz
terminal-of-terror quiz -n 5
terminal-of-terror quiz dracula
Guess the Monster
A portrait is hidden in the fog. Press space to clear a little more (clues appear as it lifts), but every clearing costs points. Name the monster through the thickest fog for the Eagle Eye badge.
terminal-of-terror guess
terminal-of-terror guess --rounds 8
The Monster Mash
Three rounds, no rules, no refunds. Two monsters fight it out over strength, speed, cunning and dread, decided by their stat cards and a roll of the dice.
terminal-of-terror mash
terminal-of-terror mash dracula "wolf man"
terminal-of-terror mash --fast
💀 The Crypt
Answer three questions about a monster correctly, in quizzes or Guess the Monster, and it's captured. Your crypt keeps your collection, your badges and your records.
terminal-of-terror crypt
terminal-of-terror crypt reset # release them all and start again
| Badge | How to earn it |
|---|
| 🎃 First Fright | Finish your first quiz |
| 🏆 Flawless Fiend | Score 100% on a quiz of 5 or more questions |
| 🦴 Grave Robber | Capture your first monster |
| 🔍 Eagle Eye | Name a monster in Guess the Monster before the fog lifts |
| 🥊 Fight Promoter | Stage your first Monster Mash |
| 📚 Midnight Scholar | Visit every monster's page in the explorer |
| 🦉 Night Owl | Play between midnight and 4am |
| 🌕 Survived the Full Moon | Play a game on a full-moon night |
| 🐈 Unlucky for Some | Play a game on Friday the 13th |
| 👻 Halloween Spirit | Play a game on Halloween |
| 🎬 Silent Era Scholar | Capture every silent-film monster |
| 📺 Monster Kid | Capture every Universal Classic |
| 🌍 Folklorist | Capture 5 monsters from World Folklore |
| 🔭 Cryptozoologist | Capture every cryptid |
| 📖 Bookworm | Capture every literary monster |
| 🏹 Hero of Legend | Capture every monster of classical mythology |
| 👑 Master of the Crypt | Capture every monster |
Progress is saved as JSON in your config directory (e.g. ~/.config/terminal-of-terror/progress.json on Linux). Set TERMINAL_OF_TERROR_HOME to keep it somewhere else.
🕛 Nightly rituals
Everything here is worked out offline: moon phases, film anniversaries and the countdown to Halloween.
🎟️ Tonight's Double Feature
A retro ticket for tonight's Channel 13 double bill. The line-up changes every night.
terminal-of-terror tonight
terminal-of-terror tonight --shuffle # a different bill
terminal-of-terror tonight --date 2026-10-31 # what's on for Halloween?
🎃 The Halloween Countdown
The nights until Halloween, tonight's moon and the next film anniversary. During October it's the 31 Nights of Fright, with a different monster featured every night, and that monster headlines the double feature and tells the Fact of the Night too, so every ritual agrees on who's haunting you tonight.
terminal-of-terror countdown
✨ The Fact of the Night
The same fact for everyone all day, and a new one tomorrow. It notices full moons, Friday the 13th and anniversaries too: on 21 November it'll remind you that Frankenstein opened in 1931.
terminal-of-terror random --daily
terminal-of-terror random --date 2026-11-21
terminal-of-terror random # or just any old fact
📜 The roster
Universal Classics · --pack universal
| Monster | First appeared | The classic film |
|---|
| 🧛 | Dracula | Bram Stoker's novel (1897) | Dracula (1931), Bela Lugosi |
| 🧟 | Frankenstein's Monster | Mary Shelley's novel (1818) | Frankenstein (1931), Boris Karloff |
| 🐺 | The Wolf Man | The Wolf Man (1941) | The Wolf Man (1941), Lon Chaney Jr. |
| 🏺 | The Mummy | The Mummy (1932) | The Mummy (1932), Boris Karloff |
| 🐟 | The Creature from the Black Lagoon | Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) | Ben Chapman on land, Ricou Browning in the water |
| 👻 | The Invisible Man | H. G. Wells's novel (1897) | The Invisible Man (1933), Claude Rains |
| 🎭 | The Phantom of the Opera | Gaston Leroux's serial (1909) | The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Lon Chaney |
| 🔔 | The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo's novel (1831) | The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Lon Chaney |
| 👰 | The Bride of Frankenstein | Bride of Frankenstein (1935) | Elsa Lanchester |
| 🦇 | Dracula's Daughter | Dracula's Daughter (1936) | Gloria Holden |
| 🌿 | The Werewolf of London | Werewolf of London (1935) | Henry Hull |
| 👽 | The Metaluna Mutant | This Island Earth (1955) | Regis Parton |
| 🩸 | Son of Dracula | Son of Dracula (1943) | Lon Chaney Jr. as Count Alucard |
| 🦍 | Paula Dupree, the Ape Woman | Captive Wild Woman (1943) |
World Folklore · --pack folklore
| Monster | Where the legend comes from |
|---|
| 🗿 | The Golem | Jewish folklore, most famously Prague |
| 😱 | The Banshee | Irish folklore |
| 🧙 | Baba Yaga | Slavic folk tales |
| 🥒 | The Kappa | Japanese yōkai tales |
| 🏮 | The Jiangshi | Chinese ghost stories |
| 💧 | La Llorona | Mexican and Latin American legend |
| 😈 | Krampus | Alpine folk tradition |
| 🦌 | The Wendigo | Cree, Ojibwe and Innu tradition of the northern forests |
| 🐎 | The Nuckelavee | Orkney folklore, Scotland |
| 👹 | The Rakshasa | Hindu mythology and the Sanskrit epics |
| 🌺 | The Pontianak | Malay and Indonesian folklore |
| 👣 | The Draugr | The Icelandic sagas |
| 🐊 | The Bunyip | Aboriginal Australian traditions of the south-east |
Cryptids · --pack cryptids
| Monster | Where it was seen |
|---|
| 🦶 | The Sasquatch | The Pacific Northwest; "Bigfoot" since the 1958 Bluff Creek footprints |
| 🦕 | The Loch Ness Monster | The Scottish Highlands; the modern legend began in 1933 |
| 🦋 | The Mothman | Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 1966 to 1967 |
| 🐐 | El Chupacabra | Puerto Rico in 1995, then across the Americas |
| 🐴 | The Jersey Devil | The Pine Barrens of New Jersey; the great panic of January 1909 |
| 🧊 | The Yeti | Sherpa and Tibetan folklore of the Himalaya |
Literary Monsters · --pack literary
| Monster | The book | On screen |
|---|
| 🧪 | Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson's novella (1886) | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Fredric March |
| 🎨 | Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde's novel (1890) | The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Hurd Hatfield |
| 🐈 | Carmilla | Sheridan Le Fanu's novella (1872) | Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970), Ingrid Pitt |
| 🎃 | The Headless Horseman | Washington Irving's story (1820) | The Headless Horseman (1922), a silent with Will Rogers as Ichabod |
| 🦴 | Grendel | Beowulf, the Old English poem | Beowulf (2007), Crispin Glover in motion capture |
| 🐲 | The Jabberwock | Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (1871) | Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977) |
Classical Mythology · --pack mythology
| Monster | Where the myth is told |
|---|
| 🐍 | Medusa | Hesiod's Theogony (around 700 BCE), retold by Ovid |
| 🐂 | The Minotaur | Greek vase painting, then Apollodorus, Plutarch and Ovid |
| 🐕 | Cerberus | Hesiod's Theogony; the last labour of Heracles |
| 🐉 | The Hydra | Hesiod's Theogony; the labour told in full by Apollodorus |
| 🧿 | Polyphemus the Cyclops | Homer's Odyssey, book 9 |
| 🦁 | The Sphinx | Named by Hesiod; her riddle in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex |
Silent Screen · --pack silent
| Monster | The film | Played by |
|---|
| 🐀 | Count Orlok | Nosferatu (1922) | Max Schreck |
| 🛌 | Cesare the Somnambulist | Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) | Conrad Veidt |
| ⚡ | The Edison Monster | Frankenstein (1910) | Charles Ogle |
| 🤖 | The Maschinenmensch | Metropolis (1927) | Brigitte Helm |
| 🃏 | Gwynplaine | The Man Who Laughs (1928) | Conrad Veidt |
| 🎩 | The Man in the Beaver Hat | London After Midnight (1927), the famous lost film | Lon Chaney |
📦 Monster packs
Monsters come in packs. Use --pack with any command to choose which ones come out to play:
terminal-of-terror packs # every pack in the vault
terminal-of-terror quiz --pack folklore # a folklore-only quiz
terminal-of-terror guess --pack cryptids # who lurks in the fog? probably Bigfoot
terminal-of-terror monster --pack universal,literary
🧪 Make your own
Build your own monsters without writing any Go:
terminal-of-terror packs new urban-legends
This creates ~/.config/terminal-of-terror/packs/urban-legends/ (or your OS's equivalent) with an example monster to edit. Every pack there loads automatically, and its monsters join the explorer, the quiz, the guessing game, the Mash and everything else. Only name, description and facts are required. See CONTRIBUTING.md for every field, and if your pack turns out frightfully good, send it our way.
📖 Command reference
| Command | What it does |
|---|
monster [name] | The interactive explorer (--all, --no-intro) |
list | Every monster, grouped by pack |
random | A random fact (--daily, --date YYYY-MM-DD) |
quiz [monster] | The Midnight Quiz (-n) |
guess | Guess the Monster (--rounds) |
mash [monster] [monster] | The Monster Mash (--fast) |
crypt | Your captured monsters, badges and records; crypt reset starts again (-y) |
tonight | Tonight's double feature (--shuffle, --date) |
countdown | Nights until Halloween (--date) |
packs | List packs; packs new <id> makes one |
completion <shell> | Tab completion for bash, zsh, fish or PowerShell |
Every command takes --json and prints its data instead of drawing it: the monsters, the questions and answers, the rounds of a game, tonight's bill, the countdown, your crypt, the packs. Under --json an error is one object on stderr, {"error": {"code": "unknown-monster", "message": "...", "hint": "..."}}, with a stable code to branch on: unknown-monster, ambiguous-monster, bad-pack, bad-date, bad-flag, no-terminal, store or usage. --pack <id> narrows every command to one or more packs. Piped into a file or another program, the output is plain: no colour codes, ASCII borders, no emoji, so list | grep sees names; --no-color or NO_COLOR=1 asks for the same on a terminal.
Every command also takes --pack, and terminal-of-terror [command] --help has the details.
📚 Night School
Want to know how it's built, or build your own? Count Cathode's Night School is a 31-night course that builds Terminal of Terror from an empty folder to a released Go CLI: Cobra commands, embedded monster data, a Bubble Tea explorer, games, saved progress, community packs, CI and a GoReleaser release. One lesson a night, each with an exercise and a terrifying Go fact.
📺 "Thirty-one nights. Bring a blanket."
🌐 The website
Everything above, plus a page for every monster and the whole Night School, is at terminalofterror.com. It's generated from this repository by go run ./site (the monster pages come straight from the packs, the course from course/) and published to Cloudflare on every push to main.
🤝 Contributing
New monsters, packs and fixes are all welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. The demo GIFs and screenshots above are recorded with VHS, and you can re-record them with docs/demos/render.sh.
For any task not covered above, read docs/README.md for the routing table for every doc in this repo.
See CHANGELOG.md for what's changed, and LICENSE for the MIT licence.
🕸️ Acknowledgments
- Inspired by the classic Universal Monsters and the late-night horror hosts who kept them alive on TV
- Built with Cobra, Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss
- Facts compiled from horror history and folklore sources; quotes come only from public-domain texts such as the original 19th-century novels
- Count Cathode and Channel 13 are fictional. No monsters were harmed in the making of this program, though several were captured.
📺 "That's all for tonight. Sleep tight, and check under the bed."
Count Cathode, signing off.
