The Steamboat Drowned

A haunted river. A forgotten steamboat. And the cartoon captain who cannot die.

Elara wakes aboard The Legacy, an ink-black steamboat adrift on a river that flows through lost stories and broken memories. Her body is monochrome. Her past is a blur. And the captain-a whistling, dead-eyed cartoon mouse from a bygone era-refuses to stop his endless tune.

Around her, other passengers stir: a flapper girl with eyes full of static, a rubber-hose giant stuck in loops of laughter, a slick-talking alley cat who remembers being famous. They are refugees of fiction, discarded characters from canceled animations, all trapped on a boat bound nowhere.

But something is unraveling. The film is glitching. Time skips. Reality stutters. The whistle is off-key.

And the static is hungry.

A surreal and deeply psychological descent into narrative decay, The Steamboat Drowned is folk horror for the media-saturated age-a tale of memory, obsolescence, and the terrible price of being forgotten.