Western horror is rife with cliches: Every year Hollywood gives us the same handful of movies about zombies, vampires, werewolves, and vampire werewolves who fight zombies ( Dracula Wolfman: Zombie Fighter , coming 2017!). And that's a damn shame, because if we just mined other cultures for horror inspiration, we could find some truly inventive, truly terrifying stuff that puts our own monsters to shame. Like ...

6 Stikini, The Native American Were-Owl That Pukes Up Organs

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Where Western culture has werewolves, the Native American Seminole culture has the stikini, which is kind of a cannibalistic were-owl.

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Which sort of seems like a consolation prize to being able to turn into a badass werewolf,

but you take what you can get.

According to Seminole lore, stikini are witches who, for reasons known only to themselves, magic on up into nocturnal owl-people in order to prey upon their sleeping neighbors. You'll never know which of your friends is secretly a magic murder-owl, because they look like regular people by day, but upon nightfall they go about their terrible avian transformation.

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And it's not comfortable for them, either. To become an owl, they first have to vomit out all of their internal organs. We're not sure what this entails, whether they can just stick their fingers down their throat or whether they have to choke down some Arby's, but in any case, once they've vacated their entire body cavity, they hang their organs in a tree so that nothing eats them. Although it seems to us like this would make them easy pickings for, you know, regular owls. We don't know; we didn't make up the story.

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After a diet of almost exclusively mouse hair, you'd think an unattended spleen

would come as a nice change.

Now that the stikini is in owl form, it's time to fly around the village looking for sleeping victims. But they're only really interested in eating your heart, which they suck out through your mouth. Before dawn, the stikini returns home and begins the awful procedure of returning to human form, which basically means horking down all of their organs again like a slightly more disgusting Arby's combo meal.