In order to successfully write horror, you must first understand fear. Fortunately, fear is a universal experience, and likely something you have intimate first-hand knowledge of - the key is learning to harness your fears so they can be translated for the page.
First, recognize that different techniques and approaches will work better in different media. What works well in a horror movie may not translate well to a written story, and vice versa. Understanding your medium and your goals will help you work to the strengths of the medium and provide the most effective approach.
Second, remember that horror, perhaps more than any other genre, is at its core interactive. Even a linear story told through writing or visual cues invites participation from the reader: You need them to engage so that they will bring their own fears to the table. Simply seeing characters interact with frightening things isn’t enough; you need to invoke fear in the reader by inviting them to experience the things that you describe. That’s something I’ll delve into in greater detail in a later post, but for now, keep it in the back of your mind.
Two Main Types of Horror
There are two primary types of horror reactions you can create in a reader: Visceral horror, and cerebral horror.
Visceral horror is felt in the gut. It preys upon the lizard brain and taps into basic primal fears. Visceral emotions include disgust and shock. It is most effective in visual media, where a viewer sees images and responds to them before their brain has a chance to process them, but you can still invoke these feelings through the careful use of description. More on that in a minute.
Cerebral horror is felt in the brain. It’s the type of horror that you think about hours or days or years later, the kind of disturbing ideas that implant themselves in there and become more frightening the more you consider them. These are rooted in anxiety rather than the primal lizard brain. Cerebral horror includes fridge horror and dread. A tightly crafted story will beat a movie every time when it comes to cerebral horror, because written media is more intimate. Use that to your advantage.
The Emotions of Horror Stories
Let’s talk in a little more detail about the emotions that you should work to create in your reader when crafting a horror story. In order of most-difficult to most-natural for the written medium, try experimenting with:
Shock: Films and video games can fall back on the “jump scare,” a tactic wherein you rapidly break suspense with a sudden visual cue, almost always accompanied by a loud noise. If you need an example for some reason, turn to the nearest Five Nights At Freddy’s game.
Jump scares work by temporarily startling the viewer, short-circuiting their conscious brains and tapping directly into their oldest and most primal reflex. Newborns startle when they are exposed to too much sensory input - it’s literally their first line of defense. When you jerk, scream, or flail, you are tapping in to the newborn infant part of your brain.
Can you do a jump scare in a novel? Probably not. For one, there is no sound, and sound is extremely important to a successful jump scare. For another, reading involves conscious interaction with text; you can’t really bypass their thought processes enough to invoke a jump scare response (except for the occasionally really susceptible reader).
But you can still shock them, and that’s just as good.
Shock occurs when a reader is totally blind-sided by new information. They think they know what’s going on, but in reality, the truth is something unexpected (and perhaps far more sinister). They think a certain character is safe, only for them to be suddenly and brutally murdered. They think they’ve solved the puzzle, but the rabbit hole actually goes much deeper. I’ll talk about shock in greater length in another post, because it is so difficult to do well and requires a lot more attention.
Disgust: Gore and “splatterpunk” relies on the visceral response of disgust. We are naturally repulsed by certain things, and that too may be hardwired into our DNA (although it’s also partly based on nurture and cultural factors). But basically, disgust exists to keep us away from things that may hurt us, like diseased things.
Triggering disgust in your reader will mostly fall to writing effective descriptions. Word choice matters a lot when it comes to writing gore. Some words just feel gross (think “moist”), and some invoke really icky mental images. I’ll write a whole thing on tricks to writing gore at a future point, but for now a word of caution: Horror cannot rely on gross-out scenes alone. You might invoke a kind of sick fascination in the reader, but you won’t really scare them.
Dread: Suspense and dread are vital ingredients to horror in any medium. They work by drawing the reader into the story, enticing them to think ahead - but stripping away their certainty about what will happen. A really good story will alternate between shock and dread, building up tension before twisting the narrative in an unexpected direction.
I wrote a little bit about invoking dread here, and I’ll delve into the topic at greater length later. But for now, remember: Suspense lies in giving the reader the pieces to a puzzle, but withholding context. It forces the reader to think ahead, to try and make sense of what they’re seeing, and to imagine terrible conclusions. It encourages the reader to think “what if…?” or “something terrible is going to happen but when? how? what?”
This is something you can only do well if the reader is invested in the characters and truly cares about them. Fortunately, because writing is so intimate, it’s easier to delve into a character’s mind and forge a strong connection between them and the reader.
Fridge horror: Fridge horror is basically when something becomes creepier or more disturbing the longer you think about it. It’s when the implications of something are more horrifying than what you see on the surface. It’s the part of the story the reader takes with them, the part that makes them question their own beliefs or world-view or even reality.
It is a cerebral horror, and it’s the thing that written stories can really excel at. I will - you guessed it - write a whole post on the topic in the near future, but until then, realize that fridge horror relies in part on logic (”oh god, this means THAT!”) and part empathy (”can you imagine what it must be like….?”)
The best fridge horror moments will be pulled from your own personal experiences and fears. While anyone can tap into primal fears (the dark, the unknown, disgusting things), fridge horror is often deeply personal and oddly specific. It’s raising a question and leading the reader to think “Oh god, I never thought of that, but it is terrible.”
I’ve rambled on a long time now, and I have many things to come back to and explain in more detail - but for now, hopefully this gives you something to think about! Until next time, stay scared :)
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