How to Write a Horror Story

I'm a great believer that all good writers began (and continue on) as enthusiastic readers too. It's the flip-side of the same coin.

Therefore I was gratified to find that one of the most famous horror writers of all agrees with that principle.  Stephen King wrote,

If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but "didn't have time to read," I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
On Writing by Stephen King

I cheered.  People could be forgiven for not listening to a word that I said, because I'm nowhere near the Times Best Seller List.  But he's a very different prospect.  Stephen King knows what works!

This was wrong!  Frankenstein's monster was patently the scariest of all!  Or maybe the Wolfman, but you could take him down with a silver bullet. We all had crucifixes around our necks.  Vampires were no threat. 

But no. It was the woman. 

I was only about seven or eight, but I had the same questioning mind then as now. I wanted to know why!  She was no monster.  She wasn't even supernatural!  She was just looking scared.  I pondered it alone for a while, but no answers surfaced.  So I put my question to the highest authority in the land.

My Mum said that the lady was the scariest because we don't know what's frightened her.  And she's looking past us.  Whatever has made her scream is standing right behind us.  And we don't know what it is yet.

This notion was underpinned as I got older and realized that it repeated over and over again.

A classic example is the aforementioned Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Nothing actually happens in that story which can't be explained away as pareidolia, overhearing the neighbors through thin walls, or our protagonist going insane.

In fact, the whole story can be interpreted as a descent into madness.  Or it is a ghost story.  I've read it both ways and they're both equally terrifying!

What Jackson does perfectly is that she applies a light brush to all of her conclusions. Her descriptions are rich and as well crafted as any horror story can be.  But she passes the assumptions onto her readers to make and that is genius.

Nor is she alone in that.  Think back to the most disturbing and enduring horror image that you've ever encountered.  Are you told it all?  Is there a garish gore-fest, or is it an idea deftly inserted like the twisting of a knife?

Gore is best reserved for the movies, where they have the special effects to make it a visual experience.  For horror writing, the subtle approach is always best.

No-one is saying that you should sanitize your work, least of all me.  If any genre cried out for blood, guts and gore, it's horror.

All that's being said is that nothing you could write would be as terrible, and precisely horrific, as the images conjured in your reader's mind. A skillful horror writer will push those mental pictures into a certain direction, then let them make the final step themselves.

So your werewolf has fallen upon its victim.  You can give us a blow by blow account of every bite wound and tearing away of the flesh.  You will have forced your reader to follow your notion of what's horrific. 

Or you could step away and suggest it.  There could be screams and pleas in the darkness; sounds suggestive of what's going on out of view.  You could have someone witnessing between splayed fingers, with your narrative telling us more about that person's terror and nausea, than the sight that's causing it.  Or better still, you could have someone watching someone else, who can actually see the attack.

Now THAT would be horror in its purest form!  Because all of the details have to be added by the reader, in an environment of uncertainty and fear.

But none of this is always possible.  If you have a massacre or a serial killer at work, then a certain amount of gore-fest has to be written.  This is particularly true if there's not an established framework for the reader's imagination to latch onto.

We KNOW what a werewolf is going to do.  Our minds are more hazy on what Lksfjhhdksdd, the Demon from the Ninth Circle of Hell, does when it grabs hold of its victim. Therefore, we have to tell our readers.

The trick is to write it all as something very commonplace.  Write it in the same tone in which you would describe doing the washing up.  The more sensationalized you get, the less effective the horror. 

The main issue is realism.  Your reader is having to suspend their belief in order to even accept that Lksfjhhdksdd is real.  The more garish your narrative, the more divorced from reality it all appears; and there's nothing scary in something that couldn't possibly happen to us.

But matter of fact writing adds a veneer of ordinariness over the top of the gore.  It's a subtlety which adds that much needed realism.

Both Interview with the Vampire and Carrie are written in the first person.  The Haunting of Hill House is third person, but it's still a stream of consciousness from the point of view of Eleanor.

Writing in the third person allows the reader to step into a universe and observe it.  That's great for most stories.  It lets the writer add in objective detail and allows us to move where the action is.

But for horror, a greater factor is in play.  We want to reach out to our readers on a deeply emotional level.  We are not just telling a tale.  We're trying to scare them!

Third person lets them watch the protagonist move across a scene; first person places them right behind the protagonist's eyes.  The readers don't watch it happen, they experience it happening to themselves.

This isn't to say that third person doesn't have its place.  If you have a cast of thousands, and don't wish to leap between perspectives, then third person is the way forward.  But you will be sacrificing that direct hard-wire into the emotions of your reader for the sake of style.  It's ultimately your story and your choice which would work best.

You can be forgiven a lot in horror writing. Cliches are not only embraced, but expected.  Unlikely scenarios will be believed, if they are written well enough.  Stupidity on the part of protagonists is overlooked.

But you will never get away with a paper thin, undeveloped threat.

The whole point of horror is to make you care about a person or people, then place them into unspeakable danger. 

The worst that could happen does happen, with terrifying abandon.

A moment can be totally lost, if the reader loses faith in the terrible thing.  I always recall, at this point, a scene in the movie Jaws.  The tension was all there.  The horror was real and present.  The shark that jumped out of the ocean was blatantly rubber.  Not even very well crafted rubber at that.

Let's just say that it all turned very swiftly into comedy in our house.

Fortunately, we don't have to worry about bad special effects in literature, because most of that is in our reader's mind.  However, that doesn't give you license to leave your baddie or bad situation undefined.

Horror works because whatever is out there, however unlikely, might actually be true.  Take Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  At the time of her writing, people really were digging up corpses.  The medical associations needed them to teach their surgeons. 

Also hot off the press was the experimentations of Luigi Aloisio Galvani, who was sticking sparks into the muscles of dead frogs. The result seemed to animate them for a moment.  We call it 'galvanization' after him today.

So while the actual story of Dr Frankenstein was fictitious, all of the elements were in place in reality.  That's what made it perfect horror material.  But that wasn't all that Mary Shelley did.  We were invited into the mind of both the doctor and the creature.  We saw how they thought and what they did.  There was back-story; and hopes and dreams for the future.

It's not always possible to gain all of this with your monsters or other danger points.  No-one is going to stop a zombie to ask about their inner feelings and motivation.  (The answer in all cases is 'braaaaiiiinnnnssss'.)  But the more rich in detail your story's antagonist, the more readily your reader will accept the threat.

Then they can get on with emotionally reacting to it.