My argument about horror is that horror is horror because of its theme: something awful is going to get you. I’m going to repeat this idea because I believe it’s integral to writing horror.
A story is a horror story often because its theme is that our world is a veneer over things that are terrible, and that those terrible things are inescapable. All reprieves in horror stories are temporary.
One reason, beyond sequels, that horror movies end not with the thing being defeated but being escaped is that it’s still out there. The masked murderer’s body is not where you expect it. The shark has babies. The noise you heard in the wall that started everything repeats at the end. Thematically, that’s what makes it horror. You might escape the ghost, this time, but ghosts are still out there, as are vampires and werewolves and zombies. They’re relentless. Horror challenges the assumption that you can be safe. It’s the opposite of “happily ever after.”
This is one of the bedrocks of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos stories: your understanding of the universe is flawed. It is huge, uncaring, and it will roll over you without even thinking about it. You are not in control.
A horror story is sort of like Norse mythology. In the end, the gods die. No one escapes. It’s grim stuff, but so is horror.
Many horror stories, it seems to me, are about people discovering this underlying truth. They do their best to escape their fates, and they often do, but they are forever scarred by the experience. Once they know the truth, they’ll carry it with them until the end. Some of my favorite horror stories really emphasize the “living with the knowledge” theme, like “Young Goodman Brown” or “The Music of Erich Zann.”
The end of Lord of the Rings, for Frodo, is a kind of horror story. He’s too intelligent, and he’s seen too much, to be able to go back to the Shire like Sam can (although I wonder if Sam has nightmares).
A weird thing has happened to horror tropes, I’ve noticed, which is that they’ve been trivialized. The monster, the vampire, the werewolf have become popular icons. Buffy slays them, but in many stories they are losing their capacity to carry the horror theme. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was frightening because most readers hadn’t considered the possibility of an undead force actively seeking the most innocent. It was a creepy idea.
Effective horror has to awaken the knowledge in the reader that their world isn’t safe. The threat is present and unrelenting.
There are no completely happy endings. The threat may be pushed back, but it’s not gone.
An editor putting together a book for teen writers interviewed me about some parts of the writing process. The questions were fairly standard and fun to play with, like “What do you find easiest about writing?” or “What do you find hardest about writing?” Originally, she asked me to answer this question, “What’s your best advice to teens who want to write science fiction?” until she realized I also, occasionally, write horror. Since she already had another science fiction writer on board, but no horror writers, she asked me to switch the question to “What’s your best advice to teens who want to write horror?”
I thought this was a troubling question, particularly to teens. I have an uneasy relationship personally with horror. Maybe I’m too existential. At any rate, here was my answer to the question. Comments are welcome.
In some ways, horror is easy. If you are writing a story that says, basically, “something awful out there is going to get you,” then you are writing horror. The blood and gore and images of death that people sometimes associate with the genre are just the trappings of a horror story, not the heart. The heart is in that feeling that we are helpless. The bad thing is on the way. It makes me shiver right now to think of it.
So, my best advice to a teen who wants to write horror is to not let the props that often stand on the horror stage distract you. Horror is not about zombies or vampires or serial killers. It’s about realizing that you can’t get away.
Now, knowing that there is no escape, let your characters try as hard as they can to not lose. The struggle is what makes horror interesting. Struggle is what makes all stories interesting. If your character manages to beat whatever was pursuing them at the end, whether it is something slithery that lives under the bed, or a shadow that lurks only in the peripheral vision, or the footsteps behind you as you walk through an empty hall, then he delayed the inevitable because he struggled and got lucky. Next time, or the time after that, or sometime in the far future, he won’t.
Think about what scares you. I have a lot of fears: nuclear war, animal attacks, tornadoes, disease. You probably have a list too. Now, think about how you feel when you are faced with your fears. Write a story that makes your reader feel that. Horror isn’t about telling the reader what happened; it’s about making the reader feel something while it is happening.
The editor also asked me to include a short excerpt to go along with my answers.
This is an excerpt from a story called “The Radio Magician.” In it, a young boy in the 1930s had contracted polio, a truly horrible disease that may end up paralyzing him completely. He doesn’t know when the disease will stop taking away his ability to move. He may end up in an iron lung. Here is a section from it where he recalls when the polio started:
Clarence remembered running home down the long muddy lane beside the field, its corn already harvested, the broken stalks lying across each other. He’d run on the weeds beside the lane to keep his shoes dry. Then he stumbled. For a second, he thought he’d stepped in the mud, but he could see the shoe was clean. His right leg dragged again. He slowed to a heavy limp, massaging his thigh through his jeans. What was wrong with his leg? The house had never looked so far away. Too far to call for help. He leaned on the fence and felt his strength fading.
Just as he reached the gate an hour later, Mom came out on the porch to look for him. She ran to him as he fell, her face wet with fear. By morning, the left leg had gone weak too. How far would it stretch? As the doctor poked at him later that day, Clarence made a fist, then unmade it, over and over. Would the paralysis spread? Fist. No fist. Fist. No fist.
Clarence envisioned the virus like a horrible mold. Its name sounded like a mold, poliomyelitis. The doctors put his useless legs in casts. Itching during the day was intolerable, but Clarence could force a pencil, or a ruler, or a straightened coat hanger only so far under the plaster. Maybe the virus really resembled a mold, growing out of sight in the cast’s moist darkness. If the casts came off now, would his legs look human anymore? And that wasn’t the worst. In his blood, he pictured the virus marching toward his lungs, filling them with cauliflower-like lumps of grey and green mold until he couldn’t inhale.
Did that breath hurt? He wheezed a little as the air whispered from his mouth. Was that breath just a little bit harder than the last? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
Suggestions for Writing Horror
One goal in horror is to experience the story, not to be told about it. So avoid describing with judgments. I wouldn’t write a sentence like, “We drove up to the hideous house” unless I’d earned the use of “hideous.” “Hideous” is not a meaningful description. It only tells us that the character or narrator thought it was hideous. What I want to do is to describe the house in such a way that the reader says, “Oh, my god, that house is hideous.” See the difference? The first way shares with the reader that your character passed a judgment. The second way, your reader makes a judgment. Go for the second way.
In the same manner, be wary of emotion-reporting words like “scared,” “frightened,” “revolted,” “petrified,” etc. Those words don’t evoke emotions in the reader. What does it feel like for your character to be scared, frightened, revolted, petrified, etc.? Show that instead.
In general, a strong way to horrify a reader is to threaten a very sympathetic character.
The more the reader knows about your character and cares what happens to your character, the deeper the emotion you can provoke by threatening them. I think the first chapter of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Stephen King’s It create wonderful characters you care about, and then do terrible things to them. Horror-inducing things.
Horror stories are often about a loss of innocence. The state your characters (and readers) enter the story is the most innocent they are going to be. Whatever happens in the story should take them to a place where that innocence is destroyed or damaged. Think of the many terrible lessons that a loss of innocence can teach us. Our parents don’t really love us. The doctor wants to make us ill. The sweet old lady down the street was a serial killer in her 20s. The world is not safe. Your neighborhood is not safe. You are not safe. Out there something wants to lead you to a bad end. Evil, whether it is the indifference of godlike beings from H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination that won’t even notice as they squash you, or the tightly focused individual hatred of someone who pretends to be a friend, like Montresor in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” wants to rob you of power, control, safety and/or life.
Speaking of Stephen King, if you are really interested in writing horror, or figuring out its attraction and why it works, read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a book-length essay on the subject. He spends time going into types of horror. From a simple fright or gross-out to stomach-clenching body horror, to existential dread that leaves readers questioning all their assumptions.
Two years ago, horror writer Michael Picco wrote a blog post for WCWF that you can find on this site. It’s called “Stephen King and the Bologna of Fear.” If you are writing horror, I’d suggest you read that too.
But for me, I say if you want to write horror, you have to be willing to go to some dark places, because to write about a thing, you have to think about a thing, which is why I don’t write horror often.
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. He’s retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s reader’s choice awards. Years and years ago, he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
