9.6: Horror

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chapter 9.4: horror\(^{110}\)

Horror stories can be as fun to write as they are to read. A good horror story can gross you out, terrify you, or haunt your dreams. Horror stories depend on the reader believing in the story enough to be scared, disturbed, or disgusted. However, they can be tricky to write well. Like any fiction genre, horror can be mastered with the right planning, patience, and practice.

Be aware of the subjective nature of the horror story. Like comedy, horror can be a difficult genre to write because what makes one person freak out or scream can leave another person bored or emotionless. But like crafting a good joke, crafting a good horror story has been done many times by the masters of the genre. Though your story may not appeal to all readers, or elicit cries of terror, there will likely be at least one reader who will respond in horror to your story.

Read several different types of horror stories. Familiarize yourself with the genre by reading effective examples of horror, from classic ghost stories to contemporary horror writing. As famed horror writer Stephen King once said, to be a real writer, you have to “read and write a lot.” Think about ghost stories or urban legends told around a campfire when you were a kid as well as any horror tales you read in school or on your own. You may want to look at specific examples like:

“The Monkey’s Paw”, an 18th century tale by William Wymark Jacobs about three terrible wishes granted by a mystical monkey’s paw.
“The Tell-Tale Heart”, master horror writer Edgar Allan Poe’s psychologically disturbing short story of murder and haunting.
Neil Gaiman's take on the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty in “The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds.”
You’d be remiss not to read a horror story by arguably the master of the genre, Stephen King. He has written over 200 short stories and uses many different techniques to scare his readers. While there are many lists of his greatest horror stories, read “The Moving Finger” or “The Children of the Corn” to get a sense of King’s style.
Contemporary writer Joyce Carol Oates also has a famous horror story called “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” that uses psychological terror to great effect.
Modern non-standard horror, like Stephen Milhauser’s “The White Glove,” uses the horror genre to tell a coming-of-age story.

Analyze the horror story examples. Choose one or two examples you enjoy reading or find interesting in terms of how they use a certain setting, plot, character or twist in the story to create horror or terror. For example:

In King’s “The Moving Finger”, King takes a premise: a man who thinks he sees and hears a moving human finger scratching a wall in his bathroom and then follows the man closely over the span of a short period of time as he tries to avoid the finger, until he is forced to confront his fear of the finger. King also uses other elements like a Jeopardy game and a conversation between the main character and his wife to further create a feeling of suspense and dread.
In Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Oates establishes the main character, a young girl named Connie, by providing scenes of her daily life and then zooms in on one fateful day, when two men pull up in a car while Connie is at home all alone. Oates uses dialogue to create a sense of dread and allows the reader to experience Connie’s growing sense of fear of the threat of these men.
In both stories, horror or terror is created through a combination of shock and dread, using elements that are possibly supernatural (a moving human finger) and elements that are psychologically disturbing (a young girl alone with two men).

generating story ideas:

Think about what scares you or revolts you the most. Tap into your fears of losing family members, of being alone, of violence, of clowns, of demons, or even of killer squirrels. Your fear will then come across on the page and your experience or exploration of this fear will also grip the reader.

Make a list of your greatest fears. Then, think about how you would react if you were trapped or forced to confront these fears.
You could also take a poll of what scares your family, friends, or partners the most. Get some subjective ideas of horror.

Take an ordinary situation and create something horrifying. Another approach is to look at a normal, everyday situation like taking a walk in the park, cutting up a piece of fruit, or visiting a friend and adding a terrifying or bizarre element. Such as coming across a severed ear during your walk, cutting up a piece of fruit that turns into a finger or a tentacle, or visiting an old friend who has no idea who you are or claims you are someone you are not. Use your imagination to create a horrifying spin on a normal, everyday activity or scene.

Create extreme emotions in your reader. Because horror hinges on the subjective reaction of the reader, the story should work to create several extreme feelings in the reader, including:

Shock: the simplest way to scare the reader is to create shock with a twist ending, a sudden image of gore or a quick moment of terror. However, creating fear through shock can lead to cheap scares and if used too much, can become predictable or less likely to scare the reader.
Paranoia: the sense that something is not quite right, which can unnerve the reader, make them doubt their own surroundings, and when used to its full effect, make the reader doubt even their own beliefs or ideas of the world. This type of fear is great for slow tension-building and psychological horror stories.
Dread: this type of fear is the horrible sense that something bad is going to happen. Dread works well when the reader connects deeply to the story and begins to care enough about the characters to fear something bad that is going to happen to them. Inspiring dread in a reader is tricky as the story will need to do a lot of work to keep the reader engaged and involved, but it is a powerful type of fear.

Balance intense negative emotions with intense emotions of wonder or positivity.

developing the characters:

Make your reader care about or identify with your main character. Do this by introducing clear details and descriptions of the character’s routine, relationships, and point of view. Make your characters believable so others will empathize with them.

Determine the age and occupation of your character.
Determine the marital status or relationship status of your character.
Determine how they view the world (cynical, skeptical, anxious, happy-go-lucky, satisfied, settled).
Add in specific or unique details. Make your character feel distinct with a certain character trait or tick (a hairstyle, a scar) or a mark of their appearance (an item of clothing, a piece of jewelry, a pipe or cane). A character’s speech or dialect can also distinguish a character on the page and make them stand out more to the reader.
Once your readers identify with a character, the character becomes a bit like their child. They will empathize with the character’s conflict and root for them to overcome their conflict, while also realizing that this rarely happens.
This tension between what the reader wants for the character and what could happen or go wrong for the character will fuel the story and propel your readers through the story.

Be prepared for bad things to happen to your character. Most horror is about fear and tragedy and whether or not your character is capable of overcoming their fears. A story where good things happen to good people may be heart-warming, but it will likely not scare or terrify your reader. In fact, the tragedy of bad things happening to good people is not only more relatable, it will also be full of tension and suspense.

In order to create conflict in a character’s life, you need to introduce a danger or threat to the character, whether it's a moving finger, two men in a car, a mystical monkey’s paw or a murderous clown.
For example, in King’s “The Moving Finger”, the main character, Howard, is a middle-aged man who enjoys watching Jeopardy, has a comfortable relationship with his wife, and seems to live a decent middle-class life. But King does not let the reader get too comfortable in Howard's normal existence as he introduces a scratching sound in Howard's bathroom. The discovery of the finger in the bathroom, and Howard's subsequent attempts to avoid it, remove it, or destroy it, creates a story where a seemingly normal, likeable man’s life is interrupted by the unknown or the unreal.

Allow your characters to make mistakes or bad decisions. Once you have established the threat or danger to the character, you will then need to have your character respond with the wrong move, while convincing themselves they are in fact making the right move or decision against this threat.

It’s important to create enough motivation for the character so their bad decision feels justifiable and not merely stupid or unbelievable. An attractive young babysitter who responds to a masked killer by running not to the telephone to call the police but outside into the deep, dark woods is not only a stupid character move, it also feels unbelievable to the reader or viewer.
But if you have your character make a justifiable, though flawed, decision in response to a threat, your reader will be more willing to believe and root for that character.
For example, in King’s “The Moving Finger”, Howard initially decides not to tell his wife about the finger in the bathroom because he believes he may be hallucinating or confusing the scratching noise for a mouse or animal caught in the bathroom. The story justifies Howard's decision not to tell anyone about the finger by playing off what most people who tell themselves if they witnessed a strange or bizarre event: it wasn't real, or I'm just seeing things.
The story then justifies Howard's reaction by allowing his wife to go into the bathroom and not comment about seeing a moving finger by the toilet. So, the story plays with Howard's perception of reality and indicates that maybe he did hallucinate the finger.

creating a horrific climax or twist ending:

Manipulate the reader but do not confuse them. Readers can either be confused or scared, but not both. Deceiving or manipulating your readers through foreshadowing, shifting character traits, or a revelation of a plot point can all work to build suspense and create anxiety or fear in the reader.

Hint at the horrific climax of the story by providing small clues or details, such as the label on a bottle that will later come in handy for the main character, a sound or voice in a room that will later become an indication of an unnatural presence, or even a loaded gun in a pillow that may later go off or be used by the main character.
Build tension by alternating from tense or bizarre moments to quiet moments where your character can take a breath in a scene, calm down, and feel safe again. Then, amp up the tension by re-engaging the character in the conflict and then making the conflict feel even more serious or threatening.

In “The Moving Finger”, King does this by having Howard freak out about the finger, then have a relatively normal conversation with his wife while listening to Jeopardy and thinking about the finger, and then attempt to avoid the finger by going for a walk. Howard begins to feel safe or assured that the finger is not real, but of course, once he opens the bathroom door, the finger seems to have grown longer and is moving much faster than it was before.
King slowly builds tension for both the character and the reader by introducing the threat and then having it overshadow the rest of the story. As readers, we know the finger is a sign of something bad or possibly evil and are now in a position to watch Howard try to avoid, and then eventually confront this evil.

Avoid clichés. Like any genre, horror has its own set of tropes and clichés that writers should avoid if they want to create a unique, engaging horror story. From familiar images like a deranged clown in the attic to a babysitter alone in a house at night, to familiar phrases like “Run!” or “Don’t look behind you!” – clichés are tricky to avoid in this genre.

Focus on creating a story that feels personally terrifying to you. Or, add a twist to a familiar horror trope, like a vampire who enjoys cake instead of blood, or a man trapped in a dumpster rather than a coffin.
Remember that too much gore or violence can actually have a desensitizing effect on the reader, especially if the same pools of blood keep happening over and over again in the story. Of course, some gore is good and likely necessary in a horror story. But make sure you use gore in a spot in the story that is impactful or meaningful, so it can punch your reader in the gut, rather than numb them or bore them.
Another way you can avoid clichés is to focus more on creating a disturbed or unsettled state of mind for your character, rather than images of gore or pools of blood. Pictorial memories often don’t stick in a reader’s mind, but the effect of these images on a character will likely create a lingering creepiness for the reader. So, aim not for your reader’s imagination but for a disturbance in your character’s state of mind.

example: “The Shivering Skin” by Anonymous\(^{111}\)

Excerpt of Journal, Unknown Author, Written in 1874

The following is an account on which the circumstances may be found to be unbelievable. I express my deepest condolences with Peter Kregg’s family members or friends or anyone who knew him who has happened to come across this document. Peter Kregg was my associate. We had attended the same school of medicine in New Hampshire. At first, he came off as an odd fellow, those of you who know him know that he liked to keep to himself unless you were somehow beneficial to his studies. Over the years I grew to appreciate his work from afar. I noticed his diligence and endless perseverance to keep up his work regardless of the obstacles or unfortunate circumstances that somehow were constantly thrown into his path. Eventually, this admiration could no longer suffice my curiosity and I approached him after one of our early morning lectures. It seemed that he chose to ignore me, but I persisted that he respond and allow me to participate as an assistant in his studies and various experiments. After what seemed to be weeks – or months – of pestering, Kregg gave in to my desires.

Starting as an assistant with Kregg held many similarities to enrolling in a new school of medicine. Gone were the methods of practice on examining cadavers and studying the anatomy of the human body. Phosphorous liquids that glowed an unnatural red and strange jars of blue dust filled my days of study. I never once asked Kregg what medicines or resources he used throughout our experiments out of the fear that he may forbid me to participate in any further activity.

For those of you whose minds are beginning to wander away from my vague ramblings, let me interlude to briefly explain what it was that Kregg and I were studying:

The integumentary system of the human body was our prime subject. The purpose was to take skin, which is the largest and one of the most important organs in the human body and attempt to reanimate the dead tissue. We did not want to start with cadavers or dead subjects yet, just dead skin. If we were able to reinvigorate the skin cells and bring life back, we would be one step closer to finding a solution to death.
The effect of temperature on the skin was another essential experiment. One of its functions is to regulate body temperature by sweating when hot and shivering when cold. We concluded that if we were going to try and experiment on the skin in the humid chambers of the Library’s West Tower, the skin could produce sweat and get out of our grip. It is difficult to explain when I state that the skin could get out of our grip.

Kregg believed and I should have agreed with him, that the skin could become sentient. He hadn’t the faintest idea of the effects of his formula on human skin, so he took every precaution. Due to the skin’s tendency to produce sweat to cool down in hot temperatures, we decided it would be safer to experiment in the archives located in the library basement.

We took to action at once. Kregg sent me on a supply run throughout the school. I became drowsy due to sleep loss from the constant raiding of university classrooms night after night. Eventually, I hoarded enough supplies to carry out the experiment. I met Kregg in the bowels of the library at two in the morning. All of the lights had been blown out, so I had to carry my own lantern. As I stepped deeper and deeper into the blackness, I felt an urge of excitement. The excitement could not be exactly attributed to one emotion or the other. I felt inspired; I felt nervous; I felt frightened.

The worst of it came when I had reached the door to the archives. I held the lantern at my side, illuminating everything within a ten meter radius. I could not bring myself to move. Whatever lay in store for me and my future was beyond that door. This was the night I would either be deemed a part of scientific advancement or of catastrophic insanity. Right then, the door swung open to reveal a disgruntled Kregg standing in the dark. Light flickered off his eyes and in the most ironic way, created a sinister appearance. My paralysis broke and I followed Kregg through the archives until we reached the small table in which he had set up the equipment. A small wooden table, roughly six feet long and two feet wide lay next to his collection of liquids and powders. On the table, lay a cadaver. I noticed a miniscule patch of skin had been removed, just above the elbow.

The skin in which Kregg had cut out of the body sat on a stool. Nails were driven into each corner of the square to keep it on the wooden surface. A small candle sat nearby and I placed my lantern next to it. The combined light from both sources created just enough luminance for Kregg to work, but not for me. Kregg told me to stand by and watch. He handed me the journal in which I am writing this document and to record my observations.

I watched as Kregg took a razor and very carefully removed the hair from the skin. Any remaining hair was plucked out with a pair of tweezers. The purpose of this action was to remove any particles which clung to the hair resting on the flesh’s surface. This hair caught these particles and protected the skin, but once there was no hair, the skin was vulnerable.

Kregg set down the tweezers and picked up a small syringe. He stuck it into one of his many vials of colored liquid and filled it to roughly halfway. The receptors on my skin alerted my body of the temperature and I shivered; it was cold in the archives and my hair stood up on end. It did not stand on end from the temperature however, but the sight before me. Kregg slowly stuck the syringe in the skin and just gave a small dosage of his formula.

Nothing occurred. Sweat dropped from Kregg’s brow despite how cold it was. A single drop landed on the patch of skin. Suddenly, it began to convulse. The outside of the skin bubbled and the sweat glands released what little sweat was left in the skin. The sebaceous glands that produce oil released what little oil was left. It all came out at once and made a thin, liquid membrane on top of the skin. Then it stopped.

Kregg began to furiously whisper in great frustration. I asked him what had happened, if the skin had been alive. Kregg explained that the skin had been alive, yet it believed that a harmful chemical or bacteria was trying to enter the body. It was of a kind the skin had not dealt with before, so it released everything it had to fight it off. Kregg began to shuffle. The main issue in the first trial was that there was not enough skin for cell life to last long enough.

Without hesitation, Kregg filled up the syringe completely. He spun around and bent over the cadaver. I could not see what he was doing until he moved around to the other side of the cadaver. He was injecting the formula in various points throughout the corpse! I meant to speak up, but my cowardice and natural hesitation got the best of me. I could only look on in horror. No precautions had been made, not a single restraint lay on the corpse. We did not know how a large section of skin would react from such a large dosage.

The body began to convulse. Kregg stepped back. I peered closer. It was not the body that convulsed with such violence, but the skin. A horrifying ripping sound began to slowly fill the room. The skin was tearing itself from the cadaver. Kregg could not move. I only saw the back of his head and his frozen body. A loud humming filled the room. It buzzed and rang in my ears. I felt my bones shake. The more it continued, the lower it got. I realized it was not a humming, but the skin moaning. The skin continued to moan until it completely tore itself from the body. It flopped up and fell to the floor, continuing to flail helplessly. Kregg slowly bent down and reached out to pick it back up. The skin latched onto his arm.

Kregg screamed. I could not move. The skin slowly crawled up his body and began to take his form. His screaming became more and more frenzied. I could not stand the sight or sounds before me. I quickly picked up my lantern that lay next to the work table and threw it at Kregg. He stepped towards me, limbs flailing, engulfed in flames. The screaming became a high pitched howl. The thing that was Kregg stepped back and knocked over a crate of old documents. The crate went up in flames and so did the shelf that held it. The banshee-like wail refused to cease and something gave in. My instinct of excitement and survival told me to run. I had no light by which to guide me, but I ran.

I felt myself exit the archives as the warm air from the corridor blew into my face. I fumbled through the dark, hearing cries of hate and pain not too far behind me. I arrived at the stairs to the main level of the library. Quickly, I ascended. I could not waste a single second. Once I reached the top of the stairs, I realized I could not let this creature, this abomination reach the outside world. Despite how I had set it afire, it still came. The cries grew closer as I saw the flickering flames bounce off the stairwell walls. It ascended the corner. I grabbed the nearest large object I could find. It was a chair. I lifted the chair above my head and aimed for the monstrosity. For a brief moment, I made eye contact with the creature. I hoped to see a troubled Kregg, begging for mercy, but all I saw was disgust and a fierce hatred. I threw the chair at the beast and it fell backwards down the stairs.

The flames from the archives caused a section of the library not too far from me to collapse. The building’s destruction was now inevitable. I ran out the doors and into the university courtyard. The flaming building lay behind me; my scientific ambition lay behind me. I swore to write this down, despite how illogical and fearsome it may seem. I swore to document what happened. I planned to take off running into the night. I set a new goal to run, to run from science and the horrors of whatever that flesh became.

The more I live on the road though, the hungrier I get. I stare at my frail, dirty hands and think back to the mess they took part in. I think to how the skin rebelled and fought for its life. It became a new creature of unspeakable terror. I think to how my hands have skin on them as well. My entire body is covered in skin. My entire body is covered in horror.

student example(s):

questions / activities / exercises.

\(^{110}\)Wikihow contributors. "How to Write a Horror Story." Wikihow. 01 June 2019. Web. 22 June 2019. http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Horror-Story. Text available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

\(^{111}\)Discovered on the Anonymous Authors Fandom web site: https://anonymous-authors.fandom.com...Shivering_Skin Their community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.