It’s also possible to combine subgenres, especially as your story progress.
Terror provokes a feeling of all-pervasive dread, which can either serve as the climax of your story or be sustained throughout. Classic horror harks back to the Gothic (or Southern Gothic) genre, with spooky settings and bone-chilling characters like those of Dracula and Frankenstein. Gross-out horror involves vivid descriptions of spurting blood, hacked-up flesh, and gouged-out organs in order to shock the reader think gore movies of the 70s. Thriller-horror employs psychological fear, often occurring near the beginning of horror stories before very much has happened. To use cinematic examples again, are you going for more Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Silence of the Lambs? The tone and atmosphere of your story will hang upon its subgenre. The right atmosphere for your story depends on what kind of horror you want to write. Image: Universal PicturesĬlick to tweet! 2. Pick a horror story subgenre Societal tensions like those in Get Out can lend a gritty realism to horror. However, societal tensions can also easily be embodied in the pages of a horror story, as in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Just in recent memory, Get Out tackles the idea of underlying racism in modern America, The Babadook examines mental health, and It Follows is about the stigma of casual sex. Societal tensionsĪnother great means of scaring people is to tap into societal tensions and concerns - a tactic especially prevalent in horror movies. In fact, it’s the very uncertainty they arouse that makes them so sinister: what if monsters are really out there, we’ve just never seen them? This fear is one of the most prevalent in horror, but if you decide to write in this vein, your story has to be pretty convincing. We all know that vampires, werewolves, and ghosts aren’t real, but that doesn’t mean they can’t shake us to our core. These stretch beyond the realm of logic and into the realm of the “uncanny,” as Freud called it. As horror writer Karen Woodward says, “The beating undead heart of horror is the knowledge that bad things happen to good people.” Monsters and supernatural entities This is especially true when terror befalls innocent characters apropos of nothing: a killer traps them in their house for no apparent reason, or they’re suddenly mugged by a stranger with a revolver. As a result, they tend to be very effective at frightening readers. 
Darkness, heights, snakes, and spiders - all these are extremely common phobias rooted in instinct. Instinctive fearsįears that have some sort of logical or biological foundation are often the most potent in horror. That said, here are a few elements you can use to seriously scare the pants off your reader. People don’t read horror for easy entertainment they read it to be titillated and terrorized.
The most important part of any horror story is naturally going to be its fear factor. Click to tweet! 1. Start with a fear factor
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