What should a horror story have

In the same sense that a long, panned shot can slowly build tension, stretched, descriptive sentences are a good way to create a sense of slowly developing dread. When you follow that with short sentences, the effect is visceral. You can even change the way your reader breathes while reading. If there is a particular scene that you want to use as a potent dose of fear, try rewriting it with pacing that evolves from slow to staccato. Sometimes our greatest fears can be entirely in our imagination.

Our minds have an amazing ability to play tricks on us and cause us to imagine multiple possibilities of danger that might not even be present. The primal fear of enclosed spaces is common to the human condition. It triggers a basic evolutionary impulse to escape and makes breathing shallower. It makes the heart rate increase. Haunted house stories use this technique often, as does the slasher genre. Think of the feeling that results as victims frantically hide in closets to escape death. Stephen King understood this and included children in several of his stories.

Many of our most basic fears stem from experiences we had when we were children. 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.

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. 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. 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. Make the stakes for the character clear and extreme. If your reader doesn't know what is at stake for the character in the conflict, they cannot fear loss. And a good horror story is all about creating extreme emotions like fear or anxiety in the reader through creating extreme emotions in the characters.

Fear is built off of understanding the consequences of an action for a character or the risk of their actions. So if your character decides to confront a clown in the attic or two men in a car, the reader will need to be aware of what the character could lose as a result of this decision.

The stakes of the character in the story are very high and very clear to the reader. So, when Howard does finally confront the moving finger, the reader is terrified of how the outcome is going to create a loss for Howard. Part 4. 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.

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. 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. Add a twist ending. While you want to create a satisfying ending for the reader, you also do not want to make it so closed and settled that the reader walks away without a lingering feeling of uncertainty.

You could have the character experience a moment of realization about the conflict or about how to solve the conflict. The revelation should be the result of a build-up of details in the scene or story and should not be jarring or feel random to the reader. This ending leaves the reader wondering what the officer sees in the toilet, and if the finger was real or a figment of Howard's imagination.

In this way, it is open-ended without being too surprising or confusing for the reader. Avoid cliches. Like any genre, horror has its own set of tropes and cliches that writers should avoid if they want to create a unique, engaging horror story. 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.

Part 5. Analyze your use of language. Go through the first draft of your story and look at sentences where you have duplicated adjectives, nouns or verbs. Be sure to make your language use and word choice fit the voice of your character. A teenage girl will likely use different words or phrases than a middle-aged man. Creating a vocabulary for your character that fits their personality and perspective will only add to their believability as a character.

Read your story out loud. You can do this to a mirror or to a group of people you trust. Horror stories began as an oral tradition of spooking someone around a campfire, so reading your story out loud will help you determine if the pace of the story is building steadily and gradually, if there is enough shock, paranoia, or dread, and if your characters make all the wrong decisions until they are forced to confront the source of their conflict.

If your story is dialogue heavy, reading it out loud will also help you determine if the dialogue sounds believable and natural. Did you know you can get expert answers for this article? Unlock expert answers by supporting wikiHow. Christopher Taylor, PhD. Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer.

Not Helpful 5 Helpful Have plot twists everywhere! And then make that plot twist false, obliging the reader to want to know the real truth. Or, you could reveal the guilty one at the beginning, so that reader is like "I can't wait for him to die! Or, you can even foreshadow it little by little and when it's obvious, change it to something that will cancel out the hints to the "truth".

Not Helpful 21 Helpful Describe the spirit's intention, its story, how it died, its specific traits and how it reaches the protagonist. Then discuss the ways in which it attacks the protagonist and makes life difficult at first, then scary for the protagonist. Take the scariness up a notch each time, until the protagonist is ready to be scared to death or needs to run away perhaps only to have the spirit pursue it.

Not Helpful 18 Helpful You can make a plot twist shock by giving closure to the story yet still adding a question that will linger in the reader's mind. Twists can include a sudden realization, discovery, or final scare. Not Helpful 20 Helpful Depends on what the horror is. A single word might be enough. For example, if it's about a spirit that chokes people, "Strangle" or "Gasp," might work. Not Helpful 25 Helpful Give the character with the powers an interesting backstory, show how they handle their powers, and don't overpower them to the extent that they become comical.

Not Helpful 19 Helpful Editor Tip: Let the audience experience the power of the monster while empathizing with the victims. We relate to both the victim and the villain. The writers of Evil Dead II chose not to do this, and they lost the respect of a large number of Horror viewers who blew the movie off as parody. A character expresses their belief that the monster is unbeatable. In Evil Dead II, for instance, the narrator begins the story with this speech.

Alternatively, the unbeatable nature of the monster may be revealed to the audience without a speech but this approach may rob the writer of the opportunity to increase characterization for supporting character or the monster itself. He is expected to fight the monster alone, again.

The monster may return but where and when is left unknown. In Evil Dead II , the knights inform Ash they believe he is there to save them from the monster lurking in his new world. A single traditionally non-heroic protagonist is thrown out of stasis and is forced to save their own life. The body count varies by publishing house. In the end, the protagonist is the final remaining victim a convention. The characters killed can be agents of the monster the protagonist kills them or the allies of the protagonist monster kills them.

Evil Dead II incorporates both. They may or may not stay alive. In the first Evil Dead movie, the protagonist is murdered in the final scene. There are readers for that type of work, but less so than those with protagonists that succeed in their journey to stay alive.

There must be two endings. But the incantation opens a vortex that transports Ash to another world in which he is expected to, again, eradicate the monster. The Force of Evil is rational and explainable; psychopaths, Frankenstein monsters, aliens, etc.

Examples of this genre are Alien , Frankenstein, and Get Out. The Force of Evil is from the spirit world and cannot be explained by conventional rational thought. The monster is a spirit or undead being that feeds on the living; vampires, zombies, etc. The monster could be possessed by a devil or just plain crazy.

We never really know. Examples of this subgenre are Friday the Thirteenth , Saw, and Carrie. Horror requires the leanest scene count and the most efficient scene turns within all the genres…but you must strike a balance somewhere between writing like Hemingway and Tolstoy. Write the descriptions of setting, emotions, and thoughts as sparse as possible in action scenes.

In poorly crafted Horror stories, sensational violence substitutes for imagination. Walk the line between the explicit and suggestive. The best writers collaborate with the minds of their readers true in every genre. Beneath the plot is the subtextual pacing; tension arising from dread and revulsion.

Dread is a grim certainty that bad things are coming. Revulsion is seeing how bad things unfold. A good Horror story cycles from dread to revulsion to dread to revulsion. Because Horror is personal, you gotta be stirred by your own writing.

Mine your fears for the material. Truth resonates with readers. Think; the dentist, dolls, clowns, antiques. If the story theme is old, the payoff must be fresh and new. This is especially true in Horror, where it can be tough to innovate. Allow your raw ideas and bold thinking to take your writing where other writers are afraid to go.

You must convey fear rather than tell your reader something is scary. Your primary goal is to entertain. In order to do so, a Horror writer sometimes has to dig the grave deeper than any writer before them and write some really psychologically twisted stories.

Make us confront the truth that bad things happen to good people. Read thoroughly in the Horror Genre and compare your work to the masterworks and the guidelines here. The best way to move toward innovation is knowing what others have already done. Need some extra help completing your manuscript?

Grab a spot on my calendar for a free half-hour consultation so we can determine how I can best help you meet your story goals. Your email address will not be published. But how? So what does it take to create a Horror story? What Exactly is a Horror Story? Are we there yet? What is the Core Emotion? In Horror, the core emotion is fear. Or, more specifically, terror. The controlling idea of your Horror story will be: Positive prescriptive tale : Life is preserved when the protagonist overpowers or outwits the monster.

Editor Tip: Use this formula to develop your controlling idea: Human Value prevails when x occurs. How is a Horror Story Structured? Introduce supporting characters as rich and interesting. Ending Payoff of the Horror Genre Here, you will include your climax the resurrection, the protagonist fights the monster and the resolution of the global story.

Eternal vigilance is the price of peace.