By: Brandon LAng

“We take refudge in make-believe terrors so the real ones don’t overwhelm us, freezing us in place and making it impossible for us to function in our day-to-day lives. We go into the darkness of a movie theater hoping to dream badly, because the world of our normal lives looks ever so much better when the bad dreams ends. If we keep this in mind, it becomes easier to understand why the good horror movies work and why the hundreds of bad ones just don’t.”

Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Well, it’s that time of year again when talking about your favorite true crime podcast doesn’t immediately cause your family and friends to side-glance each other with looks of concern, and horror fanatics vibrate in excitement when their horror-curious friends ask for movie recommendations. That’s right, it’s the scary month, and that means I get to talk about horror.

This blog post is going to be somewhat different from others because I will not only be talking about horror when it comes to creative writing, but I’m also going to throw in some suggestions for movies, books, video games, etc. Giving you my suggestions on good sources of horror inspiration and something fun to watch, do, or play on Halloween. Let’s start first with creative writing and horror.

Writing Horror

Writing horror, in my opinion, is like dancing on a spiked fence. When done right, it’s mesmerizing. Each step of the plot creates more and more tension for the audience. When done poorly, well, the audience will only talk about the mess that came from the performance. When writing within the horror genre there are a few tips that are worth following to help improve the atmosphere of the story you are trying to write. Here’s 3 of them:

The Hierarchy of Senses

This is a trick that I picked up during my time writing and running horror ttrpgs. The bottom line is, that the reader should view the Horror with touch, smell, hearing, and taste before sight. Describing aspects of the Horror using the other senses that aren’t sight forces the reader’s imagination to work at the mystery of what is haunting the protagonist. You don’t have to use all the senses, since taste is very situational, but sight or seeing the Horror should be the very last sense that is used to describe the Horror.

Using concrete descriptions using touch, hearing, smell, and taste that the reader can attach or relate to is a good way of maintaining the creepy factor regarding the Horror of the story.

the Weird

A part of horror comes from when we encounter something that conflicts with our understanding of reality. We all have rules that help us understand the world or reality that we live in and when these rules are broken it usually really messes with us. The example I always go to is the human-faced dog from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978].

A dog having a human face is definitely not following the rules that a normal person has regarding their understanding of the world. So when people saw this for the first time, the image of this creature became imbedded in their minds. Just looking at the picture creates a “WTF” sensation.

For writing horror, using the weird to create the “WTF” sensation for the reader is something that should be kept in mind when writing. It adds to the creepiness and the mystery of the story that will make the reader want to continue reading in hopes to find some rationality for that moment.

Smart Characters

This one is probably one that you have heard many times, but there is a reason why this advice is repeated so many times. Don’t dumb down your characters to fit the plot, elevate the plot to work with the characters. When writing a horror story you want the reader to enjoy the characters that the story is following. If they don’t, then they won’t want to follow those characters and thus, don’t want to read the story. Have the protagonist be a smart and likable character, someone that the readers will want to cheer. If you write this way, the reader will want to follow the protagonist’s story to see if they survive and not to see how and when they are killed.

Horror Inspirations

Good creatives are inspired by other creatives. With that in mind here are some horror things to inspire you in your writing.

Books/Stories

Movies/TV Shows

Games