H is for Horror

[snowynight]

So you want to scare your readers. To target their primal fear and make them stay awake all the night. To turn the normality into nightmare fuel. To see if the characters can handle tragedy and fear to come out all right. Stay tuned to this post... or we won't know what'd happen to you.

Choices, choices
-It's hard to avoid writing horror tropes when you're writing... horror. There're quite a lot of sub-genres covered under horror, cosmic horror, psychological horror, splatter horror... But more importantly, what kind of fear do you want to target? Do you want to hit people how insignificant they are in the universe? Do you you want to remind them that Nature's far from kind? Do you you want to show how easy it's for ourselves to be corrupted and consumed with madness? Want to strike them how vulnerable their bodies are or force them to open their eyes to the unnatural?

-Who are your horror survivors/victims? Are they armed to the teeth, genre savvy enough to stick close to their buddies? Are they over curious that they stumble onto things they are not mean to know about? Are they ordinary people caught in things bigger than their own? There's usually an anti-sex moral in modern horror but you always can subvert it.

-Where is your horror story set? The Gothic castle in ruin, the gloomy forest that sunlight never shines through, the uncanny town you're snowed in... They all have in common is that they are alien, exotic, and dislocate the characters, leaving them to struggle. Or it may be your safe sweet home. Then one day you wake up and see your name written in blood on the the wall... The Other has invaded your home.

-Horror is a spice that goes good with other genre. Any standard fantasy elements can be turned horrifying. A dragon is a standard. But what about a skeleton dragon with poisonous smell, with an army of mice that spread plaques? You can always set your horror story on the dark side of the Moon, set it in Imperial Rome, and the post-apocalypse fic that is now a staple in the genre.

Pitfalls:
A horror story is after all a story. Cardboard characters who hold idiot ball in plots are easy to annoy your readers. Overused cliche will break the atmosphere fast and beware of unfortunate implication in choosing your victims.

So my characters are big damn action heroes. How do I horrify them?
-Do your heroes have people they love? Do they have things close to themselves? They may be invincible, but what they care aren't. No, don't kill them. There're a lot of fate worse than death.

-Or it's a wonderful chance to explore how hardened your heroes are.
How isolated they're from the society because they can no longer be touched by a cry of baby. How much threat they can pose as can they go by a complex code of morality when you no longer feel guilt and fear?

-How much will your characters be accountable for their actions? Yeah, you know he's a dark mage, but the police will go after you if you kill him. The dark mage may have people who love him too. How do you deal?

Fic rec:
The Probability of Combined Events by jazzypom (Marvel comics, gen, PG) Steve finds himself transported to another dimension, where order rules at the behest of Tony Stark. Before Steve can go back to his own world however, he has to deal with this one. Wonderfully disturbing atmosphere. Dystopia done right

Between 'Outerscope' and the Sleestaks (Candle Cove, gen, PG)
You have to admit, some of those special effects were so scary-looking that you can understand why adults describe a great fondness for the shows of their childhood mixed with an overwhelming feeling of terror. In between discussions of the creepy puppets from "Outerscope" and the Sleestaks, "Candle Cove" comes up again and again.

Reference:
GURPS Horror 4th Edition.

Question: Share your experience with writing or reading horror. What do you think is something done right or wrong?

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I like to Whedonize things -- take a common, scary life situation and make it worse with speculative aspects.

Re: Well...

[snowynight]

This sounds interesting. Would you share some examples?

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Start with Joss Whedon as a background example:
Boyfriend acts like jerk after having sex with girlfriend --> boyfriend loses soul and becomes a psychotic murdering demon after having sex with girlfriend.

From my own work:
"A One-Way Trip" is dark science fiction in which someone uses a time-machine to rip enemy vessels into the distant future. When I wrote it, I was thinking of the soldiers who have dropped atomic bombs on cities. Only this is so much worse, because you're kind of bombing yourself, but YOU don't die. Everyone and everything else outside the nimbus of effect dies. And then you're stuck living with that.

"Within the Wolf's Jaws" is dark science fiction that pits a colony's dreams against another species' survival. You just want to find a nice place to settle down, but it all goes to hell and the people there don't want you. But instead of being a colonial argument within one species, one planet, the scope is a lot wider.

A Conflagration of Dragons is fantasy about what would happen if there wasn't just one dragon attack, but a whole bunch of them, devastating a civilization. I read this essay about the economic impact of Smaug and thought, wow, that's like what rich people are doing when they hog the wealth to the point nobody else can keep the lights on. So what if there were like 400 dragons, the way we have 400 uber-rich people? Watch the world burn.

"A Stranger Message" is fantasy dealing with the physical manifestation of mixed heritage that was previously unknown. It's hard enough realizing that your family tree has some unexpected fruit, some of it rotten. When that's written across your body in blood and feathers, and history starts talking to you, the result is much creepier. And "Picking and Pecking" is even darker, about Israel and Palestine, but that one hasn't sold yet.

"It Comes First and Follows After" is surburban fantasy about winter night. That's all. Cold, dark, hungry night. Personified. This is one of the pieces where people have told me they had to sleep with the light on after reading.

Re: Well...

[snowynight]

They all sound fascinating. Thanks.

[elspethdixon]

Four of my favorite examples of horror from fiction are:

1. The original (show, not movie) Reavers from Firefly. The movie ruined it by making it an artificially induced virus thing and turning them from existantial horror to basically another version of fast zombies, but the concept as originally presented, that the blackness of space causes a sort of contagious insanity that can be passed along just by surviving a Reaver attack, is incredibly effective. The idea that there is something out there so horrible that just witnessing it will turn you into it >>>> fast zombie virus.

2. The terata from C. S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. The heroes stumble upon a group of children living in a magic utopia in the wilderness, apparently in perfect harmony and health, worshiping a magical tree-thing that protects them. They then discover that the tree-thing is parasitically feeding off its victims' worship and that both the youth and the health are an illusion. The terata aren't actually eternally children or eternally healthy - the tree-thing has simply made them and everyone who enters its spear of influence perceive them that way, while in reality they're all starving, aging, and dying of untreated illnesses and festering neglected wounds that they don't even know are there (because the illusion of perfection means they never realize they exist and so never tend to them).

3. The original 70s version of The Wicker Man. Because you know, watching it, that the crops will keep on failing even after they sacrifice a human, because it's not actually going to work. And the only sacrifice bigger than the stranger they lured to their village to kill is Lord Summersisle. And he knows it, too. And also because the animal masks are just really freaking creepy.

4. The Hinshelman story in American Gods. A small town is idealic and peaceful, except for a single teenager or adolescent who disappears every winter. The hero eventually discovers that one child or youth every year is killed by the town's car salesman and thrown into the lake. Then he discovers, buried at the botom of the lake under the years worth of bodies, an ancient box containing the corpse of a child. The child was sacrified by the ancient pagan Northern European tribe that some of the townspeople are descended from, in order to make themselves their own personal god to worship for good fortune. And it gave them good fortune, as long as they "fed" it with a similar sacrifice every year. Eventually, they completely forgot that the child/god-thing had ever existed and just remembered that the box brought luck, and their descendants took it with them when they immigrated to the US and buried it in the lake. By then, though, the child/god-thing had figured out how to "feed" itself. (And Hinshelman, the amiable old car salesman, is of course actually the child-thing). Again, like the terata, it's the combination of childhood and innocence with something horrific hidden underneath, but in this case the fact that the child/god-thing's own people have completely forgotten it and that they created it to begin with by horribly killing it makes it worse. And the fact that the corpses are all frozen under the lake ice also makes it worse somehow.

And example of something that could have been super effective psychological horror but that instead is just a bad movie barely redeemed by the presnce of Ron Perlman is Season of the Witch. The premise is that everyone believes a witch/demon has caused the plague to come to the countryside, and that she must be killed or cast out to get rid of it. Where the movie fails, IMO, is by making this literally true and having the woman accused of being the witch actually turn into an evil demon that the heroes have to fight in badly CGI-ed action sequences. The idea of the movie, where the heroes return from the Holy Land to fund themselve in the middle of a depopulated Europe ravaged by the Black Death is incredibly effective horror - both small farmsteads and entire towns are abandoned and filled with corpses, and they don't know what's happened or why, and then they're tasked with dragging this woman accused of witchcraft to a monestary to be used in a exorcism to stop the plague, and they don't know if it will really work, or if this is just some poor madwoman who's totally innocent. And both the claustrophobic atmosphere of fear and paranoia caused by "everyone everywhere is dying and we don't know why, let's find a scapegoat!" and the uncertainty of "is this all witch-hunting hysteria with an innocent woman desperately trying to talk her captors out of killing her or is there actually something supernatural going on here" as the witch reveals flashes of malevolence and tries to manipulate her guards is much scarier than "a CGI batwinged monster rips out from inside a girl's body and eats people and then they cut its head off, the end."

[elspethdixon]

And for another super-effective example of horror: Fritz Leiber's short story "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes."

H.P. Lovecraft's also written some good horror, but I personally actually find his uncanny-valley skirting stuff about things that used to be human but aren't anymore or aren't human but are becoming like us scarier than his cosmic horror cthulhu mythos stuff. "The Lurking Fear" and "The Rats in the Walls" and "Pickman's Model" are all a lot more frightening to me than "The Call of Cthulhu." Also especially horrifying in "The Rats in the Walls" is the part where the narator's black cat is named "[horrible racial slur]". I reccommend copying the story into MS word and doing a search-replace with something like "Mr. Fluffy" before reading it, because otherwise your brain comes to a screeching horrified halt everytime the narrator says, "My cat, [horrible racial slur]" and you never get a chance to be horrified by the rats and their "cattle.".

[snowynight]

Thank you for sharing!

[elspethdixon]

You're welcome? (IDK, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it, but it really did scare me to "unable to fall asleep because I could hear noises in the house that were totally the rats coming to get me levels)