/lit/ - Literature★

You could try asking your readers to point out stories they find scary, and study the techniques used in them. What people find terrifying is rather individual.

Still, horror is overrated, and depends on the audiences' willingness to be spooked anyway. I would concentrate on making interesting stories with disturbing themes instead of seeking to emulate the cheap tricks of typical ghost stories.

Barely related, I recently read a bunch of recent short stories in my own language influenced by Lovecraft (not in the lol cthulhu sense, but imitating the style of the narrative and so on). They were more "scary" than Lovecraft's work, but they were also boring as hell. Illogical pointless stories that took the "muh fear of the unknown" too much to heart. Lovecraft concentrated on good stories first, and just happened to like macabre and terrifying things. Common criticism of Lovecraft is that he explained too much. For the impact of the horror of many of his works it's true, but those explanations are crucial for the stories to make sense. I'd take an interesting, if clumsily scary, weird story any day over a story with more well crafted tension but without anything memorable in its premise.

I have to wonder that if you can't think of something that spooks yourself even if presented poorly, why do you want to write horror stories?

It's a pithy cliche about horror, but it bears repeating because, like stereotypes, cliches are often true.

Don't show the monster. Fear of the unknown is more terrifying.

You're probably not scared by your own writing because you're writing it. As for other people, are they the target audience? Targeting a broad audience will only get you the disinterested masses.

The best horror stories are very grounded, built upon the mundane, with something odd about them that festers over time. If you create something completely ordinary but slightly off-tilt, you'll end up with something more unnerving than describing the most horrifying monster ever that becomes comical once you've actually seen the fucking thing.

>>13612

That's some poor advice. Why would the supposed axiom in horror movie making have universal validity in literature? By the virtue of the medium's nature even the most in-detail descriptions in text are going to completely up to the reader's imagination. It's up to the writer to actually describe something scary, if the story hangs on the scaryness of the monsters, which isn't very high hanging fruit anyhow. And without visual cues, the reader's imagination can go completely opposite direction and imagine something less scary than intended. This also applies for the holy grail of horror, implications; if the reader has very little to work with, they aren't going to give a shit that something scary might be going on. Actually describing something disturbing can't be explained away or missed like implied horror.

As for an anecdote, I just read a story that tried to make some man-lizard things scary by not properly describing them and I could imagine them as goofy monitor lizards running on their hindlegs.

>>13611

It's not that I can't think of anything, it's just that whatever I come up with, though it fits into the creepy category, it doesn't instill any kind of genuine fear. Let me show you an example of what I am speaking of:

>The stars are dead. In this cursed city where I dwell, my skin rotting away in the desert night, all that I see is a dark, brackish yellow. Staring up in the sky, I tilt my head in wonder. What could be hiding underneath the veil of the city lights? What is underneath that fathomless haze? It is much like an ocean, that sky, for in spite of its lack of blue, it is dark and unknown in its yellow opacity. It was then that I knew. I was staring into the pupil of the evil eye.

>The eye of the Whore of Babylon.

See? Whenever I write, I use far too much purple prose, and yet it never works, because I never feel scarfed. I'm not trying to look for the cheap thrill of a B-List gore slasher flick, no, I want to draw into a deep, primal fear that will last in my nightmares until my dying days. Yet, it seems that I will never reach that point. Perhaps you are right.

>>13616

I thank you for the advice. I will certainly look up that book.

>>13635

*book* not back. Autocorrect a shit.

>>13635

*their* not they're.

I can't type today ;__;

Part of the reason why horror is so irritating to write is that horror is a very subjective thing. That sounds really obvious, but it's not just personal, it's also cultural. That's why Japanese horror stories seem radically different from Western ones. The only consistent pattern I've noticed is that the best horror stories are deeply linked to the common cultural understanding of the afterlife, and this is often so subtle that even the author doesn't understand it.

I'll give you an example: one of the more popular computer games to come out in the horror genre is called Tattle Tail. At its face it's a very cut-and-dry game, but the horror lies in what it implies: You are forced to carry around and pamper, practically worship this doll that does nothing to benefit you and constantly gives you away to a lurking horror which is threatening you with a punishment that goes so far beyond what you deserve as to be comical. If you don't do an absolutely perfect job at this game, including doing some shit you had no way of knowing you had to do, even if you make it to the end you still lose.

That sounds really boring when I just describe it like that, but it's so close to a Western (especially Christian) understanding of the afterlife that it gets into your skin when you start to think about it. Suddenly you realize not only were you raised to believe such a horrible thing, but you're surrounded by people who would happily sell you out for your eternal punishment. People you love, even people who love you, are all slaves to this exact twisted logic.

A lot of people tell you that horror is in what you don't know, and that's partially true. A lot of other people will tell you that horror is all about the dark potential inherent in all humans, and that's also true. However, if you want HORROR, you need to find a way to open your audiences' eyes to the fact that they are surrounded, every day, in real life, by people who do terrible, unforgivable, indescribable things, and think it's perfectly normal. Not only is it about the dark potential within us all, it's about that moment, like in a nightmare, when you realize you're the only person who can see the terror, and no one can help you confront it.

But of course since by its very nature horror is so dependent on culture, time period, and individual experience, it's really hard to catch that lightning in a bottle, which is why you see lesser authors trying to get it to strike twice. Horror's a bitch to bring out in people; sorry, but shit that's easy to repress doesn't sell.

>>13610 (OP)

Atmosphere and suspense, do not be pornographic.