Jusso

I wrote my first short story for my english class (The Man from Sanaa), I have several others that I am working on, but one thing that I have been thinking about is what scares people the most. I want readers to read my stuff and say "Oh my dear god". What scares people the most? How do I find ideas for these horrible things? I know the world is full of terrible things, but the dark corners of the world have all been explored except for the ocean, and I find that kind of cheesy, well atleast some of it that is. What scares me the most is the unknown, I read about Lake Vostok, which is eerily close to where Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness took place, and the mysterious "bloop" which is very close to where the city of "R'yleh" was in his stories. I want to find the kind of horror that will cause insanity, something so terrifying that people will look around their shoulder, but how do I find this?. Would incorporating the ocean be to cheesy? I don't want to write something about a car that is possessed and kills everyone (nice going Stephen King), but im guessing there isnt really much mystery left in the world.

*Sorry if this is in the wrong section*

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"Horus was weak. Horus was a fool. He had the whole galaxy within his grasp and he let it slip away." -Abbadon The Despoiler

jesterscourt

I think it depends most of the time what scares or frightens people.

There are some commonalities. Most people don't want to be alone or trapped in small, dark, or wet environments for long periods of time. Most of us like to eat on a regular basis. People seem to have weird dreams/nightmares about losing teeth, I know for awhile I did, and I woke up and felt in my mouth with my hand just to make sure. Long tortuous or particularly grisly deaths spook most people. So is being stuck in a room with a corpse, or multiple corpses.

I don't want to give away the plot to a book, but let me say that Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, which I recently finished, made me shudder at various parts due to adding fear to rather banal events (meeting someone new, flatulence, etc.)

MZD's House of Leaves was a particularly spooky read for me, the whole meta element of the entire book made you wonder up until the very end what was real, what wasn't and what the heck you were actually holding onto.

I love Lovecraft, and there are many examples of fear of the unknown or a melding of science and terror. Way too many examples to list here, but if you want to start a new thread solely on Mr. HPL, I'll be more than happy to talk about it!

Or were you solely trying to go for the grossout route? I draw a line between horror/suspense and out and out gore for gore's sake. Splatterhouse type stuff isn't really my fare in general, although there is an audience for ready-made wanton violence just add water. Getting disemboweled, Mutilated, Tortured, raped, basically Hostel in a story format... Yeah, icky stuff seemingly for the sake of being shocking. Not that a dash of this here and there can't really spice up a story, I personally can't justify writing a story SOLELY for the purpose of making people want to wretch (Listen to an audio of "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk.)

Either way, this is the place to bounce ideas off, that's what we are here for as a community. And please take no offense to anything I wrote above, that's just my commentary for what I believe you are asking, please correct me if I'm wrong

Jusso

Thanks, that is a lot of help

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"Horus was weak. Horus was a fool. He had the whole galaxy within his grasp and he let it slip away." -Abbadon The Despoiler

WriterDude

What scares me the most? Good question. Feeling helpless would be high on the list. (above death, even). Imagine if you knew someone close to you was going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it. Or perhaps you are diving deep underwater and run into a problem. Maybe you are attacked by a shark or something, or you get stuck. It is too far to the surface to swim up without oxygen, and there isn't anyone around to help you. What will you do? What can you do? You could be dying, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I'm not afraid of the death part, but the feeling of helpness creeps me out.

Lovecraft is also a great example how to scare people. Some of his stories are a bit dull (Re-animator? The Music of Eric Zann?, but others again are masterpieces like Call of Cthulhu, The Thing On The Doorstep, Shadow Over Innsmouth etc are really great. I like the scene in Shadow... where the main character are in an old hotel at the middle of the night and hear footsteps coming towards his room. What can he do in such a situation, if whoever is coming is trying to hurt him? And if not, why show up late at night anyway?

Also, if you are into video games, Project Zero (Fatal Frame in the US) is a great example. One of my favourite scenes is early on when the main character is standing on the second floor and hear someone coming up the stairs. She looks towards the stairs, but can't see anyone... She slowly raise her camera (don't ask) and looking through it, she sees a ghost. The ghost itself isn't so scary, but there's just something about footsteps without a body and things like that. It doesn't make sense, yet the footsteps are right there, coming towards you. If you can't trust your senses, what can you trust? Something similar happens in Silent Hill all the time. When you enter a room, the camera spins around to ground level, looking up at the main character in a dramatic angle. At the same time, you hear "something" in the room with you. Or in the third SH game, the main character is entering a basement and sees an empty wheelchair lying on it's side. One of the wheels are spinning, like it tilted recently. The problem is when she gets close, the wheel suddenly stop spinning for no reason. That and the camera angle makes it really creepy. I'm not much interested in "jump from the shadows and go BOO!", but prefer slowly building up tension like this. To scare me, it has be to be realistic all the way, but with a sense of supernatural things as well like ghosts, the wheel stopping spinning and so on. Even the movie Evil Dead something similar. When they came to the cabin in the beginning, a gate was rythmically banging on the wall in the wind. The problem is as soon as they touched the door, the gate just stopped swinging. That scene was a bit creepy, as you knew it couldn't be a good thing. Something felt very wrong, just from a small detail like that.

Guess my best advice is keep it real and don't go over the top, but don't be afraid to add supernatural things. We all love a good mystery. What you could do is have supernatural things like this, but at the same have the characters try to find explanations how it could be explained. This way it could be supernatural, and it could be explained. The reader won't know until the end, and sometimes not even then. Make the reader think.

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WriterDude

Oh, as for the Project Zero and Silent Hill 3 examples, what are you supposed to do in a situation like that? Somethis is terrible wrong, but you can't really do anyhing about it. You are helpless.

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geminye

I think that what you write about is not always as important as how you write about it. Yes, S. King does sometimes write about dull horror antagonists, but he has the ability to make those normal situations very frightening. It takes more skill to make something which is seemingly normal become frightening. Just coming up with something scary doesn't make it so. If you lack the ability to make the reader visualize it the way you see it in your head, then it will come across as trite.
Try taking some golden oldies (were-wolves, zomibies, ect.) and try to put a new spin on them to flex your horror muscles.
I equate it like this: imagine a zombie movie. If you just have a bunch of guys walking slow and eathing people with very little attention to camera angles, cinematography, ect. then it will be cheesy. If approach it with more of an artistic eye and a new angle on the genre, you will have a much richer experience.

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Delvok

I'm glad someone brought up the Silent Hill stories. Look at the first three games and note the large and small things that give people shivers and then terrify them.

For example, in Silent Hill 1 you walk into a bathroom and can hear a child crying. Yet, when you get to the stalls the crying dissapears and you see that they are all empty. Yet, right when you are about to leave the room again you can hear the cry again.

Another example, from the games, is the entire hospital/mental hospital settings in the game. If you have ever played, or will, you will notice that these are the scariest settings in habitat. You also find diary entries (I forget exactly in which games) of insane inmates or carvings on the walls.

Also, consider the radio used in all those three games. When you are walking around (and monsters are near) the radio makes this terrible wretching noise that scares you more than the actual monsters do; because its so unnatural and demonic.

So, in essence, I believe helplessness, hopelessness, and the unknown are necessary to make something terrifying.

Consider also that the aftermath of something can be more terrifying than the actual event.

Imagine someone coming across, alone, in an abandoned eerie room, scratches on a wall saying "Save me" still possessing dried blood inside them. That may be more terrifying, just coming across it and allowing the reader (or yourself) to imagine what had happened rather than actual showing how it got there.

Anyway, just thought I'd add in my two cents.

WriterDude

As for Silent Hill, I loved the beginning in the first two games a lot. The first starts with a guy and his daughter driving towards an old town called Silent Hill. A cop on a motorcycle drives past (Cybil, from the movie) and vanish in the distance. A while later, the father and his daughter see the exact same motorcycle in a ditch, obviously crashed. But why? And where is the body? A while later the car crashes, and when the guy wakes up, he finds his daughter gone. In lack of something better to do, he walks to the old town and search for her. He sees her in the distance, and although she has to hear him calling her (she's not that far away), she just walks away into town. He chases her, but she just runs away. Now why would she do something like that? Even worse, the search ends in an alley, where he finds a few sheets of paper - his daughter's drawings. A few dog-like monsters appears and attacks, and he is presumed killed... only to be woken up by the very same cop in a small café. Add some insane camera angles during the alley scene (in a good, scary way) and a lot of fog, and that's one hell of a scary opening. And it only got better as we played. (and the best part? There's an alternative ending with a very natural explanation of everything).

Silent Hill 2 kinda had an even better opening, although smaller. A guy receives a letter in the mail from his wife, and she tells him to meet her in their special place in Silent Hill for their anniversary. Problem is said wife died three years earlier...? Even if I hadn't played the first a lot beforehand, that alone would have made me buy the game. And trust me, the story even gets better after that.

Then there's the third one where a young, teenage girl walks around in Silent Hill, fighting the usual monsters and that. A brilliant game on it's own, but then we got the worst line we could ever have gotten (in a good way): "They look like monsters to you?" Damn, that creeped me out. Just like that, we started thinking about every single monster we had ever killed so far. What if they were all human? It changed everything and is a major highlight of the series.

But even worse is System Shock 2. It sounds cheesy with an AI having taken over an entire space station and killed the humans "for their own good". You are supposed to stop the AI, but during the game you start to feel sympathy for the AI, Shodan. She believed the humans too inexperienced to run the station and could eventually end up destroying it (even if they didn't know it at the time), so she killed them all for their own good. Better to die quickly now and let the space station live than kill themselves slowly over time and end up destroying everything. This raised a great question. Is the AI really evil, when she did what she thought was right? She talk to you through the whole game as well, asking questions like "Why are you here?" and so on. This actually got me thinking. What am I doing here? It can seriously mess with your mind and is one of the best horror games of all time, even if it's about an AI taking over a space station. It proves it's not the story that matters, but how you tell it.

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Azram

I just gotta say, brilliant thread.

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geminye

Delvok is absolutely right. Sometimes seeing the aftermath, or the build up can be more frightening. I don't think that it is possible to write something that would live up to seeing the real thing. H.P. Lovecraft knew this. He avoided overly describing the creatures in his stories. Doing so is the equivalent of bringing the monster into the daylight, where i loses some of its frightening qualities. It is truly the unknown that is most fearsome.

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Suffer the little children...

lisajane

I don't think it's necessarily things like ghosts or murderers or monsters or dead bodies that can horrify someone. That's the sort of horrific things that are stereotypical.

Sometimes it can be the most mundane object or person that can terrify people, and how you write about that object can scare your reader.

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WriterDude

I love horror movies and have seen hundreds of them over the years, and one really stands out from the crowd. Alien, the very first time I saw it as I didn't know Alien at all. Logically, being the first movie.

What we had wasn't original or anything, but very well done. There's a small crew of ordinary people, a spaceship with very tight, claustrophobic corridors and low lights, and of course some sort of monster that killed the crew one by one. We never quite knew what they were up against, so we imagined it to be much worse than what it really was (a guy in a rubber suit). It was perfect. Like that scene where the guy is crawling through the small airshaft or whatever it was with a motion detector. The monster was coming closer and closer and closer and closer and... was suddenly supposed to be right there, but he couldn't see it? The sequel had a similar moment with the "I'm telling, there's something moving, and it ain't us!". Aliens is brilliant as well, but was made like a warmovie instead of horror movie. Logically, as we already knew what the monster looked like. With that part gone, they just couldn't remake the first one and hope to make it just as good. Alien3, on the other hand... God, no. Not really terrible, just nowhere near the first two.

Funnily, Predator follows the Alien part almost side by side, with marines instead of ordinary people, a jungle instead of spaceship and Predator instead of Alien. They still don't know what they are up against ("She says the jungle came alive!"), but it's more pure action than horror. A great movie, but even if it's so identical to Alien, it's a totally different movie. Again it means it's not the story that matters, but how you write it.

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Jeff Colburn

To find things that are universally scary you need to look back into human prehistory, or nature in general. What scared our forbearers?

* Things that go bump in the night. 90% of the information we gather about the world around us is through sight. Take sight away when dealing with a threat and you get fear.

* Being pursued by a predator. Man is use to being on top of the food chain, so a roll reversal can be scary.

* Being eaten alive and dying slowly from suffocation or digestion.

* A slow painful death from injury, torture or something else.

* Loss of control. If we can control a situation it may be scary, but nothing like that same situation where we have no control of it or the outcome.

Have Fun,
Jeff

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WriterDude

Alien combines the first two and the last of your points. It has a thing that goes bump into the night, but we don't actually see it until the end. This thing is a predator and apparently can't be killed On top of that, the crew used to run the spaceship, but now the spaceship has become a prison.

And again, Predator follows pretty much the same story as Alien, but turns out completely different. It's not what you write that's scary, but how you write it.

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Erik Buchanan

I'm a big fan of watching people you love get slowly tortured to death as a reason to go insane. Also, check out the things that happen to people in war (some horrific examples coming out of Iraq right now).

Basically, you want something to happen to the person that will make them desperately want to retreat back into their own mind and stay there.

It's different for each person, but one is just right for you.

(OK, this post came off as a bit psycho. Still, great topic!)

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