I've been toying with an idea for a horror story for some months now. I can't quite articulate it, but Horror feels harder to write than other genres I've tackled before. While the world building is coming along nicely, I've been increasingly preoccupied with questions like the difference between horror and terror; how to effectively maintain these in a long-term format like a serialization; and in the specific case of a post-apocalyptic setting, what works and what doesn't? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Yeah—what is it... horror is of the mind, and terror is of the flesh I think? I once put together a list of links to essays on horror writing by some writers known for it. Let me see if I can dig that up, it might prove helpful. Here: Notes on Writing Weird Fiction by H. P. Lovecraft Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft Learning to Write Horror From Edgar Allan Poe The ‘Uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud Click "Show More Pages" at the bottom to see parts II and III. How to Write a Horror Story: 7 Tips for Writing Horror @ Reedsy What Stephen King Can Teach You About Writing Great Horror
Oh sorry, I answered very generically, rather than responding your specific questions. Plus my list applies only to classic horror for the most part, rather than modern. Are you talking about serialization of short stories or novels? I think certain kinds of horror lends itself better to a short format, and would be too thin for a novel.
Awesome! I've only read the Lovecraft ones before, but that was a long time ago. I'll make sure to make some notes out of these. Currently researching how to make a long Horror story. I think The Walking Dead is a great example of this. I just can't put my finger on how it is that they achieve it. A rewatch might be in order.
I think it's very difficult to get horror right. That's why so many "horror" books, even the otherwise well written ones, aren't very scary, or if they are, it's only in a spot or two. I think a horror novel needs several things (probably more than I'm going to name here, but it's a start.) You need atmosphere and a creepy mood, some element to the narration or the environment or a character that keeps people at least a little uneasy. You need real peril, deadly stakes that keep the reader genuinely afraid for the characters, as well as characters who are legitimately and believably scared themselves. I think you also need vivid descriptions. More so than other genre, horror depends on immersion. You want the settings to come to life. Readers should experience the darkness and the chill in the air. You want the monster (be it human, ghost or creature) to form a strong image in the reader's mind. I will never get the razor-teeth scene from It out of my head. In fairness, I've never written a real horror novel. I've read a ton of them, though, and I've written shorts that I'm told were chilling. My WIP, Curios, has it's moments, too, for sure, but I don't think you'd call the whole thing horror exactly. I do have most of one outlined and slated for my next project, though. I'm hoping I can manage to translate what I've captured in shorts into a full length novel. We'll see, I guess.
Wow, that's good stuff @Rzero! I've never tried to write any horror, aside from maybe some stuff when I was a kid. I do like to read some calssic horror, and Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, though often his stories are incredible early on, often right through the middle, and then fail miserably at the end. I find he's really good with writing characters, taking you deep into their psychology and their fears, but if he includes anything supernatural (as he so often does) that fails in the end. And maybe whe he tries to bring everything together at the finale all his great atmosphere and deep psychology and everything just fall away for some reason that I haven't really analyzed. Spoilers ahead for The Shining and Mulholland Drive— Personally my favorite kind of horror, and the only kind that I find frightening at all since I hit adulthood, is psychological. Where the horror wells up inside the main character from the unconscious. As examples, my favorite horror films are The Shining and Mulholland Drive. Both extremely dreamlike (and done in ways that avoid all the simple dream tropes we usually see in lesser fare), and as things progress we gradually or abruptly discover the character we've been following, who we thought was innocent and decent, is or is becoming something horrifying. Or was all along, as in Mulholland, but had woven a false narrative for herself to maintian a belief that she's not the bad person. Most of the movie is that false narrative, with clues inserted that such is the case (like everything bing a little too nice and sweet, and the main character turning out to be an amazing actress with no training), and the end is where that false narrative falls away, revealing the nasty truth that she's unable to face. But I still love to read a lot of classic horror by the likes of Lovercraft, Algernon Blackwood, Poe, and the usual suspects.
I think in order to help with this we'd need to know a few things. And of course, answer as vaguely as you feel you need to, we don't need absolute. specifics. What kind of horror are you working with? Is it supernatural, is it of the flesh, like the Saw movies (torture porn as it's called), or psychological? Something else? Offhand I can't think of any more but I'm sure there are some. Can you be a little more specific about what kind of post apocalypse you're talking about? Nuclear devastation as in Mad Max? Or something else? More helpful I suppose—what level of technology remains if any, or are people reduced to scrabbling savages? Was the apocalypse in recent memory, or has it been hundreds of years and societies are starting to cobble together settlements?
One secret is to understand what real-world fears various kinds of monsters stand in for or symbolize. Zomebies play on our fear of death, sickness and old age. I mean, they're corpses, which is what we'll all become, but they walk around. This applies to classic zombies moreso, because they move slowly like elderly people (who seem to be in the process of becoming corpses stage by stage). So zombies are basically walking disease and death, advancing slowly but inexorably, come in large groups to swamp you no matter how you fight or run. In the same way werewolves represent the animal inside all of us that can come out at times and take over, making us violent and destructive. At those times we lose conscious control and awareness, so it's 'as if' we became a wild animal for a while, and then recover our humanity and start to realize the horrible things we did.
The walking dead uses the decomposed walkers, their sudden appearance, and the base fear that a character we like will be bitten and turned. Look at how people reacted to Maggie's father being bitten in the prison, and how the writers used a liked secondary character to build tension with the amputation in an attempt to save his life. The horror aspect comes from the fate worse than death. And the reaction of other characters seeing a loved one that had turned, and their moral struggle in putting down that loved one.
If it's a long-running thing, it needs to have a series of escalations planned from the outset. Otherwise familiarity, which is never scary, will naturally dull unease and tension. The rules have to keep upsetting the characters. Zombies are a good example, given that they're just the weather. You see this burnout as soon as The Farm in The Walking Dead. Their numbers wax and wane, and they conveniently show up to add tension when necessary, like a storm on the sea. After the third or fourth storm, you and the characters know what to expect. The variation is largely just environmental: what if there is a storm in a city, what if there is a storm while you're trying to use the washroom, what if there's a storm while you're trying to loot antibiotics, what if there's a storm in a condemned building that's burning down etc... From there on, humans are used as the primary antagonists because they can routinely introduce the needed rule changes which demand adaptation from the characters. Technical, emotional, moral, whatever. They can also persist more dramatically than the weather. The weather won't hold a grudge, or remember that you killed his brother, or torture someone just for fun, or outsmart the cast. The other option would have been to regularly introduce new variations of walkers. A bit corny, but hey at least the story would have been driven less by circular interpersonal drama. I'll take creature feature any day. "Coral, stay away from the water. Those aren't gators, them are walker gators." Boom. Cold open sting, cut to the credits. I'm in.
Yeah, great way of putting it. They lose their dramatic effectiveness quickly. The Alien franchise has suffered from this over the years. They're presence doesn't do what they used to do. Really after they went from one alien in the first movie to an assload of aliens in the second, they ran out of ideas. I always thought they should have done an outbreak on Earth... like a small town or something. I know it would have been a futuristic setting, but they never used infinite aliens as an up the stakes effect.
Some very good points. There have been a few zombie movies that used Variations that helped keep the zombies as something more than an environmental threat. The one that comes to my mind as the most successful variation was the fast zombie. There weren't many of them, and the movie logic was they were freshly turned, and slowed down to the traditional shambling zombie as they decayed. But you never knew if a group would have the fast ones in it, until they broke into a run. I recall one movie where they tried the intelligent zombie angle, but that seemed like they could do the same thing with a human. The true innovation in that genre seems to be how the humans deal with the environmental threat of zombies wandering around. I remember reading one where the characters spent hours looking for an EV, that still had a charge so they could use the silent vehicle to sneak past a horde of the undead. The other innovation in the genre seems to be the root cause of the zombies. Moving from Magic to Bio warfare. but this is becoming trite as well. I think the best innovation in the genres was Under a Grave yard sky, by John Ringo. There the "Zombies" weren't dead, but infected with a bio weapon. They still had to feed and drink, but the normal human limits to what was potable did not apply to them. And the big innovation was it was at sea, so running away was not an easy option, and the confrontations were forced by factors like the need for food. I think the best part for tension and unease in the book was when the survivors tried to clear out a super max cruise ship, to save some survivors. There the environment did as much or more to the tension as the zombies did. all the dark passages in a cruise ship, never knowing where you would find the zombies, along with his adding the ability for the zombies to go into a dormant state like hibernating until they sensed prey.
The horror aspect comes from a fate worse than death. Good stuff here. Just watched 28 Days Later for the first time and it nails the fast zombie trope. What I found scary/impactful about the movie was the sheer brutality and animalistic behavior exhibited by those turned. I'm focusing on the uncanny, the unknown and revulsion for the Horror elements. I want to get as "primal" as possible. The seas rise, and with them, we get fish-like Deep Ones instead of zombies coming from its depths. If you get bitten, you'll slowly transform into an ugly and repulsive fish-man hybrid a la The Fly. There's also the fact that you don't know what's in the dark waters below you. So something like The Day After Tomorrow meets The Last of Us with a dash of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I got the idea from seeing a close-up photo of an Abyssal fish. I was so repelled by it! But it was like an automatic, instinctual reflex. Close-up photos of insects also give me this feeling. Maybe it is because they're just so alien to our own biology?
Seems appropirate for someone who's username is Nemo. (Says the guy who's avatar pic is Captain Ahab) Not only The Fly, but also Dagon. I wonder if you've seen the movie version, which incorporates elements from the short story Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth (though the town in the movie is called Imboca)? The fisherfolk of this terrifying town worship Dagon, and there are Deep Ones (of course). I don't think it's because they get bitten, but as they grow older the townies begin a gradual transformation into tentacled fish-creatures. I think it's the supernatural price they pay for Dagon's protection and dominion. It's a very powerful movie, almost too intense and grotesque for me, but it's extremely well-done, and a really good modern interpretation of Lovecraft. And it's done by either the same team that did such a great job with ReAnimator (and The Bride of), or at least one of them. The producer I think. And now I know what I'm watching tonight.
It's a very intriguing idea. So, the apocalypse is the rising of the seas and the emergence of the Deep Ones and transformation of people into fish-creatures. Not quite the image we usually have of post-apocalptic, which is usally a desert setting (thanks to Mad Max) or the ruins of cities being reclaimed by nature. It's far more primordial, it's nature in her earliest form—the ocean—the womb of all life, coming to reclaim the surface world. But these surface walkers, are they intelligent, or dumb water-dwelling brutes? I think a big part of the horror of Dagon (really brought out in the movie) is that you turn into sushi, with no human-level intelligence—no hands to manipulate objects, no language, no opposable thumbs. You descend all the way to an ocean-dwelling form of slithering, scaly life. That parallels the fear in zombie stories of becoming a poorly-animated corpse. You become the things that are lurching so awkwardly toward you, and then, like a human virus, your only thought is to advance lurchingly on other people and reduce them to what you are. If you do watch the Dagon movie, it has a very interesting take on the gradual transformation involving difficulties of walking in the later stages.
Are the hybrids amphibians or is the change cosmetic? If amphibians fresh, salt or both types of water? If fresh, that sets you up for the scene where someone goes to get a drink from a pond or lake, and gets their face bitten.
