Ok so I'm writing a suspense-horror short story and after a lot of build up I'm at the exact part where the spooky stuff begins happening. Like, if this was a slasher horror movie this would be the exact moment where the slasher pops out and stabs the slutty blond girl. Any tips on coming up with an effective first sentence that scares the audience or is a good enough transition from the suspense that was built up?
By the sound of this it's your first draft? I'd say give it your best guess for now. Maybe you'll have to edit it later, but that's part of the writing biz! It's also the sort of thing that might be best when you can share with beta readers. And to share with betas, you gotta have something to share.
I've never written a horror story but I imagine if I'd write one, I'd finish the beat before with a sentence that expresses the opposite to what's about to happen. Hope. A future. I'd use an open ending. We recently had a threat about that. You can craft an 'open ending' style of last sentence, which is so hopeful and positive that it clues the reader that the polar opposite is about to happen.
There's two things I try to do. 1) establish the proper tone 2) build authenticity Tone is tricky. With horror, there's a lot of approaches that wouldn't seem like they'd work, but they do. For example, the poetic (Barker), the visceral (Ketchum), rustic (SG Jones), muted/understated (Aickman), and many, many others. Since your story is horror, the authentic anchor will have to be in the characters and setting. They need to be familiar and at the same time, unique. That's not easy. Once you have that in place (as the math books say, the exercise is left for the reader), you move to the horror. The most intense horror is what's assumed. You see it from the edges. In an authentic setting with authentic characters, it takes very little to really have an effect. You should see it and feel it from afar before it starts affecting characters. It's all about mounting tension. As soon as your characters can battle the horror, or somehow resist it, the horror is over. The story basically becomes action/adventure. Not that that's bad, but it isn't horror. So assuming you have tone & authenticity, come in slow from the edges. That would be my advice.
I think a reader and horror is like a pot of water and a frog. If you toss a frog boiling water, it'll just out immediately. If you put the frog in room-temperature water and slowly crank up the heat, the frog will sit there until you save it. (To quote Al Gore: "It's important to save the frog.") I think the spooky stuff should start happening way before the spooky stuff actually starts happening. It should be benign enough that you're not really sure if it's important or not. For example, In the Amityville Horror, the children started to sleep on their stomachs. By itself, this is a completely meaningless detail that most readers skip right over. Later on, you realize that that's how the bodies of the murdered children were found. The best type of horror for me is where it slow drips you into a slightly worse and worse and worse situation until by the time you realize how bad things have gotten, you're in way deeper than you should have been.
I get ideas from my experience. Some I recommend you give it a try if it's possible where you're at, some I don't recommend. There's a long complex of tunnels near my area. I don't know who dug it. The moment I entered its entrance, nearly a hundred frightened camel crickets fell upon me from the ceiling. This is what a camel cricket looks like: One experience that I don't recommend is encountering a poisonous snake. My experience with one gave me ideas on opening up to spooky stuff. The visual of the snake threatening me gave me feelings that I otherwise wouldn't have thought of. I wish I recorded that snake. Current events could inspire you. Watch the news on the pandemic. Right now, it's as if it's passing the opening stage of a thriller movie. I don't know anyone personally who got infected yet, but the virus is already spreading globally.