I'm outlining a ghost story that takes place in and around a cabin in a mountain forest, and I'm stuck on the "final girl" scene. I can't seem to think of something to top the other attacks and kills in the story so far. The (hopefully) scary bits involve a lot of supernatural and hallucinatory confusion, like a character following a loved one's constantly moving voice through fog until they're lost in the woods, at which point really bad shit happens, or another seeing the ghost stepping out from behind trees and being chased by trippy demon monsters, until the character is herded into a kill. I'm not looking for someone to write this for me, but I'm hoping to get some ideas I can brainstorm with. I want to know what scares you. If you can think of specific books or scenes that really got to you, that would help a ton. I like to learn by reading. I'll take movies, too, though. Or if you just have an idea of your own you want to share, have at it. And the trippier, the better. Thanks!
Jump scares in written fiction do not scare me. Effective tension building does. The feeling of knowing that something nasty is going to happen. Atmosphere. And when something nasty DOES happen, leaving most of it to the reader's imagination. Let the reader scare themselves.
Yep, this. Scary (to me) is what you don't see but know is there or is coming. Like walking into a dark, empty room, and although it appears nobody is there, you feel that someone or something is. Worse yet, you sense they can see you, but not vice versa. Fleeting shadows, objects that may or may not be sentient, moving just on the edge of your periphery. Getting that vibe of "something bad happened...or will happen here." What we don't know or don't see until it is too late is the frightening stuff. But it's challenging to execute. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) was scary because we didn't know why Michael Myers was the way he was. "Just some psychotic kid-turned-escaped-mental patient" was all we really knew. Everything else was up to the audience to guess. That made it scary. Then Rob Zombie remade it and completely explained every little thing, created this wild backstory, and gave away all the mysterious fright over the character (just my opinion.) Although, they did start cheapskatingly explaining away who/what he was as far back as Halloween 4, so it's not entirely Rob's doing. So scary stuff is often subjective, and can be either visceral or atmospheric. Sounds like you're doing both in your story, which can be good and gives you the flexibility to do more as the scene & character(s) calls for.
For me, mind control, the thought of someone/something that's able to control my actions while I'm unable to fight it off. In the shining you kinda get that with the dad, but it's more like they make him crazy and crazier over time. That's the scariest book I've read so far. But most of that fear might come from being a mom and realizing there's no clear way to fight ghosts. I think the scariest scene in the whole book was when the mom was holding Danny in the chair. The voices now so loud that even she, who had no shining, could hear them. Poltergeist remains the scariest movie to me for same reasons. When there's no clear cut way to fight an enemy, that's frightening. So the less I know about them, the more frightening they are.
I think "betrayal" is the worst, having your family/loved ones join a monstrous force. The concept of "Body Snatchers" is awful to me. Just knowing that you couldn't protect those around you, and now they've joined the enemy. You still see them, but it's not really them. You've lost what you had and it is never coming back. That's horror for me. And any horror that comes from within the body is pretty bad too because you can't hide from it. I think that's a metaphor for disease. That's the body horror genre. Some classic tropes fall within it. Simple monsters like werewolves and zombies and their infection, you know. A story where you are infected and your monstrous disease is growing is much worse than one where you're battling hordes outside of yourself. That's because you're helpless when you're already infected. There can be no escape. All great horror is about loss of control.
And that brings me back to Salem's Lot. The vampires aren't scary because they're bloodsucking corpses with dental issues, they're scary because they were once the people you knew. King spends the first half of the book getting the readers to know and becoming familiar with the townsfolk, and then by the second half, they're running around in the middle of the night fanging people.
I found The Exorcist frightening because it was as if the curtain was pulled back and you could see that the devil did in fact exist and is every bit as evil and cruel as one would expect. I found Jaws frightening because the men were isolated on that small boat and all notions of man being the king of the jungle were neutralized by the size and tenacity of the gigantic shark.
Something that makes me very uncomfortable is excessive complexity. I have nightmares about it. I face it daily at work and I hate it. The idea goes: there is a task to be completed; however, there are caveats: - the nature of the task is unclear - the consequences of not completing the task are severe and highly detrimental - there is time pressure; the task must be completed as soon as possible. The deadline has already passed and we're in emergency time. - Penalties are constantly being incurred. It is not clear what the penalties are or on whom they are levied - The task cannot be started immediately; there are dependencies to handle first - It is not clear what the dependencies are, but they are at least as complex as the main task and possibly more detrimental if they are not completed as per a specific set of instructions - The instructions are unclear. Obtaining them is yet another dependency that is also time limited. And so on.
Maybe in the cabin, a photo of a deceased person starts talking or shouting? I've only seen it being used twice despite the availability of this idea.
Why does this remind me so much of this quote? "I can't write what I mean, I can't say what I mean, but I expect you to know what I mean." (WWII Marshal of the RAF, Lord Trenchard). Great minds in aviation could be just as difficult to work with as those in the other services.
The movie Escape Room had a lot of scary scenes, but the one that scared me most was the gas chamber scene. 2 gas masks, 3 people. A lot of tough choices. I think it scared me because of the history of gas chambers and the realization that all that happened was real. That someone thought this up and murdered millions in the Holocaust with the set up. Say what you want about the Germans being inspired by US execution chambers. But the mass use of them in the Holocaust is terrifying. The worst thing for me is that we still have their shoes. https://apnews.com/article/auschwitz-holocaust-childrens-shoes-conservation-c82a8e54e60050fa3667302e610736dd 'Never again.'
There was no other way to kill that many people quickly, efficiently and "humanely," with that latter part referring to the executioners, not the victims. When they invaded the East, the Einsatzgruppen and Himmler quickly discovered that they couldn't carry enough bullets or dig enough graves to make extinction logistically feasible. I forget the exact number, but I think the 6 death camps processed 12-15k people a day at their height in 1942-43, and even that wasn't fast enough. By the time the Russians started heading west, they were scrambling to destroy whatever evidence they could. Not sure about the US gas chamber influence, but that makes sense. They started with mobile gas vans that redirected carbon monoxide exhaust into the cabin. Too slow, too small, too much evidence. So, yeah, genocide scares the hell out of me.
'Humanely' is a subjective thing I think. Because the Germans saw what the Japanese were doing and were like, 'oh, that's too far.' But anyway, yeah. I remember hearing about this, too. At least about the mass shootings in I think Polish villiages. And shit. That's too many people in a day. But thank goodness for the Russians heading west. I don't know as much about the liberations, but I would hope this stalled the German plans a bit. Anyway, I heard people talking about this. I don't know if it's true. But I heard rumors the Germans were inspired by US Execution chambers that used gas. And I heard about those vans, too. Also, damn scary. And yeah, it does.
No, BASF. They were part of IG Farben (from memory) and mostly a chemicals company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF
That's a sensible attitude. *nods* Sadly, there are way too many people even now who sincerely believe that Hitler was right. It's these type of people who march in protests, chant (and paint on walls) slogans like "Gas the Jews", beat up Jewish people, and so on. Why? Why so much hate towards a group of people that, population-wise, is so statistically small? Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. When it comes to racism, there is no sensible answer, because racism in itself isn't sensible. People like this (i.e. who are willing to use violence randomly to push their own agenda) scare the crap out of me. I won't even call it a "political agenda", because there's nothing political about it. These morons just want to feel superior over someone else, so they can feel better about their sad, wretched, empty lives. GRR. Sheesh, that went to a very dark place. Sorry. Here, have some kittens!
Rath's example above may have gone to a dark place as he mentioned, but also, it's a truthful and sad - and scary fact. All too often, the scariest things in the world are the people in it. It's very hard (often unnecessarily so), everywhere. That's the bad news. The good news, I suppose, is the huge well of source material for scary stuff.
The human mind can be scary. As someone with experience from psychosis, I can say that no horror movie or text has ever come close to as scared as I was when I suffered from my psychotic episode. Among things, the mind made me believe my own mother was going to lead me into an ambush where people were going shoot me. I believed my best friend was planning to break into my apartment at night with another person and kill me. Another disturbing thing was that at one point I thought a woman I was in love with had been killed and made into minced meat that the people of the care facility I was in would feed me. The few hallucinations I had made me think people wanted me to get cancer. (Which I incidentally later got, which did not help my mind any.) It was a very trippy period of my life. Like a dance with the devil. Long term fear that really set itself to the back of your neck. Now all I have to deal with are the thoughts and remnants of my broken mind. But I prefer my current state to that of active psychosis.
