The Essential Guide To Writing Horror Stories

What makes a horror story truly terrifying? In this essential guide to writing horror stories, you’ll discover how to create suspense, evoke fear, and keep readers hooked until the final page.

The Essential Guide To Writing Horror Stories

Myths, monsters, mummies, and murderers. Ghosts, ghouls, and graveyards. Dragons, darkness, and the deep. Mist, fog, water, and ice. Seemingly normal human beings. Strangers. Time itself. Horror can lurk in all of them. And that’s just a short list.

A good writer can turn anything into a horror story, including wallpaper. Love them or hate them, horror stories are as old as time and will always be on the shelves of the Library of Mankind. They vibrate between unsettling stories with a subtle twist at the end that you can’t quite forget, to stomach-churning gore-fests that make you sleep with the light on far longer than you’d like to admit. The ‘horror quotient’ depends entirely on the writer and the reader.

The Basics Of Writing Horror

A. Characters

Horror can be defined as the bad thing that happens to anyone, good or bad. Granted the reader is more likely to sympathise with the goodie rather than the baddie. But, as in any story, if the reader doesn’t connect with, relate to, or care about the character, the horror inflicted upon them doesn’t hold as much power as it could.

Writing Tip: When writing horror, it can be easy to fall back on stereotypes. Try to avoid this as much as possible.

Examples:

In the book, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, each character had a valid reason for being the unknown killer, and for being killed.
In the movie, Prisoners, it’s the good man that becomes the horror, only to have that be blurred thanks to the ambiguous ending of the film. As disturbing as the film is, and despite the film’s ending, you can never quite shake the horror of the good man afterwards.

B. The Plot And The Stakes

The plot, and its memorability, depends entirely on the depth of horror you want to write. But again, don’t fall back on stereotypes. Some really creepy horror stories are the most subtle.

Cut to the bone, the most important things to consider are survival, defending loved ones, cracking unsolved mysteries – earlier deaths, mythical or alien creatures, the mysteries of the universe, and haunted places. It’s vital to make the reader feel as if they are experiencing the desperately high stakes along with the characters. Stakes such as:

Losing their minds.
Being lost and never found.
Not being able to tell the difference between reality and delusion.
Turning into another form.
Dying a horrible death.

Writing Tip: An axe-wielding murderer hunting a group of young adults who have chosen to split up and run through the woods at night is so overdone! And it’s going to happen to so few people in reality. Avoid the clichés. As with the first two examples above, the most memorable horror can be discovered in the last chapter, even the last line of the book. What makes it memorable is the fact that it subverts the entire book. Try to find horror in the small things, the normal but unexpected things. Starting at the end and working backwards may be the best way to plot a horror book.

Examples

C. Point Of View

First, and Third Person Limited/Omniscient are the most common POVs in writing horror. Restricting the reader’s knowledge mirrors the characters’ vulnerabilities and uncertainties which is vital when it comes to increasing tension and fear. Third Person Omniscient takes a step back but does reveal to the reader things that the character isn’t aware of. Second Person, and an unreliable narrator are also good choices.

Examples:

First Person POV – The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, and Misery by Stephen King
Third Person Limited – The Shining by Stephen King, and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Third Person Omniscient – Carrie by Stephen King
Second Person – We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
Unreliable Narrator – The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Choose Your Fear

Horror can occur in so many different forms and it all depends on the kind of fear to which you want to subject your characters and your readers.

1. Psychological Horror

The human mind is a fragile thing, and often it can be easily manipulated. Gaslighting, propaganda, extremist beliefs that play on a person’s insecurities, and bullying are just some ways humans can influence others. The end result can be anxiety and panic attack loops, complex post-traumatic stress, cognitive distortion and dissociation, co-dependency, agoraphobia, paranoia, fractured and distorted realities, and even the inescapable descent into madness.

Writing Tip: This brand of horror relies on internal horror – what one person imagines is happening, and or what another person is doing to create that horror within their victim. Researching mental abuse, manipulation, and disorders could be a great source for ideas.

Example: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is infamous as it’s not only a psychological horror forced upon the characters, but also upon the readers. The readers’ own sense of reality becomes distorted thanks to its labyrinthine footnotes, blank spaces, and erratic layouts. All of these mimic the claustrophobic madness of the characters exploring an impossible, ever-shifting void.

2. Supernatural Horror

There can’t be a blog about writing supernatural horror without mentioning Stephen King. The supernatural is King’s go-to choice of horror, and Pet Sematary is often called his best supernatural horror.

Writing Tip: ‘The ‘other’ side, those who live ‘beyond the veil’, and the various tribes of the ‘undead’ and ‘once dead’ as well as rites and beliefs of any religion can be mined for ideas and characters in your book.
Examples:

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

3. Body Horror

Body horror is… grotesquely fascinating, and deeply scary in ways that not many people can handle. It goes beyond the horrors in real life that so many people visit on themselves in terms of beauty today. Body horror takes the reader inside the gore of bodies that transform, betray us, and become something other than human through physical mutation, alteration, decay, or invasion. In body horror, there is only one monster. You.

Writing Tip: Consider the point of your book. Are you writing to make a point or just to scare people and provide a gore-fest? Are you writing about the ethics of manipulating biology and bodies, the mental disorders that make people want to change themselves into non-humans, the horror of having your body invaded by a virus, an alien, or deliberately disfigured by either cosmetics, or surgery perpetuated on you without your consent? If you are, the trick is to get your point across but not be preachy.

Examples:

4. Found-footage Horror

“Is this real?” That’s the question that found-footage horror makes the unsettled-becoming-horrified reader ask. Because found-footage can be created through letters, handwritten notes, floor-plans, bills of sale, sketches, diary entries, newspaper clips, telegrams, photographs etc, it can be great fun to put together for the author. If done well, this can go a long way to persuading the reader that yes, it is real.

Writing Tip: Early found-footage novels often began with a prologue that describes how the ‘found-footage’ arrived in the author’s hands. You may find that your choice of introduction could influence the plot. Unlike other horror types, found-footage needs to be the most possible.

Examples:

The movie, The Blair Witch Project
Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie
Devolution by Max Brooks
The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp

5. Gothic Horror

Gothic horror and gothic romance share the same foundation – brooding, psychological tension, dark atmosphere, blending romance with fear, and the macabre. They divide on their endings. Romance ends, as all romance should, with a happy-ever-after. Horror has no happy ending, romantic or not. Gothic novels require decaying settings, often seemingly-haunted estates, the past imposing itself unrelentingly on the present, family secrets, bridegrooms that seem to change after the wedding, gloomy forests, suffocating families or servants. Trauma, madness, or moral taboos are the main elements in the books.

Writing Tip: Avoiding the clichés in this genre can be difficult. They are, after all, the reason readers enjoy the books. Distrust and disillusionment needs to be built into the book in ever growing amounts.

Examples

The movie, Crimson Peak
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Writing horror, especially if it has a twist, can be a lot of fun. As with all writing, write what you like to read, and read as many books within that sub-genre.

The Last Word

The best horror stories create fear by putting believable characters in situations that test them in unexpected ways. If you can build suspense, create tension, raise the stakes, and keep readers on the edge of their seats, you can create a story that grips them from the first page to the last. Use these techniques to write horror that entertains, unsettles, and leaves a lasting impression.

If you’d like to learn how to write a great horror novel, sign up for one of the rich and in-depth courses that Writers Write offers and get your writing career off to a great start.

Source for image: Pixabay

by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter, Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.

The Essential Guide To Writing Horror Stories