How to write horror

We recognize a good horror history when it’s hard for us to fall asleep at night, reviewing over and over all those terrifying moments, that creepy monster, that dark passage, the shadows behind the door, and how the characters of the book were subjected to such a terrible fate. But… how do the great authors of terror manage to create horror? How to achieve that tension, that suspense, that constant waiting?

Well, if you stay with us, we’ll give you some helpful tips to scare the hell out of your readers.

But, first things first.

What is horror?

When you think about horror, what images come to mind? Probably what scares you the most, a demon under the bed, spirits that wander, an abandoned house, perhaps some urban legend. Well, that feeling these elements provoke in you, is horror.

People read this genre because they enjoy the thrill of being afraid in a controlled environment, while others go skydiving or riding a roller coaster. People want the adrenaline rush.

The horror genre has 6 subgenres, each with its characteristics:

Gothic: It focuses specifically on death.
Paranormal: Supernatural stories, ghosts, that have no scientific explanation.
Dark Fantasy: It combines the darkest elements of fantasy.
Occultism: It showcases rituals that are not considered religion or science.
Survival: the Characters try to survive within their circumstances.
Science fiction horror: It combines elements of science fiction with horror.

Writing horror is not just about telling how a group of young people entered a haunted house. You have to go even deeper than in other genres because you are fighting against reality. You are taking the world of the reader and adding little credible factors. The more real it feels, the better effect it will have.

Get the right inspiration

Obtaining the necessary inspiration to write horror is essential. You need to feel the fear yourself to be able to transmit it. Facebook is a very useful tool in this regard as there are lots of groups and pages dedicated to sharing this kind of information.

In these groups, you can get tons of ideas, know the most popular trends about horror, and, most importantly, get to know your potential readers.

You can easily get inspiration from the pictures they share of abandoned and creepy places, monsters, and nightmares. These could definitely serve as the base for some specific scene, event, or character in your book.

There is nothing more terrifying than what is based on real events, many people share their paranormal and supernatural experiences in these groups, stories passed down from generation to generation, etc.

Here are some groups for you to take a look at, tell me in the comments the most terrifying story you found.

Build up suspense

“Creating suspense depends on a turning point (or turning points) in the story. The turning point is basically that critical moment where your protagonist must make a decision that will ultimately lead him in two very different directions. That is the moment when (hopefully) the reader cannot put down the book because he must know what decision, in which direction his protagonist is going to take ”.
Linda Castillo, The dead will tell

Suspense is the basis of horror since the key to fear is not knowing what will happen when you open the door. To keep the reader’s attention on each page while they fear for the fate of the characters, you must build good suspense, but how to do it?

First, let’s see what the two types of suspense are:

Tell the reader what happens: You will gain interest by letting the reader know more than the character, for example, the protagonist happily lives with his mother on a farm, but does not know that her mother was possessed by an evil spirit in the previous chapter. The reader will be waiting to know what will happen next.

Information retention: Telling as little as possible helps to maintain the suspense so that the reader knows the same information as the hero and discovers things as the book progresses, for example, how his mother was possessed, what is the objective of this spirit, what story it keeps.

Let’s compare these two examples:

Lina is in the kitchen. It’s been a long day at work. She drags her feet trying to fix herself some dinner, but she’s just too tired. Too tired to realize that the back door has been opened. Too tired to notice there’s a knife missing from the top drawer or the two feet sticking from behind the window curtain. Lina’s too tired too realize that she’s not alone at home. A soft pat against the window makes her turn. “It’s just a branch,” she says to herself and approaches the window determined to close it.
Lina is in the kitchen. It’s been a long day of work. She drags her feet trying to fix herself some dinner, but she’s just too tired of all that paperwork at the office. A soft pat against the window makes her turn. “It’s just a branch,” she says to herself and approaches the window determined to close it.

Which one works better for creating suspense? Definitely the first one. Giving your readers extra information is a great resource to make them even more scared for the characters. It’s what could get them yelling at the book, so the characters realize what’s going on.

How does choosing this method affect your writing? Well, for starters, you’ll need to think of using a Third-person POV, or multiple POVs if you want to tell the story in the First-Person POV.

Tips to create suspense:

Create a hidden character or entity: Something or someone who controls things from the shadows, a hidden puppeteer. Nobody knows his identity. This will give you the opportunity to create red herrings: make your reader doubt of everyone. Everyone is a suspect.
Create a riddle: Leave a trail of symbolic information that your characters can follow until they solve the problem, or die trying.
Use an inner monologue: If something is worrisome for your protagonist it will also worry the reader, what does the stranger who stalks my house want? Who is the strange man who was staring at me in the park?
Use cliffhangers: If you give the reader unfinished pieces of information at the end of one chapter, you will keep their interest in knowing what happened.

If you still don't know what a cliffhanger is, read this article and learn how to use them in your chapters.

Tone and atmosphere in horror

Even if you have the scariest plot, if you don’t have the right tone and atmosphere, the story is going to probably not even be considered horror.

The atmosphere in horror is usually dark, gloomy, with opaque and sepia tones, abandoned houses, secluded farms, almost uninhabited towns, dark labyrinths, and everything that can be imagined mysterious, strange, and unpredictable.

You must learn how to use the proper tone because if you turn out to be very jovial, with a friendly or humorous vocabulary, you will not achieve the wanted result.

Tips for setting the right tone and atmosphere.

Show the setting of the environment when telling your story: Narrate how each scene looks, smells, and sounds. If you are in an abandoned house you will probably feel the creaking of the floor when you step on them or how the pipes are decomposed. You will smell the mold in the walls, etc.
Describe the mood: It shows the mental state of your character and the environment. If he is breathing hard, or is agitated, the sounds around, if the wind howls, or if someone is running through the house narrate how his footsteps are heard.
Use the correct vocabulary: Once you have established a situation, use the correct words to describe it, for example, to describe the abandoned house you can use: cracked, rusty, rugged, huge, filth.
Use the correct pacing: In high suspense or tension scenes, shorter sentences and shorter scenes will give more impact. Aso, this will make the reader feel as if things were moving faster.
Show, don´t tell: Don´t tell your readers everything that happens in the minds of the characters, show with their actions what they feel, draw their feelings and create a more realistic feeling.

Make sure we can fear for your main character.

To make the fictional situation you’ve created more realistic, you need to create a credible main character that your readers can fall in love with, or at least, find them likable. This way, your readers will fear for your character, and the stressful, suspenseful situation you’ve created in the story will be more meaningful for your readers.

Show his internal struggles. Everything that takes place in the protagonist’s mind, his fears, worries, doubts, and internal conflicts, if he has problems at work, if his wife is unfaithful, if his children hate him or if he is a successful person, the more your readers know about their personal life, the more they will recognize their deepest fears. Show them in some act of kindness, even a little one will do the trick.

Make their conversations sound real, in the horror genre things go far beyond our own reality and just as you would not know how to explain to another person about the existence of something supernatural in your life, your characters probably will not know how to express what happens to them openly.

It is impossible to stop the threat of something unknown until it stops being unknown. If you remove the element of constant danger, the story loses its scary factor.

Don’t make them behave stupidly by entering the forest in the middle of the night. Normal people don’t do that unless it’s inevitable. They always wait for dawn to do those crazy things, believe me, if I hear noises from my basement and I am alone at home, I will not go down in the middle of the night to check it, I will probably move from home… for good. So, if they have to do something inevitably stupid, make sure that it’s for good enough reasons. Maybe someone is in danger or their own survival depends on it.

Learn here how to use the Three-Act Structure.

Use the uncanny valley

The uncanny valley is the emotional reaction to seeing an inexplicable object, a thing similar to a human being. It is that strange feeling of anxiety and repulsion that is caused when seeing some humanoid entity, for example, finding an entity that seems human by its shape, but it is clearly obvious that it is not entirely. It creates insecurity between what is human and what is unnatural.

However, if this entity, no matter how aggressive it is, does not look human, it will not cause this concern. And their difficulty or inability to clearly categorize it as delusion or not that fuels their fear.

Frankenstein, and the Slenderman, are classic examples of monsters that give us this feeling when we think of them. Maybe at some point, they were human, but now, are they?

There are many myths and legends around the world, many of them are very dark stories, find some of these here and get inspiration.

Make your character feel alone and little

If a character faces an unknown and incredible situation, for which no explanation can be found, at first, he always seeks help in his closest circle, and probably everyone thinks that he is crazy, delusional, that it is stress.

Make them feel lonely, misunderstood. Make them want to solve the problem on their own, at least initially.

This point has a second level. Not only you can make your MC feel little by isolating him from friends, but you can also use the setting. Make your hero enter big haunted mansions, labyrinthic catacombs, abandoned hospitals, or cemeteries. They have to be at a clear disadvantage against the monster they have to defeat, and against the surroundings. Restrict their movements, make them feel trapped and little.

Summing up…

Horror is a great genre to work with. However, it can also be a difficult one as it targets the emotions and deepest fears of your readers. We all enjoy that adrenaline rush. We have all covered our faces at some point when watching a good horror film. So, get dark and twisted and start writing.

Anyway, if you don’t have enough inspiration yet, why not learn from the best? Here is a selection of classics from horror literature:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886).
Rats in the Walls by HP Lovecraft (1924)
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971)
It, from Stephen King (1986)

Hope you found this post helpful. Any extra tips? Let us know in the comments.