Take a look. What do you see? Nothing much? Or a giant googly-eyed monster looming out of the darkness over this fence?
Horror writing. The best is all in the detail. Or lack of it. Let the reader use their imagination, let them see things through your words. Sounds easy, right? Well we all know it’s not. How to create tension, how to get the reader hiding – metaphorically – under the bed. How how how. As a horror/ghost story lover since childhood I’ve tried so many times to write a really good ghost story. Wrote, edited, believed. Set it aside. Went back several months later and howled like the proverbial wolf man with laughter at just how awful it was. The trick, as I understand it, is to leave the reader with a feeling that either a thin trickle of cold water is dripping down their back or a merest touch from a ghostly hand has just brushed their neck. Right. I’ll get on it then. Sounds so eeeeeeasy.
What do we need?
- A creepy setting. Could be a grave yard but that is sooo yesterday. Unless it’s a modern grave yard. What is a modern grave yard? (cue internet search for 21st century funerals)
- Odd characters. The sort that appear unexpectedly and look just a bit…y’know… deranged in an unthreatening kind of way – until it’s too late
- A mystery. Take your pick. A mystery sound. A mystery sighting. A mystery smell. A mystery person. A mystery mystery…. you get the idea.
- An unexpected and clever twist. Unexpected and Clever? Jeez. Not making this easy.
- A monster. Or unexplained creature. Like a googly-eyed monster leering over a fence. Just sayin.
- And, I suppose, knowing what it is people are scared of these days. There’s enough ghost hunter footage out there that tells us we are still afraid of the paranormal, because now, we could say – and I’m just putting it out there – it could actually be real. Which is scarier: the ghost idea or the concept that it is real?
Jacci Gooding, Author 
I’ve always found writing horror impossible as I don’t want to write about horrific things. The thought of something horrific happening to a person, is not something I want to delve in to by writing about it. Spooky and scary on the other hand, well, I’d love to have a go at that! But then the context (for me) would be that the scares and spooks would have to be on the way to a happy conclusion of the story.
I think the key to making something spooky is to take something familiar and give in an unfamiliar or sinister feel and consequence. To hint at things that might have happened, lead the reader to draw their own conclusions, fill in the gaps. Then to hint at what could happen based on what might have happened… googly-eyed monsters are funny unless they’re engaged in horrific acts of violence and terror, which I’m not interested in writing or reading.
I’ve found that most horror leans on the idea of a victim and I don’t like that in my writing or reading. There has to be hope, there has to be a way for the characters to ‘win the day.’
This is just in my fiction writing by the way, in my Call of Cthulhu games (cosmic-horror roleplaying game) all bets are off!
So yeah, make the familiar vaguely threatening, hint at what’s happened, what could happen, threaten something terrible happening, lead the reader along a path strewn with the signs of impending doom, make you characters feel hunted, hopeless…
Alfred Hitchcock once famously said, ‘there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.’
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