3 Common Horror Mistakes That Can Really Ruin Your Story

It's October, and that means there are a lot of people penning horror stories right now. Maybe you're taking up a seasonal challenge, or perhaps you're trying to land some work in the anthologies that always seem to rise from the grave around this time of year. Whatever the reason, though, if you're not an old genre ghoul there are a lot of traps just waiting for you to step in them out there. That's why this Halloween season I'd like to offer you all a seat by the fire so I can give you a warning or two about the dos and do-nots of horror stories.

Don't mind that noise. It's just the wind.

And for those who are wondering about what my bona fides are (or if you'd just like to check out some fun horror stories this spooky season), this genre has sort of been my comfy place for much of my career. From having short stories in collections like SNAFU: A Collection of Military Horror and American Nightmare, to the cosmic horror elements of my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, to the stinking alleys and backwoods copses laden with monsters in my collections The Rejects and New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam, I like to think I know at least a little bit about this particular subject.

 

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Now then, without further ado...

#1: Rushing To Get To The Good Part

Don't rush to the climax... you've got word count to fill.

Pacing and presentation are two of the most important parts of a horror story. If you've ever seen someone tell a ghost story around a campfire, then you already know this. You need to draw the audience in, and ratchet up the tension gradually so that when you deliver the scare it sticks the landing instead of making the listeners sigh and roll their eyes.

In its way, horror is sort of like that third date. You know what you're in for, but you don't just show up on the doorstep ready to go. You take your time along the evening, testing boundaries, and getting little glimpses of what's to come. That excitement builds, and you may have a couple of close calls, but you don't get to the proper reveal until you're finally back in the house, with the candlelight dancing on the walls. Then you hear that zipper come down, and you see her run her fingers through her hair, peeling off that skin suit and dropping it to the ground, those intense blue eyes staring at you from her lipless, lidless face as the blood pounds and the muscles twitch.

As for presentation, think of the xenomorph in the Alien franchise. The movie gives you little glimpses here and there. It lets your mind do the work, and it gets more and more tense, until you're practically jumping at shadows. There is a deleted scene where we got to see the creature just standing there under the light, though. And you know what? It's not scary. When it just stands there with no shadows, no creepy echoes, no blur of movement, it creates no tension. It still looks weird, and clearly inhuman, but it's the difference between seeing a lion in an enclosure at the zoo, and knowing there's one stalking through the shadows just beyond the reach of your flashlight.

#2: Your Entire Cast is Made of Assholes

Jesus... these kids just get worse and worse every film...

This is a trick a lot of people use to try to have their cake and eat it, too. We want to have people get beaten, tortured, or killed in brutal ways, but to make sure the audience doesn't feel too bad about it we make sure it's abundantly clear these are bad people. Maybe it's the homophobic guy at the truck stop who beat up the gay server, or the woman berating the barista because her coffee wasn't just how she liked it. It might even be the schoolyard bullies that we see making other kids' lives miserable. Whoever it is, we give the audience an out. We let them know it's okay not to feel too bad for these characters... after all, they probably had this coming.

You can get away with that once, or maybe even twice in a horror story. Perhaps for the establishing kill to tease there's something wrong, and then a last, satisfying death before the conclusion (like the businessman who keeps trying to sell out the other, non-wealthy passengers in any survival horror movie where cooperation is literally the only way to get past the danger). All the other injuries, wounds, and deaths in the story, though? Don't shy away from those! Let them happen to people who seem to be nice, or good, or honest. Let the audience's guts clench, and their mouths drop open. It isn't horrifying to see someone you're invested in hating get torn apart by a werewolf... it's satisfying!

Don't be afraid to have bad things happen to good people. And don't stuff your story to the gills with people so actively terrible you can practically read the order they're going to die in like some kind of bizarre Hollywood tarot.

#3: Mistaking Cruelty For Horror

Go on... just put your foot in it!

Horror can be cruel, but cruelty is not inherently horrific. This is like that thing they taught you in math class about squares and rectangles. The problem is that a lot of people write stories that are nihilistic and empty in an attempt to be scary, but if the cruelty isn't reinforcing a message of some kind then it just results in an audience that went through an unpleasant experience without any kind of catharsis or purpose. Like eating spoiled devil's eggs just because you could, rather than to make a statement on gluttony, or the human condition, or about how we will go to lengths of astonishing self-harm under capitalism if that's what it takes to survive.

To take that last example and run with it, there's a beautifully grotesque short story in Clive Barker's The Books of Blood Volume 2 titled "Dread." If you haven't read the story or seen the film based on it, the short version is that a psychology graduate student is kidnapping people and subjecting them to the things they fear most to torture them. The reason is to try to understand the origin of fear, how it can be overcome, and where people's minds will break. Ironically these very acts end up creating the antagonist's worst fear, which was that he would be hacked to death by an insane clown with an ax. There is a scene early on in the story where the antagonist forces a vegetarian woman into a room, and locks her in with a perfectly-cooked steak. It is the only thing she will get to eat, but she fears the meat. The longer she waits, though, the more disgusting and spoiled the meal becomes, and the more she will need to eat it to survive.

Hunger eventually wins, and though the meat has gone rancid, she eats it out of desperation, too far gone for the fear to affect her any longer.

This scene is witnessed quickly in both text and film, but it isn't just pointless cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The experience shows that the villain of the story is willing to go to horrifying lengths because of his obsession, and that once someone becomes a subject they are no longer a person to him. Then, in a microcosm, the vegetarian's struggle with her own fear, and her de-evolution into a baser animal who does things to survive that her upper brain would never have allowed. It acts as foreshadowing for what's going to happen to our protagonist once he finds himself face-to-face with his own inner demons.

Yes, torture porn, I'm getting to you.

For those clearing their throat about to cite the many examples of stories where pointless cruelty is the thrust of the whole endeavor (the Hostel series comes to mind, for those seeking examples), I'd like to point out that even bleak horror stories that seem to have no rhyme or reason to their violence and brutality are often using that lack of reason to make a point.

Take the film Seven. It's a detective story about tracking down a killer who is obsessed with a deeper meaning, with purity, and with object lessons. In a very real sense the film is about the fragile nature of security, and how those who cannot or will not look at the bigger picture will be shattered when tragedy arrives on their doorstep, blood dripping off the hem of its overcoat. While at a glance it looks like nothing but a grotesque murder spree with allusions to faith, as Ryan Hollinger points out, its subject matter challenges our definitions of "realism," and what we expect from a narrative.

We see this in a lot of films. Hostel is about the drives of those with power to seek forbidden experiences, and how they never expect to be taken to task for the things they do. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has allusions to the lost generation who died in a pointless war in Vietnam, as well as criticisms of the meat industry and the cruelties it's responsible for. Even the outlandish A Serbian Film is making a political statement on how a particular ethnic group is portrayed in fiction, using the brutality and grotesque actions to create a parody of these stereotypes.

There is cruelty in all of these examples. That cruelty is in service of the narrative, however, and it's used to drive home what the stories are about, in addition to their actual plots. But just throwing cruelty into your story doesn't make it any more compelling, or any more inherently frightening. In fact, handled poorly, it can be the final nail that makes your audience walk away.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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