How to Write a Horror Story: Five Tips for Writing Horror Fiction
This article is part of a series. Check out the rest!
Everyone knows what a horror story is: a story created to repulse and/or frighten the reader (usually the latter). I’ve talked about this just recently. With that established, I think the next question to answer is how to actually do that. What are a few methods and tricks of the trade a writer can employ to make their scary story scary?
Atmosphere
A story’s atmosphere contributes a lot to whether or not it comes across as scary or horrifying. Atmosphere is admittedly a little difficult to define, but it can generally be described as the overarching tone and vibe of the story and its setting. Naturally, when writing a horror story, you want the atmosphere to be unnerving, tense and uncomfortable. There are a number of ways to achieve this.
Setting
In my opinion, there are only two real approaches to your horror setting. You can make your setting otherworldly and bizarre or you can make it mundane and twist it. I think most horror stories do blend these approaches to varying degrees, but one part is always going to be more prevalent than the other.
In all honesty though, I don’t think the former option is particularly viable. It’s possible and these stories are out there, but it’s difficult to do well for a host of reasons. Firstly, it isn’t easy to describe the indescribable and it’s not any simpler for your audience to convert such a description into mental imagery. Even Lovecraft, a writer famous for a mythos about incomprehensible eldritch horrors, largely drew on familiar elements and feelings to make his stories work. On top of this, you run the risk of straying into stories that feel silly and very Alice in Wonderland if you aren’t careful. At best, you end up with a fantastical story with darker elements or a world so oversaturated with horrors that the audience builds up too much tolerance for it. At worst, you end up with something that reads like nonsense and destroys immersion. Trying to maintain a good atmosphere for horror in a more outlandish setting is consigning yourself to walking on a tightrope the entire way and you’re more likely to fall off that make it to the other end without stumbling.
That leaves the other method, the mundane setting. This is my preferred setting choice for a horror story. I think that it not only is easier to do well, but it opens up the door for experiences that are actually far scarier than those that are nonsensical. Using a mundane setting for your horror lets you take the familiar and make it unfamiliar, take the safe and unsafe. Consider the haunted house. The reason it is such an enduring element of horror stories is because it takes the home, where you should feel safest and it makes it dangerous and deceptive. It takes the place where a character should be most in control and wrests control from their fingertips. A good haunted house story makes the reader question if they are as safe as they thought in their own home. It makes them want to leave the lights on so they can illuminate all those dark corners something could be hiding. It’s not just haunted houses that do this either: schools, parks, forests, shopping centres, airports, office buildings - any familiar location can be made into something far scarier than any otherworld by stripping the veneer of familiarity and security away and sprinkling in the dangerous and unknown.
I have said before that the best horror is a mixture of the certain and uncertain. This is simply taking that principle and applying it to your setting.
Language
Of course, just choosing your setting isn’t enough. A lot of it will come down to how you describe that setting. As a horror writer, your word choice is your selection of weapons to wield against your reader. Be descriptive about how things not only look but also sound, smell and feel. Choose words that conjure powerful imagery and carry specific connotations. In the same way that a hand being placed against a cheek can be a comforting or romantic gesture or something possessive and creepy depending on the way the action is described, so too can a location be a place of security or a place with an implicit threat.
A bedroom can be comfortable, clean and well-lit; a place of rest and relaxation. Or the light can be dim, flickering at inconsistent intervals and never quite reaching the corners properly. The floor can creak, the old pipes in the walls gurgle and grunt and the wind through the branches of trees outside the window can sound suspiciously like whispers and nails dragging on the glass. Maybe you’re never certain if that shape in the dark when you’re trying to sleep is just how the silhouette of your belongings looks in the moonlight or a figure watching you dream.
If you get really creative, you can even do the opposite and make bright, open places that would normally feel comfortable and safe scary by focusing on how vulnerable and unprotected they are. The words you choose have power. Taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar is the single best tool in the toolbox of a horror writer regardless of your medium. It’s what breeds the ominous atmosphere that makes a horror story thrive in a sea of competitors.
Suspense
Curiosity is a funny thing. Even when something horrific could be behind a closed door, the very fact that we can’t see it makes us compelled to look. Readers are people, and people are curious - we always want to know what is going on behind that door. As a writer, you can use this to your advantage. That is how suspense is created.
As I’ve talked before, suspense is essentially anticipation of what might happen, borne from anxiety or excitement about the possible outcomes of a given scenario. IT is the combination of the guarantee that something will happen, but without the guarantee of what. In the case of our mysterious door, perhaps there is a strange sound behind it. That sound could be something mundane, something dangerous or something beneficial. But there is no way to know without opening that door. Curiosity will compel the reader to turn the page to find out what is behind the door and the suspense generated between those pages is what makes the story engaging.
The same principle should be found all the way through a horror story. Whether it is a ghost, a monster, an alien entity or just a person with an axe; your readers should be certain that there is a threat present, but not certain how it will come for the characters. In a horror story, dread and suspense should be borderline synonymous.
Characters
I’m not going to say a lot here because various iterations of the same point, that your characters need to be compelling to keep your audience engaged, have appeared in my articles and podcasts ad nauseum at this point. Horror stories are still stories, so this point is going to hold true regardless.
That being said though, there is something additional to add to this axiom. While you can definitely make horror work with an unlikable protagonist, I think it is very easy for that to turn from horror into something resembling a revenge fantasy where the appeal isn’t in the fear but in the satisfaction of seeing someone who deserves it being afraid. If you want to be certain that your readers fear for the safety of your characters, it is more effective to make them likable or pitiable than an object of disdain.
The characters who the audience finds the most relatable and/or endearing are the ones they will want to see alive and unharmed the most. If a reader likes a character, they will keep turning the pages in the hopes of seeing them safe and sound at the end of the story. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about when I talk about dread and suspense being practically synonymous in a good horror story. Your audience will be anxious, dreading that their favourite character will be harmed on the next page but keep reading out of hope that they will see them survive and thrive.
Children make excellent subjects for horror for similar reasons. We are at our most uninformed and vulnerable in childhood and, because of this, we are socially conditioned to protect and shelter them from danger. Putting a child at the centre of a horror story is almost a cheat code since it triggers that instinct to protect in a lot of people, even though they are physically incapable of doing anything to change the trajectory of the story. So long as that kid isn’t intolerable anyway.
Either way, it all ties back into what I was saying in the last segment: curiosity, dread and suspense.
Research
Obviously, you should make a point to educate yourself about any factual elements of your story. If you’re writing about a story on a plane, you might want a basic understanding of how a plane works. If your monster is a bear, it will be helpful knowing how a bear typically behaves so you can decide when to draw on that and when to intentionally subvert it.
More to that point though, it is worth educating yourself about fear and horror specifically. I’ve talked plenty about certainty and the unfamiliar, but looking at what specific things typically cause people discomfort and fear is always a good idea. Fear is subjective, the same things won’t bother the same people. So, given this, you want to cast a wide net and play on common fears and phobias like acrophobia, claustrophobia, nyctophobia and the general fear of the unknown and uncontrollable.
Another good idea is to look at other horror media for inspiration. Consume plenty of horror books, games and movies yourself to see how other writers capitalise on those fears. Keep in mind what you find effective and what you would rather avoid and let it inform your approach.
Additionally, make a point of taking in a lot of other media too. You can learn a lot about storytelling by reaching outside of your own comfort zone and genres and can apply a lot of the lessons you take from identifying what you like and dislike about those stories too.
Creativity
I think it’s important to be honest about creativity in writing at this stage. I don’t necessarily mean creating something completely original and new. If you do develop something entirely unique and untouched, that is excellent. However, there are a lot of stories out there and only so many things most people will find fear in.
But this doesn’t mean that you should just rip off what your favourite horror stories do. Finding inspiration in the work of others is perfectly accessible - and as I said, important. However, you don’t want your own work to be read as derivative.
The writing market is oversaturated more now than ever, even for horror which was once considered a more niche genre. There are a lot of other horror stories for you to compete against.
So, when I tell you to be creative, I don’t mean to abandon the mundane parts of your setting that will make the unknown pop. I don’t mean to forgo research into other media. I also don’t mean that you have to use a premise nobody else has touched, because coming up with one is borderline impossible. But you should absolutely make a point of going against the grain in places. Your audience will know all the same tricks and tropes as you do, so play with those expectations. Add your own voice and perspective to common story elements like isolation, insanity, monsters and murders. The place to flex your creativity is in how you approach the story, not necessarily at your starting point for writing it. There are a million different serial killers in horror, but some of them stand out a lot more than others because of how their writers approach them.
Conclusion
Horror isn’t easy to write well. The subjectivity of fear plays a big part in that, but so does the saturation of stories available out there and your audience’s exposure to all the usual themes and tropes.
But that shouldn’t dissuade you from trying. There’s plenty you can do to stand out from the crowd and write a genuinely terrifying bit of fiction that will engross your readers and leave them scarred and desperate for more in equal measure. You just have to be willing to put the work in. I hope that this article can provide some helpful direction on that front, but I encourage you to read up on what other horror writers are saying too.
If you want to see some examples of my own horror stories, you can find them here. I also incorporate some horror elements into my books and have discussed horror fairly often on my podcast.
