Do you have any advice in writing horror?

'Yes, I actually do, wow!'

do you have any advice in writing horror?

SHOW, DON’T TELL, BUT MOSTLY FEEL. This feels more like just generic writing advice, but I feel like it’s especially important when one is writing horror. It’s not enough to say that a woman is standing in a red room. You have to place the reader in the room, engage all of their senses. Talk about the texture of the walls, the floors, the smell (and, by extension, that gross back of the mouth feeling some smells give you), all that can be heard and felt against the skin and in the mind. Really put yourself into the room. If you as a writer can’t see it, your reader most definitely can’t.

FOCUS ON THE HAUNTING, NOT THE SCARY. A lot of horror flops, in my opinion, because the author/director/whoever is focusing on what makes people jump and not on what makes people shiver. A quick flash of a scary face is scary for that one second. Having a monster chase you is scary, a serial killer is scary, a ghost is scary, but what’s underneath it? Nothing, in most cases. Think, truly, about what terrifies you. What’s the sort of horrible, horrifying thing that sticks with you, that makes it hard for you to sleep? Change the focus from the scary face in plain view to the scary face just out of sight, lingering on the edges. With horror, the less you know is better (though, side note, can we not be like H.P. Lovecraft and just point to vague somethings that make people lose their minds? People want to see the horrible, maddening creature! Describe the creature!), and the more you write what makes you anxious instead of what makes you scream, the more your horror Hits.

Alfred Hitchcock sucks, like he was a terrible man, but he had a point with his bomb under the table quote.

SS OUT AND GORE ARE NOT SUBSTITUTES FOR SUBSTANCE. This is the most important in my opinion. Lots of horror fails because there’s this huge focus on grossness and gore, violence without substance. Reading a Stephen King novel to read about minorities being savagely murdered is the norm. A horror film flashing near-pornographic images of white women and Black men being brutalized is what most people think of when they think of horror. While I do like to see a little gore in my horror (hello, who would ever turn down buckets and buckets of fake blood/the imagery of rooms awash with red!), mindless violence and gross-out shots of killing CANNOT and IS NOT a substitute for truly intriguing horror. If you have to lean on grossness to tell a story, the story is either a) not worth telling or b) you’re not the person to tell it.

BE MINDFUL OF WHO’S HAUNTING WHO. Oh, no, wait, this is the most important. Horror, historically, has been a very racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and misogynistic genre. Up until recently, horror has been ruled by cishet white men (and cishet white women). Every “classic” horror novel and movie I can think of has some instance of overt anti-Blackness and misogyny. It’s a trope, at this point, that the Black person dies first, that the woman who has sex is the woman who gets cut to bits. The villain is always disabled in some shape or form, “crazy” in that vague way that punches down at the schizophrenic and people with psychosis.

So, be careful! Be mindful about what you write, be careful about who’s doing the stabbing and who gets stabbed. Is your villain an ableist trope? Do the people of color suffer for the sake of suffering? If a marginalized person read your piece, would they feel seen and safe, or would they feel targeted? Make conscious decisions with your writing because nothing exists in a vacuum, and every choice has a reason behind it, you feel?