Fear Factory
The art of creating scary stories
Scary stories are fun. Scary stories are also polarizing.
You won’t find a fiction genre that elicits more divided opinions than horror. Some readers love horror stories and devour every scary story they can find. Other readers avoid the genre like a plague, insisting they don’t like reading horror stories because those stories give them nightmares.
Whether or not you like horror stories, you can’t deny the powerful influence they exert on modern literature.
Horror has endured as a genre from the days of Edgar Allan Poe to now by tapping into universal fears. An effective horror story offers an allegorical or metaphorical lens through which authors and readers can examine the nature of humanity. These stories explore deep-rooted fears and give them a tangible form.
Ingredients for Terror
Think about truly scary horror stories. What characteristics set them apart?
Setting immediately rises to the top of influential elements. Where the action occurs is crucial for driving the plot forward. Setting becomes an influential background character in a horror story. It molds atmosphere, hides or reveals key plot points, and influences character emotions and actions. That’s why places like haunted houses and dark forests are staples of many horror stories. Settings that tap into natural fears (such as darkness, isolation, abandonment, et al) are more consistently effective in conjuring up scares as a story unfolds.
Antagonists make or break a horror story. Memorable horror villains embody a specific fear or set of fears. Randall Flagg is a perfect example of this. Flagg is a major antagonist appearing in various forms through multiple Stephen King stories. What makes him frightening is how he embodies pure chaos. Flagg wants to destroy civilization. He wants to reign over every world and turn them into realms defined by carnality, violence, and darkness. Humanity collectively fears a breakdown of society, an existence where anything goes and evil rules the day. Flagg encapsulates that fear.
Strong protagonists are equally influential in the level of fear within a horror story. Stakes rise higher for a reader when they connect with a protagonist on a deeper level and become invested in their fate. Seeing those characters facing danger and possible death increases terror because the reader doesn’t want anything bad happen to them. That’s a reflection of human nature. We fear for and care about people we know and love much more than random strangers.
Symbolic horror
I enjoy writing science fiction stories and horror stories equally. The two genres might seem like an odd marriage on the surface. They are more alike thematically than you might think.
Science fiction and horror share a speculative nature. Both genres explore deeper questions about life, humanity, and the universe. The best stories in these genres invite you to examine the answers to those questions from a perspective you may not have considered before reading that story.
With horror, specifically, I find value in symbolism and meaning. Monsters are allegories of human nature. I like using those allegories to explore dark corners of human nature in my stories.
Pandora Reborn, for example, offers a cautionary tale about the perils of revenge and isolation. The main antagonist transforms from an innocent medieval maiden to a powerful and malevolent witch through an unchecked thirst for revenge. Her desire for justice is sympathetic, but what she does to obtain justice ultimately destroys dozens of innocent people over three different centuries and costs the witch her soul.
In Hell’s Shadow explores the line between love and abuse in a relationship. Kate suffers a car accident while traveling to meet Sarah for an intimate weekend together. Her accident and subsequent perils in an isolated mountain cabin symbolically mirror how Kate’s romance with high school boyfriend Bobby deteriorated. What started out as a happy and exciting journey toward true love turns into a nightmare ordeal from which she seeks an escape.
The best horror stories always contain deeper levels of meaning that will make a story and the characters driving that story resonate with a reader long after enduring a few scares.
Nicely done!