Effective horror is not easy to write. Horror and comedy are very similar in how they are executed however written horror can be far harder to land than written comedy.
In theory they both work in the same way:
Set up: a situation occurs in which the reader needs to begin to feel an emotion.
Tension: that feeling is held and elongated until youre ready to pay off those emotions.
Punchline: something big happens in which the reader feels the fullest extent of the emotion intended. This is the section where written horror will always suffer.
With comedy you can easily make a reader audibly laugh, with horror in a written form you will not be able to make a reader jump with fear. Writers cant rely on jump scares and a consistent ambient soundtrack like you can with a horror game.
So to write good horror you need to turn elsewhere, as you are rarely going to “scare” a reader. I learned this while running horror tabletop roleplaying games, specifically Call of Cthulhu, as players and readers are very similar concepts.
To scare a reader, your goal is to unnerve them and make them remember something that made them uncomfortable, uneasy, or anxious. They arent going to jump and scream, instead theyre going to second guess themself the next time they see a shadow move in their room.
To set up good horror I follow 3 simple steps:
Change your voice: the moment I begin to set up a scare I change my authorial voice, I use shorter more visceral words replacing “she wandered down the hall, her eyes drifting from place to place” with “she walked, quickly. Her legs shaking, her eyes running around the shadows”. This change tells the reader that something is amiss and they will unconsciously notice it.
Darkening word choice: this ones rather simple, I change my descriptions from standard to uneasy. “The couch was burgundy leather with pillows at each arm” to “the couch was a red leather, dark as blood”
Remember your theme: whatever the main monster, killer, or general spooky of your text is needs to be given credence in every scare. This drills the pattern of fear forward. If your killer uses a knife, describe the glint of moonlight as blade like. If your monster eats flesh, describe food in detail and relate your characters emotions to grotesque foods.
Remember, you arent going to get a scream. Your goal is to make your reader anxious, uncomfortable, and make them look at their day to day life differently
After all
Meat is Meat
If you want some examples, check out my horror rp blog @research-duck
