Hey Bell, do you have any tips on how to write horror well without it being ineffective or too much? I’ve been writing a horror based campaign but it’s really difficult to write in a way that will impact players and not feel forced for shock value.
Hmmmm well I think the most important thing when it comes to horror and suspense is drawing out tension. If you do a bunch of scary stuff or jump scares right off the bat, that doesn't really frighten people in the long term, it just startles them in the moment. But creating a creepy or tense atmosphere and then drawing out the horror, making people anticipate it and then still get scared by it, that's the kind of stuff that I think works best when it comes to horror. And think about why each thing is scary, not just that it's something horrifying in appearance or something surprising or awful but that it has a larger, preferably story-relevant reason to be frightening. There's also the thing of horror as not just scares but as lingering fear-- not just things that scare you in the moment, but things that sit with you because they're disturbing, or they hit on some personal or social fear. Those can be just as terrifying if not more so than someone jumping out from a wardrobe with an axe.
I'll use Crimson Peak as an example, since I rewatched it recently and I think it does this pretty well for a supernatural horror film. Spoilers, obviously, but I encourage you and anyone else to watch the movie regardless if you haven't before.
There's some creepy moments early on in the film, with the appearance of Edith's mother as a ghost scaring her as a child and then as an adult, giving her a very oblique warning and just generally looking terrifying, and the fright of watching Edith's father die is also quote unquote scary (that scene is actually very cool, I do love the tension of it even if it's relatively short-term). But those aren't nearly as horrifying as the ghosts that appear later in the film-- namely, Thomas' dead wives. As soon as Edith and the audience start to put the pieces together about how dangerous the Sharpes are, these figures become even more frightening, because now you know where they came from. They aren't just mindless, unnamed, horrifying red ghosts. They're women who were used and killed by the Sharpes, thrown into the clay to be forgotten, and now they're haunting Edith to tell her she needs to get away before she becomes just like them. The tension gets drawn out with these figures and with the overall horror of the house and of Thomas and Lucille's behavior. Edith knows, increasingly, that she must leave, but she's been poisoned to such an extent that she's too weak and is now trapped there because of the storm. She knows she's in danger, knows what her future will be if she stays, and she knows all of this because of the information she finds and the ways that things slowly become known to her. And on the point of the horror of lingering fear, I think there's a few great examples here as well-- the horror that Edith thought she was escaping, in finding a man who did respect her writing and didn't dismiss her, but instead fled straight into the arms of a man who intended to use her and then get rid of her, with little real respect for her talents and her agency. The horror of what Thomas and Lucille have done, over and over again, and of their relationship, and the horror in that final scene where Lucille turns and sees her brother's ghost and knows what she did to him, that she turned him into another ghost in spite of all she'd fought to do to protect him and their life together. It's scary! It's tense! It all sticks in your brain in a horrifying but fun way, and I think that's what good horror ought to do.
So in terms of more concrete tips, I think one good thing to keep in mind is to slowly let players know what the threat is. Not at first, not all at once, but as they learn more and more about what horror might face them, then they'll be able to have that rise in tension and then get more and more scared (but also more and more prepared!) as they go on. Dig into the horror elements of what you're writing-- what makes each thing scary? What makes it stick as something even more horrifying then it seems on first glance? Think of those ghosts in Crimson Peak, here, and also, as another example, of the sources in OSNF (if you've watched it; if not but you plan to, you'll understand it when you get there!). What at first glance is just a horrifying image then becomes more and more terrifying as you think about what's behind it, what led it to happen, what horrible consequence it is that this thing exists. Horror is much more frightening when you know what created those awfully long limbs and what made those teeth grow so sharp; horror is, in a way, good worldbuilding.
In general I think it's good to look at what horror media you enjoy and figure out what makes it interesting and scary to you, and work from there, but I hope some of this is helpful for you!
