HORROR
Under the horror fiction umbrella lurks dark fiction, psychological horror, dark fantasy, splatterpunk, thrillers (sometimes) and bizarro
HORROR:- the heroes break down, so they need to be described as feeling human beings
- heroes have real problems and do not need to be strong
- characters need to have real fears such as the fear of the dark or the fear of confinement or heights
- your main characters need to love each other because losing a person we lose hurts and it is one of the fears most wildly shared
- heroes need to have a past. Show them in their environment. Give them angst, a history of failure or disappointments. The reader needs to feel for them.
- the reader should care about thew heroes and feel close to them. Characterization is important because the reader can empathize with the characters enough to feel distressed and horrified when the characters are placed in threatening situations.
- do not give away the ending too soon. Create a good twist at the end.
- Always stay ahead of the reader and let them guess, but do not offer a jumbled series of events. Use the art of suspense.
- violence should be justified. Do not use blood just for the effect; it needs to be used strategically.
- use details to suggest something horrible will happen. For example, glass chard on the floor and a shoeless hero suggest the hero will cut his feet.
- surprise and shock the reader by inventing new situations
- create an atmosphere of bleak desperation and unreliable reality
- write a few gruesome/horrific scenes and only suggest others
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QUOTE:
"The three types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …” — Stephen King
RESOURCES:
Taylor, David. "How to Write Today's Horror. Part I: The Seeds of Horror." Writing World. <http://www.writing-world.com/sf/taylor1.shtml>
SUB-GENRES:
“Horror, for me, is the compelling Ôdon’t want to look/must look’ sense of awe we feel under the breastbone.”
–Mort Castle, author
Child in Peril: abduction and/or persecution of a child.
Comic Horror: dark humor.
Creepy Kids: kids, inhabited by a dark force, turn against adults.
Dark Fantasy: contains supernatural and fantasy elements.
Dark Mystery/Noir: detective story set in an urban underworld and bathed in crimes and moral ambiguity.
Erotic Vampire: graphic description and violence.
Fabulist: objects, animals and natural forces deliver a moral lesson.
Gothic: haunted, atmospheric tale with decay and ruins especially castles but can also be moral decay with imprisonment and persecution.
Hauntings: possession by ghosts, demons or poltergeists.
Historical: set in an historical period.
Magical Realism: something peculiar pops into normal, real-life settings.
Psychological: disturbed human psyche.
Quiet Horror: atmosphere and mood create fear and suspense.
Religious: religious icons and mythology (Examples: Dante’s "Inferno" and Milton’s "Paradise Lost").
Science-Fiction Horror: SF with a darker, violent twist with mad scientists and alien invasions (Example: "V").
Splatter: gory.
Supernatural Menace: a tale where normal rules are reversed. Contains ghosts, demons, vampires and werewolves.
Technology: stories in relations with computers, cyberspace, and genetic engineering.
Weird Tales: strange and puzzling (Example "Twilight Zone").
Young Adult: teen related.
Zombie: dead people who wake up or cannot die.