Horror Stories

Whether it is a ghost story told before bedtime or the latest Stephen King novel, horror stories have always been popular.  Horror stories can mix easily with other genres – they might be written for children, take place in a fantasy world, or even incorporate romance.  While ghosts, demons, and vampires may be popular fixtures of many horror stories, other horror stories terrify readers by seeming eerily realistic and possible.  In fact, it’s usually the horror stories that seem closer to real life that have the power to scare us the most.

 

Writing Horror Stories

The hardest part about writing horror stories is probably the part that seems the most obvious: they need to be scary, creepy, or disturbing in some way.  While it might be tempting to use violence, blood, or creatures popping out of hiding places to scare your readers, a story full of tricks like that probably won’t hold anyone’s interest for too long.  Horror stories, like all good stories, still need to focus on strong characters with whom we can relate.  Here are some suggestions to get you started.

  1. Who or what is your main character?  Is it a lonely vampire?  Is it a family man?  A high school student?  A serial killer?
  2. What is happening to your main character or in your main character’s life that is strange?  Horror stories usually start off with some odd coincidences or some unexpected weird events that suddenly become terrifying.  Is your character receiving letters from someone who seems to know a lot about them?  Has your character started hearing noises outside their door at night?  Does your character wake up with blood on their hands and no memory of what happened?  Be creative – what would be creepy if it happened to you?
  3. How does your character respond to these events?  Do they tell people, but find that nobody believes them?  Do they try to keep it secret?  Do they try to investigate these events on their own?  With their friends?
  4. Horror stories often surprise us with many twists and turns.  How could you shake things up in your story to keep your reader on edge?  Do the noises the main character hears at night suddenly stop – and phone calls with heavy breathing on the other end start?  Do the letters that seemed so eerily knowledgeable about the main character suddenly start making mistakes about them – and make the character wonder who the letters are really for? 

Keeping your reader guessing about what’s behind the terrifying or unnerving events in your story will make every twist and turn even scarier – but if you throw your reader off too much, they might feel pushed away.  For example, you don’t want to include a twist that makes the whole story just a bad dream – your reader will feel cheated, and you won’t be doing your own story justice.  Remember, if it scares you, you’re on the right track.

 

Example of a Horror Story:

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson - [ CLICK HERE for LINK ]