How to Write a Horror Story

Writing a story is hard enough, but writing a story that will scare people is even harder. It takes imagination, visualization, punctuation, a work station, basically, anything that ends in 'tion'. But let's not get caught up in details.

When I sit down to write a horror story I have to remember that it's all about mood. I need to make absolutely certain that I set a dark, scary tone for the reader to be drawn into. This means there should be no light of any kind during the telling of my story. It takes place at night, in a cellar or basement, and the main character is blind. These three elements are key to creating a terrifying setting, and no successful horror story has ever been written without them. It's as simple as that. When my character bumps into a chair, they can't know it's a chair, they have to wonder if it's possibly a dead moose carcass. Think about it like this, if the protagonist walks into a well lit room, sees a chair on the other side, and walks over and runs into it, where's the suspense? Chairs are only scary if you don't know it's a chair, otherwise, it's just a chair. Writing a horror story is all about creating illusions with furniture.

Once I've established the perfect scary setting for my story, it's time to include some blood. This is an essential element to any horror tale. It creates a sense of urgency, and the more of it there is, the better. That's why I always have my blind basement character trip and fall into one of those little kiddie pools just filled with the stuff. As they struggle to get out of this horrific pool, they now have to wonder, did they trip over a roller skate, or someone's severed hand? See what I'm doing here? I'm turning a simple, everyday item into something terrifying, just like I did with the chair. Remember, a roller skate isn't scary on it's own, but if it might be a severed hand, now we have something to worry about.

Now that I have all of the elements needed to create a horror story, I have to bring in some twists. And, just like the blood, the more the better. Twists are necessary because they keep the reader guessing. Not only that, but if I let the reader assume one thing about something, and then change what they thought they knew, now they're going to have to question everything, and questions are scary.

Let's take my blind basement character again. Let's say he is walking around and all of a sudden decides that the moose carcass he ran into earlier wasn't a moose, but just an exercise bike. This is horrifying because now the reader wonders what else isn't what they were led to believe it was. They'll try to think about what other twists there might be, but won't be able to because they'll be too shocked by the bike. Imagine how scared they'll be when they find out the severed hand was just a power drill, and instead of tripping into a pool of blood, the main character decided he actually just fell in a puddle. Had enough? I hope not, because the protagonist wasn't even blind or in a basement, but just some dude walking around in his fully lit garage at high noon. Talk about terror.

Great, my horror story is really starting to shape up. I've included a dark setting, blood, and twists. The last thing I have to do is end it with a bang. Something that just blows the reader away. To accomplish this, what I'm going to do is make the entire story I just told into a dream that the main character had. That's right, nothing in the story was true, and now that the protagonist is awake, they realize they really are blind, in a dark basement, and with not one, but two pools of blood.

If I know how to write a horror story like I think I do, this ending will leave my audience gasping for air. I will have successfully rattled their mind, and it's not quite over, because now the main character has woken up for the second time, for real now, and he's just lying comfortably in his bed, or is he? I will go through and have the main character "wake up" as many times as I want, all while sending chills up and down my audience's spines as they wonder if he's truly awake this time, or if the story is just getting more twisty. If it was horror they wanted, they got it. But now I'm guessing they wished they hadn't wanted it. It's that scary.