How To Write A Horror Story - 5 Ways to Scare Your Readers

How to Write a Horror Story
Horror is not just a remarkably diverse and visceral genre within which to write - it can also be one of the most difficult. The variety of emotional responses you can evoke is wide, as is the kind of experience demanded by different corners of the horror audience - from readers who crave little more than an onslaught of gory carnage, to those who shy away from graphic violence but love the skin-crawling atmosphere of a scary, slow-burn ghost story.
To help you mix up your scary stories, or gain a better handle on writing within the horror genre if you’ve rarely dabbled in it, here’s a helpful list of 5 ways to scare the pants off readers who dare to tread between the covers of your next hair-raising horror opus.
1. Beyond Fear: Evoke a Blend of Responses in Your Horror Story
It helps to understand the difference between horror-centric emotions. Fear and suspense are rooted in anxiety - the expectation that something bad will happen. Fear is the “what’s out there?” emotion - the response to something rustling in the bushes, to nearby footsteps in the dark or the sound of breathing coming from inside the closet. Something feels wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. That alone can be scary.
Panic and terror often follow fear, once the perceived or expected threat is made real. The monster leaps from the shadows, or the intruder is revealed… and the low throb of fear becomes immediate, adrenaline-pumping terror. The threat is there, it is real, and it must be escaped.
Disgust is another viable option - the visceral, gut-churning reaction to vivid bodily harm, grotesque mutations or simple common revulsion such as insects crawling from foodstuffs. These descriptions can be deviously fun to write, depending on your sensibilities and, of course, those of your readers.
For a varied experience, try mixing these types of horror across your scenes. Terror, for example, is often the shock “punch line” that helps break the oppressive nature of fear, giving your readers some temporary respite from the pressure while still offering the the kind of scary read they’re looking for overall.
Keeping an eye on the spread of angles from which you approach horror as an emotion helps avoid your story feeling inescapably one-note. After all, the last thing you want when writing horror is for things to feel bland or predictable. Horror thrives on the unexpected (which we’ll get to in just a few moments) - so make sure to mix it up.
2. Increase Their Heart Rate by Writing Short Sentences
In moments of terror, using short sentences will help you push your readers into a heightened state. Where a foreboding setup in horror fiction will likely be constructed of longer, dread-building sentences and paragraphs, this should change once your character makes the mental shift from fear into terror and panic.
Switching to a shorter structure will force your reader to take breaths more often, pulling them deeper into the scene and creating an experiential connection with the panic your character is going through. When writing horror, this gives you a second important kind of connection with your audience: you’re not only hooking into them in a logical and emotional way through the core concept of your horror story, but also in an experiential manner as part of the active reading experience.
3. The Horror of the Unexpected
Horror is often structurally compared with comedy, and for good reason. The success of both relies heavily on elements of misdirection, build-up and release, all the way to the ending.
To send your reader figuratively rocketing off their seat with shock...
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:55 Go For Multiple Emotional Responses
2:19 Increase Heartrate with Short Sentences
2:55 The Horror of the Unexpected
4:01 Corrupt Everyday Stories
5:05 Don't Skimp Out On Your Characters
6:19 The Twist