Smart Girlfriend Is Writing A Blog Series On Horror, You Should Read It · 9:26pm Jun 15th, 2016
You like my words? This lady is the brain behind half of them. Check out part one here.
I've been a lurker, commenter, and contributor on this site for about three years now, and in between the endless crossovers, the adventures, and everything else I've found improbably connected to ponies, real horror is probably the rarest thing I've seen.
That's also a damn shame, because the fantastic setting of Equestria has plenty of concepts that seem ripe for mining. The Everfree is just beyond the borders of Ponyville, after all, and there have to be more things lurking in there than timberwolves, cockatrices, and humans with assault rifles. Princess Celestia has surely encountered terrifying things in her millennia-long reign. There are real monsters within this realm, and real magic- who is to say that such magic doesn't contain terrifying secrets, or that there are beasts no one has yet discovered? It would only take the barest of tweaks in some cases to turn an oblique reference from the show into something terrifying.
All right! Got to give it a read; horror is an interesting genre, but also a tricky one. I think that more than any other, it requires the reader's cooperation to work. You have to be willing to play along, to let yourself to be scared, for most horror to work. Getting that cooperation is the tricky part.