Most of my story ideas mostly fall into this category. The creepy, eerie tale of a pony facing an incessant fear of something of the unknown. But how do you write good Horror? I want to grasp the reader's inner fear and allow them to turn their head back and check if their safe. Any advice?

2120294

Fear of the unknown is a good thing to use

2120294
Find what scares you. For me, it's the fear of drowning.

2120294
Read my dark/horror story. It has 53 up votes and 1 down. Tell me if it helps you any.
Facility 0013

2120294 It's all in the description. One good way is to be mysterious and give as much sensory details as possible. There are other ways but this is the best advice I can give.

2120303

Hmm... I like this advice. I'll keep it in mind.

2120297

Me too....

2120299

I'll give it a read later.

2120294

Horror has been reduced to a science.

It's not directly relevant to writing (in fact it discusses gaming instead) but here's a video that talks about the fundamentals of making people evacuate their bowls.

They work across all mediums, it's just a question of figuring out how to apply them.

2120297 Did you know that it's physically impossible to kill yourself by asphyxiation (choking yourself) and holding your head underwater till you pass out.
Mostly because you're mind is wired so that it won't let you drown yourself on purpose.

Yay for College Psychology classes I'll never use again!

Well, first of all, you need to make things amount to something and not just add cruelty and death for the sake of it. Second, I think what really drives horror especially, is a sence of helplessness. You need to create a situation which is difficult, or rather nigh-impossible to solve with the means the characters have.

You need something, a character, an event, something that presents a threat to them. It doesn't have to be immediate, nor does it have to be fatal, it just has to be something that is really-really bad towards your protagonist. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, unless the dark story is about a descent into evil (and maybe even then), give the reader someone to root for. A lot of horror stories fail because you're simply not invested in the characters and as such, when they die or are hurt, you don't care because it's just something that happens, it doesn't affect you. Get the reader invested, create something they can hope for.

2120294 Try using different existing phobias and blow them waaay out of proportion.

2120294
Fear of the unknown, you say? I'd like to introduce you to a man named H P Lovecraft.

My favourite horror author of all time. His stories basically portray mankind as clutching onto the last rock of sanity in a torrential sea of the horrors he can't see or understand.

Oh, we doing shameless self-promotion now? Well, my Twilight Sparkle: Night Shift has been praised for its horror elements. Granted, the focus is more on the adventure part while the [Dark] tag is merely a supplement, but still. Also, with 400+ likes to 15 dislikes, it's much cooler than that other one.

Seriously though: the key to good horror is suspense. You want your reader to be afraid, not scared. Being afraid lasts a long time. Being scared is a one-time thing. Don't shove a monster in their face and go "boo! be scared now!" but instead give them reasons to be afraid of that thing. Good description goes hand-in-hand with good buildup.

Also, I always recommend anyone who wants to learn about the art of suspense to watch the movie The Machinist. That, to me, codifies good suspense.

Ultimately, your usual stories nowadays are power fantasies with happy endings: if the hero is smart or strong enough, they can overcome even impossible odds! Horror, on the other hand, is about disempowerment. The hero is helpless. The hero is a victim. And no matter what they try -- no matter what they come up with -- things always get worse, either by their own mistakes or through unfortunate happenstance.

In case you were interested, I found a website with some of Lovecraft's stories.

Here

Some of my favourites are "The Statement of Randolf Carter", "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Whisperer in Darkness"

(They're pretty short, too)

2120294
A lot of people with say to write something big or something unknowable. In my opinion, that's not the best way to do something like this. Mysteries are great, but they're just that; they have their flaws. A mystery lives and breathes on the build up. Few stories can survive not having their mysteries revealed, and that reveal needs to live up to the hype.

In effect, and in extreme, you're trying to pull a Shyamalan.

If you're writing the unknowable, then you have the same issues. Something that great and powerful is, at best, an esoteric concept. The weakest Great Old One in the Cthulhu mythos is so much beyond what we can't even comprehend the scope of it beyond 'eats everything.' Which, granted, was kind of what Lovecraft was going for. Consider the same in even in more recent stuff, such as comic books, the Event in Watchmen or Galactus in Marvel. On their own, they're ideas. The effects of their passing are concepts that are generically 'bad' in our minds.

Horror, and even dark, is about the human cost. If you follow the recently popular anime or manga Attack on Titan, then you'll get what I mean better, but just the same: The story centers around giant human-like monsters that eat people and there's one walled, giant (some 500 km across, I think) left. A disaster requires the government to send out 20% of their population to try and retake lost territory, but it was really done to thin the population so everyone didn't starve. Almost no one returned.

Ugly, dark, but an idea.

The then POV character stares numbly as a fellow soldier (someone we've known as a minor character for a while) tried desperately to revive her fiance. After a minute or two, the camera pans over to reveal he's been bitten in half and ends just below the ribcage and she's still trying to perform CPR; that's horror.

So, among the other advice here, I'd recommend trying to keep things grounded and human. If you draw a line between acceptable and not, right and wrong, it's not the thing a mile past that really gets us, that's just a concept. It's the thing just one step over, that we either understand or very nearly do that frightens us the most.

Distort the familiar, probe the unknown, make the character unwilling to remain in the present moment. Sensory data is more important than the actual emotions (show, don't tell). Read horror stories/watch scary movies. Imagine the worst thing that could happen to you, then make it happen to your character.

Avoid passive tense at all cost: things need to happen suddenly. Don't kill the hope quickly, but make it crawl for it's life, with its knees broken. Gore doesn't equal scary: a drop of blood on a handkerchief can be infinitely times more distrubing than a gallon of it spread over a wall.

2120404

Mine are Dogan , Call of Cuthulu (naturally) and, at The Mountains of Madness.

2120440
I forgot about The Mountains of Madness - that's a good one.

2120334
Slightly wrong ...

2120495 1) Close enough...
2) Does it look like I care? I passed the class with a C.
3) It was five years ago... don't expect me to remember something I don't care very much about.

Horror in stories can go one or either two directions. One, the reader is faced with something so omnipotent, so evil and scary that they in the characters place would run away as quickly as possible (amnesia the dark descent)

Two. The reader is faced with a familiar form of horror, drug dealing, kidnapping, murder, rape. The list is endless really. So once again, when faced with this the reader wants to hide under a couch (stephen king horror)

Or the way for complete twats.
Fill a story with as much gore as possible, but make it in no way subtle or relatable (dead space)

Ofc the first two only work if written well. But thats basically my point of view.

2120294

I want to grasp the reader's inner fear and allow them to turn their head back and check if their safe.

I remember getting just that feeling while reading House of Leaves. Which, personally, I think any fan of creepy-ass shit should read. Or hell, any writers at all. Just for how interestingly it plays with formatting to give a certain feel.

In any case, there it was just literally a matter of the 'author' describing his own fear. The feeling like there was some horrific thing hovering just behind them, in the dark. That if they made any move. Any sound. Any turn. They would meet a horrible fate.

You couldn't help but just deal with the badness, just by virtue of empathy. And trying to imagine the feeling.

2120294

To put it bluntly: write something that you don't want to write, or even know about. Something that makes you really uncomfortable, and goes against everything that you are willing to accept.

Here's an example: I tend to dislike a story with Rarity in it if she is portrayed in a negative light, especially when it's the usual "she is a fussy and unpleasant bitch"-thing. However, the deeper someone delves into this, making her portrayal more and more sinister, then it gradually becomes less annoying and a whole lot more disturbing to read, since at that point you favorite character is being "corrupted" instead of just mocked. Disturbing in a good way, that is. After all, a good "dark" story is meant to be like that.

Thus if I wanted to write something really nasty, then I would have to go for something that makes even me feel horrible. And what better to have a go at than the very thing that I hold dear?