Four Key Creep Factors to Get the Frights Just Right
By Nancy Merritt Bell
Fright flick master John Carpenter, who terrorized the big screen for the last 50 years with movies like The Fog and most of the Halloween movies, closed in on the power of the horror genre when he said, “What scares me is what scares you. We’re all afraid of the same things. That’s why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you’ll know what frightens me.”
The universality of horror stories in film and also fiction, in classics like Dracula and Frankenstein, and favorites such as Carrie and Mexican Gothic, also allows this popular genre to cross all ages, generations, and backgrounds. With this huge reach, horror fiction is extremely lucrative. It’s even more profitable these days with dozens of subgenres that we can choose from to give us our own particular chill from A to Z: literally, from Apocalyptic to Zombie Horror. (FYI there are as many as 20 known horror subgenres) Add to that diversity the thousands of subjects on offer from a world that gives us much to worry about, especially among younger readers. As a result, horror sales doubled in the last two years due to an exponential demand from Gen Z and Millennial readers.
Writing a good horror story that has fans screaming for more, that even makes the best seller shelf, is a very scary proposition. I say this as an editor who adores editing horror: it is the most demanding genre to work on. I’ll read a horror manuscript 20 times in various drafts, and while tweaking and tuning, make sure I’m still utterly terrified every time I read it. So, if a horror story stands up to 20 and more readings, with analysis and edits, and it still sends chills, to me that’s a great horror story.
Chief among the creep factors in making a horror story great is that in writing it you scare yourself. These days when it comes to terrifying topics you select to be your book’s world and theme there is almost too much to choose from, be it climate change, AI, influencers, haunted data centers, or even the popularity of tiny dogs. The chill you feel personally transmits directly to the reader. It certainly worked for Mary Shelley, who was terrified by the concept of bringing the dead back to life through electrification, or “galvanism”, which had fascinated the poet, her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was this electronic resurrection which inspired Shelley to write Frankenstein, a book which continued to give her nightmares as she revealed in the introduction to the 1831 edition: “Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator.”
Frankenstein caught on fast with readers because Shelley had caught the 1818 galvanism zeitgeist, or should that be “fright-geist”. It’s a classic horror model, but timely concepts and new monsters give horror fiction an immediacy that reinvigorates the genre, and when you give to the genre, it gives back. Sure, old monsters are still given new life and so we may always read about more Draculas and nasty vampires, even friendly ones such as in the Twilight series, and these days there are enough haunted houses to fill Texas. But a new domain or force or monster, like an influencer who knows your thoughts and dreams and has tapped into your psyche, becomes an unknown and mysterious manifestation of modern wickedness. And that piles on the creep factor!
With the emergence of this strange influencer, or a force, or haunted abode (even a haunted hospital), there comes the demand for a smart protagonist to solve the maleficent mystery. One of the first of these characters was Dracula’s Mina Harker (née Murray): she tirelessly recorded all the comings and goings of the strange, old Count, and, like a mystical detective, she ultimately exposed the vampire’s undying thirst for blood. Mix this kind of lead character in with a bit of monster and you get a powerhouse horror heroine like the title character Carrie in Stephen King’s Carrie. Strange and savvy leads keep us reading through the night as we ride the hope that they will discover in time how the manifesting horror can be defeated, or survived, maybe even understood, or even tame it if they also happen to be the monster.
Horror fiction lends itself handily to film and TV, the current proof being the excellent adaptation of Carrie to the small screen. There is a powerful visual and audible life given to horror stories on screen, big or small, that lets us hear the monster crawl up through the rotting basement doors as they creak open, or see it creep up behind the unwitting victim, then see the victim’s blood splash all over when they are attacked. These tense and terrifying events are viscerally created through chilling descriptions in works of fiction, the more physical the better. It’s prose that really holds horror stories together. Reading the works of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and the classics of horror offer the best lessons in thrills and chills of creepy prose, even if the lessons keep you up for a few nights. Even scarier are the works of the new horror masters, like The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias, or I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones, or anything by any of the recent Bram Stoker Award winners.
At BookGo, we have a few works of horror in development, and they are keeping me up at night. I’ll keep you updated.
