This was presented at Horror at the Metcalfe 12 March 2014, co-organised by the NSW Readers Advisory Working Group

1. We are all afraid of the Dark!
- Writing a Horror Story
By Keith Whelan
Ways & Means Learning

2. Writing a Horror Story
Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story.
Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether
or not one is capable of overcoming those
things. It’s not all about severed heads or
blood-glutton vampires. It’s an existential
thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every
story this dark heart beats.

3. Writing a Horror Story
Horror is best when it’s about tragedy in its
truest and most theatrical form: tragedy is
born through character flaws, through bad
choices, through grave missteps. When the girl
in the horror movie goes to investigate the
creepy noise rather than turn and flee, that’s a
micro-moment of tragedy.

4. Writing a Horror Story
We know that’s a bad goddamn decision and
yet she does it. It is her downfall — possibly
literally, as the slasher tosses her down an
elevator shaft where she’s then impaled on a
bunch of fixed spear-points or something.

5. Writing a Horror Story
From Beowulf to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from
Greek myth to Horace Walpole, horror’s been
around for a long, long time. Everything’s all
crushed bodies and extracted tongues and doom
and devils and demi-gods.
This is our literary legacy: the flower-bed of our
fiction is seeded with these kernels of horror and
watered with gallons of blood and a sprinkling of
tears. Horror is part of our narrative make-up.

6. Writing a Horror Story
You want to see the simplest heart of horror,
you could do worse than by dissecting ghost
stories and urban legends: two types of tale
we tell even as young deviants and
miscreants. They contain many of the
elements that make horror what it is:
subversion and fear of the unknown.

7. Writing a Horror Story
We fear the unknown because we fear the
dark. We fear the dark because we’re
biologically programmed to do so: at some
point we gain the awareness that outside the
light of our fire lurks....
Horror often operates best when it plays off
this core notion that the unknown is a far
freakier quantity than the known. The more
we know the less frightening it becomes.

8. Writing a Horror Story
On the other hand, creating horror is easier and
more effective when the stakes are so plain
they’re on the table for all to see. We must know
what can be gained — and, more importantly,
what can be lost — for horror to work.
Fear is built off of understanding consequences.
We can be afraid of the unknown of the dark, but
horror works best when we know that the dark is
worth fearing.

9. Writing a Horror Story
Beneath plot and beneath story is a greasy, grimy
sub-textual layer of pacing — the tension and
recoil of dread and revulsion. Dread is a kind of
septic fear, a grim certainty that bad things are
coming.
Revulsion occurs when we see how these bad
things unfold. We know that the monster is
coming, and at some point we must see the
wretchedness of the beast laid bare. Dread,
revulsion, dread, revulsion.

10. Writing a Horror Story
Suspense and tension are key components to the
horror-making process. The best way to create these
things is to have characters you love making choices
you hate. When you see a beloved character about to
step toward the closet where the unseen serial killer is
hiding, your sphincter tightens so hard it could break
someone’s finger.
We recoil at mistakes made by loved ones, and this is
doubly true when these mistakes put their lives, souls
and sanities in danger.

11. Writing a Horror Story
Horror and humour, hanging out at the gym, snapping each
other’s asses with wet towels. Horror and humour both
work to stimulate that same place in our gutty-works, a
place that defies explanation. Sometimes you don’t know
why you think this thing is funny or that thing is scary.
They just are. It’s why it’s hard to explain a horror story or a
joke: you can’t explain it, you can only tell it.
And both are told similarly: both have a set up, ask a
question, and respond with a punch line or a twist. It’s just,
they go in separate directions — one aims for amusement,
the other for anxiety.

12. Writing a Horror Story
Horror’s once again a difficult genre. It had a
heyday in the 80s and 90s, evidenced by the
fact it had its very own shelf at most
bookstores. That’s no longer the case at book
stores. Some self-published authors have
pulled away from marketing their books as
horror because they sell better when labelled
as other genres.

13. Writing a Horror Story
Horror needs to work on you, the author. You
need to be troubled, a little unsettled, by your
own material. Write about what scares you.
Doesn’t matter what it is or how absurd —
hell, some people think that being terrified of
clowns is ridiculous!

14. Writing a Horror Story
Dig deep into your own dark places. Tear off the
manhole cover and stare down into the
unanswered abyss. Speak to your own
experiences, your own fears and frights. Shake up
your anxieties and let them tumble onto the
page.
Because horror works best when horror is
honest. The audience will feel that. The truth you
bring to the genre will resonate, an eerie and
unsettling echo that turns the mind upon itself.