How do I write spooky horror stories?

>>9427836
Some great writer said some shit like: (and I'm paraphrasing here) Man's oldest and basic emotion is fear and the oldest, most basic fear is fear of the unknown. Most of the appeal of spoopy stories like Alien or The Thing is that both the characters and Audience have very little information about what is lurking around the corner. All the gore and screams can happen later. But reveal your antagonist slowly and shroud it in mystery for the most effect.

>>9427836
>>9428205
unexplained, mysterious, primal urge things are fucking scary. Incomprehensible things.

>>9428205
Lovecraft said that.

>>9427836
>>9428205
Fear of the unknown is boring, don't do that. That only made sense in Lovecraft's day when people were spooked by new findings in science. Unless your writing for dumb people, don't pretend that contemporary readers of horror are actually spooked by impossible to explain terrors. The possible, the probable, the mundane sinister are the trinity of the new horror, though most readers will be put off by the idea that it's not to be found in the usual places, but instead is just randomly clicked. You'll find that you can write yourself into horror better than you can write a horror these days, which is to say you're best bet is to not go searching else where for a new head to see when you don't much use the one you have for site. I wouldn't be bothered about that too much though.

>>9429247
>spooked by impossible to explain terrors
That's not what fear of the unknown means. The Xenomorphs in Aliens are explainable, but when they're first introduced we don't know what they are. They're a terrifying unknown variable that poses a threat.

think of every scary story you've every read. it's only scary when you don't have answers. once the monster is revealed, once you see it, once it's shown to be a particular man behind the mask, once you seen the monster, IT'S NO LONGER SCARY

>>9429256
Yeah I more so meant that as knock at Lovecraft's prose along with implying that fantasy horror is ridiculous camp and that horror fiction in general is dead and will not come back to life in lit mags nor on book store shelves. I enjoy campy horror, but the word horror has been sadly levelled and the effects of horror literature have been so debased that it has become more than necessary to move on in the sake of inhumanity to other methods of production and dissemination. If I understand as you do that the fear of the unknown is a question of variables, than the greatest of such variables that can be played with in something marked fiction has far too little range for contemporary readers - though you'll still get people who get the shivers from a Stevie King novel. I'm only suggesting to not look backwards completely, but to look elsewhere for examples. How the story is written is much less important than how it is disseminated if you're looking to produce true horror.

>>9427836

The horror genre in almost every medium is sort of overblown, and very few works of art succeed at embodying horror. For example in my mind a lot of horror greats are really just good stories that happen to deal with the macabre, paranormal, or fantastical, and have a more dark and serious atmosphere.

It is not enough to have a "horrible" or terrifying subject matter, and it isnt enough (as some critics and even posters in this thread have claimed) to properly time when information is being revealed to the audience. Proper timing in this way is essential to any kind of story telling, not just horror, and if you do it properly you will have a good story but not necessarily a horrifying one.

The really essential component of good horror is transgressiveness. The audience must be kept from staying a safe distance away from the art object. You must create an impression in them of real danger, that they are experiencing something blasphemous, inhuman, and malevolent. The fantastical element present in many works of horror is a misstep many horror writers have taken over the years. It is hard to transgress the boundaries of the medium and genuinely frighten people if your subject matter is something distant to the audience, but still possible.

Almost no horror critics talk about what Im saying and don't seem to understand it. They are mesmerized by a bunch of other arbitrary things and can't wrap their minds around what makes the really successful horror stuff genuinely frightening.

>>9429247

This post is basically a collection of dogmas about horror and lovecraft's work that horror critics have written over the years and which have been repeated uncritically ever sense, especially the idea that lovecraft's stories were scary because, "people were spooked by new findings in science" and that his subject matter was "impossible to explain terrors". Lovecraft's subject matter wasn't impossible to explain terrors, and those subjects weren't what made the stories scary. I have no idea where this idea that people found lovecraft's stories scary because of recent findings in science comes from. Like I said it is dogma. Speaking of dogma, and uncritically repeating things....

> The possible, the probable, the mundane sinister are the trinity of the new horror
What does this even mean?

>>9429247
>Fear of the unknown is boring,

confirmed for 17-year-old proto-chad with a gun fetish.

right now there is an amoebic parasite lodged in your prostate. it got in there the last time you went swimming. and it's growing. you'll find out more if you ever have sex.

Talk about the horror of metaphysical concepts. Ontological horror or some shit like that, I don't know.

>>9427836
Pervasive sense of despair or hopelessness. Write pathetic characters who rise up only to be squashed back down. Give them no real chance.

>>9429489
You'ree gonna want Ligotti for that. I think he's the only person who's really done much with ontological horror, specifically the Red Tower (which infers that creativity is both a blight and boon on the universe, a cancer which keeps trying to spread throughout it) or maybe look at his other two short stories
Dr. Nobody's Discussions on Horror and
How To Write A Horror story. Or whatever it's called. Both are great.

Outside of that...Ontological horror is very difficult because you're trying to say that the very nature of reality is innately horrifying and awful and not even Lovecraft ever went that extreme. It's a very rare slant to take from what I've seen in writing but I would look for stories about Gnostic horror as well. Might have some luck.

>>9429522
The Kafka/1984 approach?

>>9427836
The best horror writers don't focus on story. They focus on transmitting emotions and entertainment to the reader. The ones that I've seen consistently do the best like Blackwood, Lovecraft, Ligotti, Ito and Hill hit their peak when they focus less on the why or how and more on the what and who.

You don't need to explain how or why things are going on. What you need to do is invest the reader in your characters and I've found the best way to do that is emotions > logic, not logic > emotions.

Now, when you're writing a horror story, the most important thing to decide with it is what kind you want to tell. Do you want a ghost story, a splatterpunk story, a realistic horror story, a cosmic horror story or a stylistic horror story? What emotions are you trying to convey to your reader?

I've also found with horror that the best tension relievers are tragedy/dark comedy and NOT action. Tragedy and dark comedy aren't empowering but action is. Quiet moments can also work but they also provide relief...And ideally, your horror story shouldn't be so long that you need relief.

Structure your scares and your entire story like this
Uncertanity >>> Fear >> Dread >>> Revulsion > End
Uncertanity and Dread are the two chief times to build up the emotional response you're looking for.

If you're creatively starved of ideas, it also helps to cast a foreign concept through your own cultural lens; e.g., take japanese/indian/islamic horror stories and cast them through the lens of western cultural context. Bloodborne, My Work Is Not Yet Done, The Ring and The Wendigo all do this to excellent effect and it's why they are all fresh without ever using necessarily new, untested ideas. Alien also does this but by using scientific ideas, such as parasitoids, and putting them through a cosmic horror context.

Hope that helps.

>>9429247
>Fear of the unknown is boring, don't do that.
That's all I read

>>9429367
No, you're right, his subject matter wasn't impossible to explain terrors. That was the formal device he used to evoke sensations, and that's what I was attempting to make fun of: oh the terror I can barely express to my gentle reader...it is so, so, so ungodly, strange, and beautiful, and also it is not possible to put into words what it is, but I must state only facts to you.

You can debate why people found his story's scary if you want, but the history is out there about superstitious readers. I'm not denying the economic and racial elements, but only pointing to the general horror readership since Lovecraft's time. The movement from Lovecraft to Ligotti is reflected in Ligotti's work as a shift in awareness of the this new generation of readers, those who are awaking more and more today and tomorrow.

The possible ways in which a written document may have an unsettling effect on a reader.

The probability of the content, as in the division of hard and soft sci/fi.

The mundane sinister is >>9429446

>>9429816
Then you do so for the sake of enjoyment. You're in despair because awe cannot be found anywhere around you, and terror is too close to madness for you. So you seek novel unknowns from the comfort of a place in this world that is only momentarily separated from the revelation of that unknown's secrets.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I wanted to be a horror writer for a while and went into research mode. I then discovered that I found the slow strip show of unseemly bodies to not be worth the few dollar I'd chuck their way.

>>9431201

The main sensation his works evoke and what we're talking about is horror, and this mechanism of 'impossible to explain terrors' isn't what made Lovecraft's stories horrifying, contrary to the empty claims of many literary figures. It's not even a meaningful thing to say that the scary thing about Lovecraft's stories were the scary entities. Its circular.

Now if you remove the word 'terrors' from your claim so that you at least have a coherent thought, all you are left with is 'impossible to explain'. As in, 'the formal device Lovecraft used to evoke horror was that which is impossible to explain'. But this mechanism can be used to evoke many different things, such as humor, wonder, awe, etc. Saying that that is why Lovecraft's stories are horrifying is not insightful, you could say the same thing about any other device present in his stories.

As I said before, there is no merit to this description of why Lovecraft's work is scary. Its either trivial or meaningless. It is repeated again and again without critical thought by scholars, critics, and authors. The people who repeat this nonsense are hoping we forget all of the works which attempted to mimic what Lovecraft was doing and failed to be scary at all. These hacks attempted to copy Lovecraft in exactly the superficial way all the critics describe and completely failed!

The historical context critics provide to shed light on Lovecraft's work, while interesting as trivia, has nothing to do with what was remarkable about his stories: how frightening they are. I'm not familiar with Ligotti's work and I'm not interested in talking about him.

This 'trinity of horror' you describe reeks of dogma, and even uses religious terminology. Its not clear at all how any of these three things are necessary or somehow central to horror, and you have presented them without clarification or justification, probably because you yourself accepted the idea uncritically.