Horror Writing General

>>18290657
bump for later

Dont expect too many replies though, OC is in high demand and in low production here on /x/ nowadays

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>>18290657
What I find most anticlimatic is when the writer builds up a decent atmosphere and then just smashes it by revealing the bloodied, 6-limbed abomination with black holes for eyes and razor sharp teeth as it lets out a bone-chilling shriek and lounges at the reader in what can best be described as a literary jump-scare.

The best scary stories rarely give you a peek behind the veil. I guess I've never really taken a liking to gore and stuff. It's not that that can't be good also, but sure as hell ain't scary.

>>18290657
>group of people in a known haunted location in a populated area

>multiple creatures that you can fight with varying degrees of success

These. The others are overdone.

Horror literature fucking sucks ass.
It lacks both the impact and the subtlety of films and comic books.
Literally the only advantage of horror writing is that it can artificially make time move slower, but even that is done wrong 90% of the time.

>>18290690
this, bump. im not gonna get off my lazy ass tonight to write shit though. that takes planning work and revision. chans don't make the best environment for that.

>>18290798
You're reading the wrong books or authors.

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>>18290657
>alone in a remote random area where the nearest person is 10+ miles away
absolutely this. the presence of people makes everything less scary. we are social animals, and are wired to seek each other out for help. compare a ghetto with being inawoods with a mountain lion or pack of starving wolves. even in a ghetto, if some nigger decides to be a gangsta boi, there is at least a possibility someone will have a problem with it and get involved. in the woods your on your own faggot.
>a single creature that you can't fight and need to run or hide from
fucking duh, the ability to fight the monster off at least to some extent gives you a feeling of power, even if you know the struggle is ultimately futile. have you ever found a zombie game more scary than any other kind of horror game?
all this said, the most frightening story would be in a populated area with people you could fight off individually, and they all want to to kill you. the idea of people cooperating to take you down is terrifying. thats why most paranoid delusions involve conspiracies. a ghetto where the cops don't even show up, and everyone follows the don't snitch rule is way scarier than being with a bear in the woods. whats the best lovecraft story? wrong, its innsmouth.

>>18290690

I'll write something when I get back home to work. It will be my first time. I don't want it to be cliche but it probably will be. It's hard to think of something that isn't a variation of something that hasn't been done countless times.

>>18290798
Your post reeks of pleb

>>18290657
Try this:
> Haunted area, group of people, only you can see the evil. Interior fight between your perceptions and your logic.

> Haunted claustrophobic area, such as old dismissed industry or farm. The area changes itself during the escape (you think you reached the hall but you find yourself in a gas chamber or in a slaughterhouse)

Have fun!

>>18290798
>comic books

lmao kys, manchild

>>18290859
Something effective to remember. It isn't what the thing is actively going to/attempting to do to you, but the capacity for what it could possibly do to you that creates a good spook. Classic horror novels and shorts sometimes take this approach.

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>>18290859
>have you ever found a zombie game more scary than any other kind of horror game?

yes

>>18291091

Honestly, Dead Space was the scariest game for me and it's more of an action game than a horror game. Something about seeing a vent or walking into a room where you need to hit a switch and knowing with 100% certainty that enemies are going to pop out really stressed me for some reason.

>>18291050
Gotta watch out not to turnit into first-person Grave Encounters though

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>>18290657
Out of what tha fuck crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every last muthafuckin night I peep tha rubbery thangs,
Black, horned, n' slender, wit membranous wings,
They come up in legions on tha uptown wind’s swell
With obscene clutch dat titillates n' stings,
Snatchin me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey ghettos hidden deep up in nightmare’s well.

Over tha jagged peakz of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all tha cries I try ta make,
And down tha nether pits ta dat foul lake
Where tha puffed shoggoths splash up in doubtful chill.
But ho! If only they would cook up some fuckin sound,
Or wear a gangbangin' grill where faces should be found dawwwg!

Wanting to write an /x/ inspired story. A thread was actually made awhile ago that really gave me an idea.

An anon gets hoodwinked by people on the internet to try this ritual to summon some type of love demon, claiming it to become their new waifu. What was actually given was a way to summon a succubus, yeah. But it seeks to completely isolate this guy all to herself so she can drain him forever with no sort of interruption.

>>18291229
> Love demon
> Instead, succybutts.
I'd say pic one, but they're both the same so it wouldn't matter.

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This sounds generic, but I find H.P's work giving me shivers.
>multiple creatures that you can fight with varying degrees of success
If you've read The shadow over Innsmouth, you'll know that there's a completely different fear when youre in a normal town, and it warps into a ghost/fish town overnight and youre surrounded by Deep Ones.
I like the kind of horror that expands beyond what the reader knows and looks endless, like what It came from the desert did. His universe does a mythical alien thing, I like that.

>>18290657
i think people need to stop using the same basic shit for spooks. there's too much great horrific folklore and mythology to keep rehashing vampires, werewolves, ghosts, witches, and judeo-christian demons

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>>18293622
Slavic mythology is wildly unused, at least to my knowledge. Could be some real interesting stories there. Like the Rusalka, the ghost of a you girl who drowned in a swamp/was hung from a tree and never properly buried. Or it's male equivalent, Svetlonoš, a boy who wanders around the swamp he had drowned in with a candle (see will'o'wisp). Or the Chort (krampus), a spirit of pure evil, later incorporated into Christianity as a soldier of Hell. Or the Koschei, whom I know little about except that he's an old bearded man holding a scythe, mounted on a (dead?) horse. There was a thread here once about folk tales from the Balkan peninsula and it was really creepy. I'm from Slovakia myself.

>>18290657
alone in a remote random area and multiple creatures you can fight with varying degrees of success

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The only reason I am replying to this thread is because of this post. >>18290699 Read it! Read it again!

I don't read much scary/horror stuff, so I'm not really qualified here.

I have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker's Dracula many times each, The way that they give/withhold information to different characters is one of their secrets. They also delay information from one person to another about dangers because they use written letters traveling on sailing ships. Using a narrator revealing a story bit by bit even though they know the culmination, and we don't is also a powerful tool, because that is withholding information too.

Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are also a favorites of mine. Poe would not write "the character was so scared they had sphincter factor 9.5". He would spend two whole pages describing the "complete absolute and utter terminal dread the insensate character was suffering".

I read Stephen King's Christine and found it to be an insufferingly lowbrow novel, compared John Carpenter's movie interpretation, even though I have a confirmed obsession with possessed vehicles.

Finally, back to >>18290699 ...
In the mid 1980's. Yes...I am an veryoldfag. I was living in a caravan. I had a 12 inch, 12 volt, black and white TV, unemployed, no TV guide, coat-hanger antenna.
I saw the last 30 minutes of Ridley Scott's Alien, not knowing what it was. It was definitely the most scared I have been in my life watching a movie.
There are plot lessons to be learned from this movie.

>alone in a remote random area where the nearest person is 10+ miles away
The other option gives you a chance, unless that's what the characters are banking on and still get fucked. Otherwise you have nowhere but nowhere to run, even if you put distance between you and the creature, it can still follow and wait til you get tired.

>multiple creatures that you can fight with varying degrees of success
You can kill a few weaker ones, get full of yourself like, aw yeah man, I can take these fuckers on, I'll make it, until you find the next creature. And it doesn't go down with the technique you've been using. Having to keep upping your game, fighting newer stronger creatures gives time inbetween to hide, panic, possibly get caught and die. It kills any advantage you think you have.

>>18290798
Most horror literature does suck, but that's because it's the hardest genre to do well.
>>18290657
This >>18290699 is good advice. The reason monsters themselves aren't scary is because the horror is in the anticipation. The only purpose of the monster is to ensure the reader that there is a reason to expect delivery on some sense of dread, but it's the dread that is important.

Put it this way: when you're watching a horror movie, do you feel frightened after the 'moment of impact'? Not really, in general; it's more of a release of tension, but also serving as a promise that there is reason that the viewer should be worried. The really important thing is to build up that atmosphere of dread or being unsettled. Everything depends on it, and everything is there to serve it.

bumping for interest, love reading this stuff

>>18290657
Me and my boyfriend play World of Darkness and use it to tell great horror stories of various genres. I'd really recommend it as a way to practise writing or to glean ideas from.

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>>18290657
Any horror writing that is really good is relatable, and psychological.
It has to be believed - sure the six armed monster or the wierd spirit haunting the house is scary, but for a story to stick in someone's head it has to contain suspension of disbelief.
So as a basis think, what is believable?
Next it has to fuck with the reader psychologically. The reader has to have that "fight or flight" moment in their minds.
This has been increasingly more difficult to pull off with the internet & true crime stories in abundance.
So you have to go back to basics. what fucks with people on a deeply psychological level?

>>18293845
It's more dark fantasy than horror, but you may be interested in the Witcher series of books and video games. They are heavily inspired by Slavic mythology and folklore.

>>18290657
kind of related
I feel like writing today but I have no inspiration, anyone has the roll image for writing /x/ stories?

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>>18290690
Or a bunch of RP faggots slowly, so fucking SLOWLY, telling a story. Looking at you, Arin, you cunt

>>18290798
If you think horror literature is inferior to movies then you've been reading the wrong books and watching the right movies.

>>18291110
Dead Space wasn't really that scary. It had scary moments peppered throughout the series, but it was mostly just a relatively generic third-person shooter.

>>18291211
Is that Ghettpoe or Hood P. Lovecraft?

>>18294005
>Ridley Scott's Alien
Only Alien movie I've ever seen, so I'm not really qualified to judge it relative to the others, but can confirm that it was fantastic in and of itself.

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H P LOVECRAFT

"SUPERNATURLA HORROR IN LITERATURE"
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx

READ IT YOU PIECE OF SHIT

>>18301700
Sizzurrp

>>18290657
Hey guys, I'm an aspiring author who's been working on a surreal horror novel for about a year now. I'm not close to finishing it but I've been thinking about other projects I want to do in the future.

I've been thinking about doing a diary-based horror story where I lie and say that I actually found the contents of the diary and simply published it and also work in local locations of my small town to make it seem more legitimate. Does anyone know what the legality of that is? Can I publish something and say it's true for the purpose of entertainment without directly stating that it's all just fake?

>>18301754
Plenty of people do. Half of Creepypastas are that, and if you do it in film form it's called the 'found footage' genre.

Here's a twist, the monster you're hiding from is yourself.

>>18290699
This. Even in movies, if I see a monster or whatever, fucking dropped. Ruined Absentia, seeing the mantis creatures. Ruined the Mist. Ruined Descent. All best stories and movies neeeeever let you see what it is, just hints and whatnot.

>>18301728
what does purple drank have to do with lovecraft

>>18301957
>All best stories and movies neeeeever let you see what it is, just hints and whatnot.

examples?

>>18301957
> cloverfield is the best monster movie

>>18302004
Banshee Chapter, Cloverfield, etc. whatever I CS t think of any

>>18302031
>in cloverfield you see it, a lot.
succc

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If you are a first time writer, do not use first person. You do not have your permit yet. Write at least three good stories before you apply for your first person permit. Failing to follow this rule is a good indication of suck ahead.

The exclamation point (!) is a fucking abomination, and SO IS ALL CAPS. You will never need these in your writing if you did your atmosphere and your story right. Never. You get one exclamation point per 5000 normal periods or question marks. Make it count.

Dont grab a thesaurus and pretend you know how to write. If you want to use a new word, learn its meaning inside and out, and write several sentences using it before using it in our story. Some words carry meanings beyond what the dictionary says. Find how other people used the word.

Prepare to suck. I have been rejected many more times than I have been published. Learn from them. if you get mad you will never be a good writer.

Read as much as you can. You dont get good by copying someone. You dont write something like Thomas Liggti´s "The frolicker" by reading the "The frolicker." Read Lolita instead.

Have a secret set of rules for the story, and follow them. You dont ever have to show it to anyone, but you need to be self consistent.

Be creative in other ways. Paint, write poems, sing. Keep your mind working. You will probably suck at these too. I do. But I do them anyway.

Travel and get inspiration. Build a world using your world. No, you still cant use first person, but something that you built using your eyes will always be more believable than something you made up. The mind rarely sees the way the cracks break the sidewalk, the odd tilt in the trees, the one miss matching carpet square. Remember little details like that. The more real the world you create, the more surreal it will be when your creations enter it.

People dont keep writing in the diary about the sounds that are made as they are being eaten. Still no first person.

>>18302232
Continued.

Have a passable way for the story to be told to the reader.

World build, world build, world build. For every fact you tell the reader, you should have five or ten facts you keep to yourself. Never give the impression that that the reader knows as much as you, unless it is first person limited, in which case, shame on you for reading this, as you clearly are not qualified to do so.

(The reason I hate first person so much is that beginning writers self insert, and it takes serious practice to not do it at all.)

Write fast and on a deadline. Follow this up by revising until you hate the story. Than revise some more. Editors will make you revise it more, so you might as well get some practice.

I like writing in long hand, that way I am forced to rewrite everything, and I dont get attached to any shitty phrasing. First and second draft often look like night and day. Plus than I can write on the beach or in the woods and not have to worry about and sand in my keyboard.

One grammatical or spelling mistake is too many. Clean up your shit. (Irony, as this was done on a phone and probably has plenty of mistakes)

All these rules can be broken provided you know what you are doing. You using a little girls diary to tell the story? She can use as much shitty punctuation as she wants.

Any questions?

>>18302232
More advice:
Never take advice from authors

>>18302254
Anyways, this is not a rule but a suggestion. Showing the monster is bad eh? Yep. So dont have that ever happen. Dont have your protags house be haunted, have it be the neighbors. Show what they go through from an outside perspective. Telling the reader its a ghost is not scary, but watching from afar as your friends relationship deteriorates is. The kids start having nightmares. Wife fights with the husband, they start eating out more. Crying in the night. You as the writer need to know that they are going through, but you dont tell the reader. Imagine being a school teacher and one of your kids is in a house thats haunted by a demon. You see some art, some stories, maybe the kid gets withdrawn.

Maybe it ends and the monster is still in the woods.

>>18302143
Nah.

>>18301754
You mean kind of like The House of Leaves? I think your editor can take care of all that

>>18291229
If that was sarcastic then its really funny. if not then I would NOT read that.

>>18302268
Better to take advice from anons who never wrote anything!

Black men in their daughters

I actually wrote a kinda creepy story back a couple years ago in my creative writing class in college. I think it turned out well. I published it on this website.
https://www.booksie.com/posting/fuzzypinkidiot/the-abyss-430949#regular_reviews
I'd really love to hear what your guys think. It's kinda long.

>>18302268
>I've never written anything in my life, and this anon's written many. Here's my opinion on why he's not good at it.

>>18290657

The scariest thing is following threads of hope into doom. When the light at the end of the tunnel is a fiery pit. When you finally escape the dungeon, only to find the castle an impossible maze. When you break the lock to your cell, but there was never a door to begin with.

The bigger the hope, the deeper the dread. I want the reader to feel defeated before I let them go.

I love writing horror. I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I guess one day the market will tell me. I would like to self publish by the end of next year a collection of short stories (because originally it was going to be the end of this year lol oops).

Since this is a general thread I just want bring up a pet peeve of mine regarding creepy pastas. I love the concept of creepy pastas, greentext threads, all of that. I don't care how unrealistic or overdone (like skinwalker stories) it is, really. There's usually something else interesting going on in the story that I can look past that.

But what really annoys me is when writers can't keep to the style. There are half a million ways to write creepy pasta, let alone just writing horror. If you feel the need to switch POV then creepy pasta probably isn't for you. It takes out the raw emotional "this happened to me" feeling, and since that atmosphere makes up for a lot of story elements usually missing from creepy pasta, it has the ability to totally destroy the feeling of dread or terror or whatever. And without that honestly a lot of creepy pastas fall flat.

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i've narrated creepypastas for about 2 1/2 years, now i critique them.

i absolutely love a good horror story but today all i see is the same half assed attempts over and over.

here are the things i've picked up that make great horror.

1. the story cannot focus on killer
they are just too boring to hold their own
2. pick the scale of the story
whether it be on a massive scale or small you have to figure it out to properly tell your story
3.character involvement
tell your story from a human perspective of course.
4.don't over detail things
give only what's necessary and leave the rest up to the reader
5.try to twist things
never let your reader figure out where the story is going until the last word.
6.for the love of god don't use insanity
i know you want to write the next h.p. lovecraft story but "muh insanity" is a crutch, only few can land it well.
7.try to avoid cliches
you can't fully avoid them but if you must use them, don't make it cheesy.

i'll post one of my stories, it doesn't have all these examples covered but hopefully you guys will like it

I had an idea for a short cartoon /x/ish series but I'm not sure how good it'd be.

>small town guy meets two teenage rejects and they start hunting monsters.
>town is a total shithole, the citizens are kooks, and the local police are totally useless.

I was inspired by Monster Hunter International and tons of Stephen King books. Would you guys watch something like that?

>>18290657
I'll contribute

Here's the start of a cosmic horror story I'm working on,

http://pastebin.com/hsQSPUtC

Go easy on me pls I'm fragile

>>18305917
I'ts about a lonely guy who starts stalking people, nothing creepy mind you he just wants to "step into the shoes of other people" and with stalking as an outlet he starts getting less depressed and builds a life, moves out of his shithole apartment, gets a qt gf, better job, ect. Then he follows the wrong guy, bla bla bla doors to alternate void dimensions with mad gods of the abyss doing what mad abyss gods do, he gets a small glimpse of the other dimension and goes mad and loses everything. the end.

>>18305876
you could run this on cartoon network and get canceled after 20 episodes it's that shitty

>>18305925
ever heard of "the strangers" creepypasta?
sounds a lot like that, not saying it's bad to copy, but madness is a tired cliche

>>18290657
The stories I find scariest are usually the ones where something or someone is "off;" something's wrong, the narrator knows something's wrong, the reader knows something's wrong, but no none knows WHAT.

Also, building the story up is important; whether leading up to a twist at the end ("Wait a second only ten of us went in and there's eleven of us now what the crap") or weaving all the "off" bits together ("All signs point to Gramma is a freaking Witch"), the build-up is what makes the plot.

In 8th grade I wrote a horror story off the top of my head for an assignment that was apparently really fucked up and I got sent to counseling and they suggested to my parents a therapist. I can share if you guys want. If I can't find my original draft ill write a shortened version

>>18306143
>>18306148
This is exactly that

>>18306148
Well done.

>>18306116
Nah never heard of it. Also I agree that madness is sorta tired but I was going for a lovecraft inspired sorta thing.

>>18306148
this isn't hard,If you mention death or anger in American schools you get observed for having "primal dna" and being a potential serial killer

>>18306264
I remember being an edgy little shit in elementary school and drawing pictures of stick figures murdering each other in all sorts of brutal ways. I never got any therapy or anything, they just subtracted points from my grade or ignored it.

>>18306264
Well the story did include murdering an infant and cannibalism. It was pretty messed up. I have a friend who wrote how to hide a body in the same class and he got sent to a child psychiatric wars for 2 weeks because it was basically foolproof. He's never done anything wrong though, he was just a smart guy.

>>18301754
In the U.S. you can say whatever the fuck you want. The govt cant make laws restricting speech, for the most part.

>>18301754
absolutely. ignore the fact that pretty much every novel has
>This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
on the first page. publishers just put that in to use up extra paper.

seriously though: you might get away with it if nobody reads the story. but if it becomes popular, someone will think it's real, then someone else will call it out as fiction, and either they'll think you're really clever or more likely it'll get called a hoax. also if the setting is a real place, you run the risk of people thinking that characters in the book are based off them. some of them may not like that, and they may be able to sue for libel.

regardless of whatever else you do, this should go without saying: if you're going to publish something, research your copyright law. don't rely on 4chan to tell you.

>>18306389
this is only true up to a point. slander and libel are real things. just because rich people sometimes get away with it doesn't make it legal.

>>18306110
How might the idea be improved?

>>18306510
Don't listen to him, I've seen far worse ideas be made into amazing books, its all about execution. Maybe if you gave us more context we could critique you better.

>>18306237
i suggest you read it, it's good, might help improve the idea.
but madness is a cheap way to not have to explain things or come up with a quick end result.

>>18306510
don't listen to >>18307092
sucking up doesnt make you better.
if you made this a kids cartoon then it would probably work for like 10 minutes before you ran out of ideas.
as for anything else, ya gotta make it smart, and lead up to bigger things.
say they do go monster hunting, have an underlying plot, like all these monsters are leading up to something bigger, make the characters have to dive into paranormal things to get powers that can take on said monsters.
if you make it into a literal monster of the week thing it'll suck.