Most people who attempt horror, hit the narrative with a bag of cliches and heavy handed stage props—swirling fog, glowing eyes, wicked laughs. Don’t get me wrong, I love camp. I’m diehard fan of Hammer films. However, a more subtle approach can work wonders.
Build Up the Details
Use disturbing details or reversals when describing your scenes. Each one, taken by itself, does little, Combined, they imbue the reader with unease. Look at Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piñol. Here an unnamed narrator just inhabited a weather station on a deserted island.
Just then, I heard a pleasing sound far off. It was more or less like a heard of goats trotting in the distance. At first, I confused it with the pattering of rain; the sound of heavy and distinct drops. I got up and looked out of the closest window. It wasn’t raining. The full moon stained the ocean’s surface in a violet hue. The light bathed the driftwood lying on the beach. It was easy to imagine them as body parts, dismembered and immobile. The whole thing brought to mind a petrified forest. But it wasn’t raining.
Reversal: The narrator thinks it’s raining, but then there’s no rain. We wonder what’s creating that pattering sound, and the not knowing freaks us out.
Disturbing details: The water is stained violet, an almost bloodlike color. This idea is cemented in the reader’s skull with the driftwood, described as dismembered limbs.
Show Us the Character Freaking Out
Nothing does creepy better service than to see someone freaking out. Ever wonder why there are so many screams in horror movies? As an author, you must find the written equivalent to the scream.
Take Bag of Bones by Stephen King. The protagonist, Mike Noonan, begins to believe that his house is haunted. He’s in the basement and hears the sound of someone striking the insulation, but no one else is home.
...every gut and muscle of my body seemed to come unwound. My hair stood up. My eyesockets seemed to be expanding and my eyeballs contracting, as if my head were trying to turn into a skull. Every inch of my skin broke out in gooseflesh. Something was in here with me. Very likely something dead.
King lays it on thick here. Instead of one physical reaction, he dumps the whole bucket on us. He doesn’t dazzle us with a etherial decaying corpse. We won’t even see the ghost till the final chapters. No. He tells us how Noonan feels just in the presence of the thing. And it creeps us out.
If you want to make your readers squirm, reading only in daylight hours, shy away from the obvious gore and claptrap. Rather, take the quieter road of tiny disturbing details built up over pages and chapters. Show how your character reacts to what’s happening, and the reader will feel it too.
Bio: Tim Kane researched every major vampire film from the 1931 Dracula to Underworld and Twilight. His study was published in The Changing Vampire of Film and Television, but McFarland Publishers. Visit timkanebooks.com www.timkanebooks.com or read his blog at timkanebooks.wordpress.com http://timkanebooks.wordpress.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @timkanebooks.
