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Horror 101: The Fundamentals of FEAR in Fiction

Updated: Mar 7, 2021




What makes some stories terrifying and visceral, inspiring nightmares and making you jump at shadowy nothings when you turn the lights off at night, while other stories…well, put you to sleep or make you cringe and laugh awkwardly in an attempt to salvage some kind of emotional response?


Effectively creating fear in a story is difficult. Some authors owe a huge amount of their career just off the ability to pull that off consistently. In this video, we are going to analyze and break down what makes us scared in a story, based on science and techniques as explained by famous authors like King.

We'll begin with THE NATURE OF FEAR, and discuss what fear is from a biological perspective, and why things scare us. Then we'll discuss THE STRUCTURE OF FEAR, and learn about how stories are organized to provoke that feeling of fear.


Before we begin, what exactly is fear? How do we feel it? Fear is a survival mechanism. We feel fear when our minds are alerted to the possibility of a threat. This triggers a fear response in the amygdala, which activates our fight-or-flight response, along with the release of stress hormones and the sympathetic nervous system. This is what gets your heart pumping, your pupils dilating, your muscles tensing, we're getting ready to survive.


So let's talk about what makes us scared. You've probably heard of the uncanny valley before, right? And there's also the common phobias, like fear of spiders, fear of heights, fear of social situations (that hits a little too close to home), the list goes on. I can say with 99.9% certainty that you've been scared at some point in your life. If you are the 0.1% here, drop a comment down below and prove me wrong.


Can you remember the last time you were really, truly scared? Do you remember why exactly you felt that way? If you're thinking of something like coming face-to-face with a rat, or a spider, or maybe a snake and freaking out, those would fall under what I call "hard threats". This is when you're faced with something that could straight up mess you up. This is when your body is screaming danger signals at you, telling you that whatever the current situation is, it is not cool.


But even if hard threats are terrifying in real life, they sometimes fall flat in fiction. Think about going to the zoo. You'd be terrified of a lion in the wild, but behind glass, it's something to make fun of and take selfies with. It's even less scary when you're watching a video, of someone else, taking a selfie with the lion, at the zoo. With these degrees of separation, we lose that immediacy of the threat, and it doesn't as often trigger our fear response. The same goes with words on a page, or pixels on a screen.


Fascinatingly, the difference biologically is actually due to the influence of our hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which work closely with the amygdala in regulating our fear response. If the amygdala is the drama queen, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are the down-to-earth friends that put things in perspective-- once they decide that the perceived threat isn't real enough to warrant concern, they rain on the amygdala's parade and shut the drama down. So back to the zoo example, essentially the rational part of our brain overrides that instinctual fear, so we feel comfortable enough to have fun.


So to summarize all that science, it just comes down to, a big part of what makes things actually scary, is how "real" the threat is to us. It's about control. As long as we feel in control of the situation, that we can rationalize the threat and understand our relationship to the threat, we become confident that we can counteract it. This feeling of control is critical to our ability to suppress fear. Remember that, we'll come back to it soon.


What we want to invoke is a slow-burn fear. Something that seeps into the audience's psyche and lingers with them long after they've left our work in the dust. An itching feeling at the back of their neck that won't go away no matter how hard they scratch.


How do we achieve this through nothing but the audience's imagination? Different creatives have put forth different models, so here we'll try and fit those pieces together.


First and foremost, it is almost universally agreed upon that it is not the monstrosity itself that induces fear. It is what goes unsaid, what is implied. From Stephen King's perspective, and Lovecraft, from which King drew much inspiration, fear comes from "the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply". Indeed, it seems that fear in fiction is defined by the negative space of the text. (Show art example of monster defined by negative space)


Fascinating. Let's dig a little deeper into this idea. What is so scary about the unknown? The fact is, you are your own worst enemy. (Search your heart, you know it to be true.) When an artist creates a monster, they draw upon spiders, snakes, insects, why? Because these are common fears, so to the majority of people, the design will be discomforting. But there are always people who aren't afraid, and the design falls flat. But we also have the option to leave a fill-in-the-blank. We can ask the audience, insert your worst nightmare here. By not defining the enemy outright, the audience will do a better job scaring themselves than we ever could.


There's a sister idea here, very related, which is the power of ambiguity. When we aren't sure about something, we become anxious about it. We don't feel like we have control over the situation. (Remember what we said earlier?) This is a key component of building tension. Imagine Being stuck in a room with a bomb on a five minute timer. After convincing yourself there is no escape, you will probably make your peace and accept your fate. Still terrible. But now, let's say you're stuck in a room with a bomb that goes off the next time someone rings your doorbell? Now you start thinking, when is my partner coming home? Wait, I ordered pizza an hour ago, didn't I? When something is seemingly incomprehensible, or we simply aren't sure of the outcome, we desperately grasp at anything that can give us more information, we grasp at straws to regain some semblance of control--this is how horror movies can get you jumping at shadows as you bite your nails and scan every corner of the screen for signs of the monster.


So, can you see why successful horror movies try to avoid showing the monster as much as possible? Because once you show the monster, you are defining it, and it no longer has that Boggart quality-- it's stuck in one form. You also lose all the beauty of the ambiguity. It's not, "when and where is it going to show up", the question becomes "can I run faster than it?", and there's usually a pretty obvious answer to that.


Now of course, a good monster design still has its place. If you've been teasing a monster, you'd better have one show up at the end, or else your audience is going to feel cheated. And yes, it is still possible to freak people out by description or imagery alone, this is what Stephen King refers to as the 'gross-out' factor. But even this is built upon that idea of incomprehensibility. We create monsters that are unnatural, that seemingly do not follow the normal rules of society or nature. It is this foreign quality that lends that creep factor to our favorite evil clowns and serial killers.


As a final note on fear itself, I've talked about amplifying the threat by removing control, but I intentionally skipped over a discussion of realism. Yes, suspension of disbelief is important, and you should try to be realistic in your depictions, but this is a subject that veers away from fear specifically and just becomes a discussion about good storytelling in general (writing strong characters with believable motivations, do your research, blah blah blah). That's beyond the scope of this video, but perhaps we'll cover it in the future.


Okay! So we've talked a bit about the theory of scariness, but the bigger question is, how do you make a story out of these ideas? In many ways, it's analogous to plotting a story in any other genre, but you do have to approach it from a bit of a different perspective.


One of the biggest pitfalls with writing horror often occurs when you start in media res, or in the middle of the action. That pitfall is, failing to establish a reference point of normality upfront. You must have normal before abnormal. Ordinary before extraordinary. All things are relative! If everything is messed up wack-a-doodle from the get-go, how do you expect people to take anything at face value? If everyone is dying and having alien babies burst from their chests in the first five minutes, the tone loses the gravity of fear, and the whole thing drops a notch down into gross territory. There's no BUILD-UP.


And that, is the absolute key here. Ash Law lays out a great framework for how to approach the build-up and release of tension in horror. You could even say, he lays down the law, if you know what I mean.


According to Law, there are four types of fear: unease, dread, terror, and horror. When approaching horror, we have to smoothly transition in and out of these types, over and over, increasing in intensity until we climax. So let's get into what these terms mean and how we should use them.


First off we have unease. Put simply, this is your foundation. How tall of a horror skyscraper you can build really depends on how solid of an unease foundation you set up first. You have normal, but now things are just a little bit off from normal. It's after school, and you notice the same person entering and leaving the bathroom over and over, shuttling loads of paper towels to somewhere else in the building. You find a student ID on the ground, but that person was absent today. As Law says "something is wrong here, but it is not an immediate threat and is nebulously defined."


On the next level up, we have dread. Now the possibility of danger becomes more apparent-- there's something bad, and it might be nearby, but we still don't know how much danger we're in in this moment. We can only earn dread if we've properly established unease first. You shadow the student ferrying the paper towels and see him enter the basement. You wait for him to leave again before sneaking in yourself. There you find a body wrapped in paper towels dripping with dark red. You hold back a scream but stumble back and send a mop and bucket crashing to the ground. Your heart stops. Did he hear you?


Next comes terror. This is when danger is imminent. You hear the sound of heavy footsteps rushing down the stairs toward you. Do you run or hide? You shove yourself in a cleaning locker and quietly close the door, hoping he didn't see you get in.


Finally comes horror. This is the peak of the build-up, which means that it's all downhill from here. From the moment that the danger is revealed and is clarified, the tension quickly falls. When you are thrown from the cleaning cabinet to the ground and scramble away from the killer's cleaver, you can get an adrenaline rush, but whether you get away or die, the tension has been reset.


You can think of it like a roller coaster. Law uses the following analogy: Unease is the building excitement getting on the ride. Dread is the cars going up the hill. Terror is that delicious moment before the drop. Horror is the long screaming ride down, a cathartic release of the tension that had been building.


So you might be thinking, well Quintus, that's cool and all, but you just gave us the steps, how do we move between them? How do I go from normal to unease, or from dread to terror? If that's what you were thinking, great question! The answer is plot. No, not that kind of plot, the actual plot. It is a story, after all. So at its core, events happen to the characters, and characters make decisions in response to these events, causing more events, and the loop goes on.


One thing that people might underestimate in horror is agency. For example, it makes sense that to make the audience scared, you should make the characters feel as vulnerable, and helpless as possible, right? Well, sure, to an extent-- inevitable doom is rather depressing, but it can be so much more. The horror becomes much more powerful when the events are direct consequences of the character's own actions. The dramatic irony, where the audience may realize how stupid the idea is before the characters do, can create anxiety and fear quite effectively.


For example in The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs, (www.jacob.com), there is this artifact, where the characters make a wish, and it comes true in the absolute worst way possible. Like, you wish for money and a million coins rain down and smother you. Or something like that. We as the audience know it is a terrible awful horrible dreadful idea to ever wish anything, but guess what, the characters do it anyway, and that builds fear, as we bite our nails waiting to see how this poor bloke is going to get bamboozled by the paw.


Everything in moderation though. If you're dropping your characters to such low intellect levels that the audience begins wondering how they survive getting out of bed in the morning, for the sake of letting them make bad decisions, it's going to seem cheap and unrealistic, leading to a failure in suspension of disbelief. "Hey look there's a house in the middle of the woods with skeletons all around it and screams at night, we should go in and explore by ourselves without calling the cops first or anything else!" Yeah.

And that brings us to the finale. We're winding down to the end here, so let's summarize what we've learned. Our biological fear response is mediated by the rational part of our brain. To effectively exploit our audience's fear, we must make the threat real and believable, and take away their sense of control. We take advantage of the power of imagination to let the audience do the work for us and create the scariest monster for them. We increase tension and anxiety by using ambiguity. Finally, we structure our story by a gradual escalation in fear, very similar to how the plot of any story would go.


A Final Word:

Of course, this is just a quick overview of what I have found to be commonalities and strategies used by effective horror authors, combined with the accompanying scientific explanations. Everything I've said can be taken as a guideline, and not as an immutable rule. You may disagree with some of my points, and that's perfectly fine! Creativity is a deeply personal process and what's most important is finding what works for you. Regardless, I hope that this has been informative and entertaining for you, and wish you all the best in all your artistic endeavors.

Further Reading:


Attributions:

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  2. Klepon Ijo (Font), by Lantype Studio via Dafont, from https://www.dafont.com/klepon-ijo.font

  3. It, by ömer tunç via ArtStation, from https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q3lQn

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  5. The Cabin in the Woods, by Lionsgate, from https://www.tampabay.com/features/movies/review-audacious-entertaining-cabin-in-the-woods-goes-over-the-edge/1224299/

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  16. Blank Street Sign, by John3 via toppng, from https://toppng.com/blank-street-sign-psd-blank-street-sign-PNG-free-PNG-Images_275132

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  18. Cage clipart zoo cage, via WebStockReview, under CC BY 3.0, from https://webstockreview.net/image/cage-clipart-zoo-cage/318642.html

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  20. Volume Up Interface Symbol free icon, by Dave Gandy via flaticon, under CC BY 3.0, from https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/volume-up-interface-symbol_25695#

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  24. Ticking Clock, by bart via OpenGameArt, under CC0, from https://opengameart.org/content/ticking-clock

  25. 2 High Quality Explosions, by Michael Baradari via OpenGameArt, under CC BY 3.0, from https://opengameart.org/content/2-high-quality-explosions

  26. Male Thijs Loud Scream, by thanvannispen via freesound, under CC BY 3.0, from https://freesound.org/people/thanvannispen/sounds/9432/

  27. Bounty Paper Towels, by Mike Mozart via Flicker, under CC BY 2.0, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14164028844

  28. Alex's UWO ID card, by Alex Dawson via Flickr, under CC BY-SA 2.0, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/51035608727@N01/2784447976

  29. Metal Hit, by Marcelo Fernandez via OpenGameArt, under CC BY 3.0, from https://opengameart.org/content/metal-hit

  30. Footsteps of soldier on ground, by Medartimus via freesound, under CC BY 3.0, from https://freesound.org/people/Medartimus/sounds/243794/

  31. Cinematic Horror Ganglands, by Alex McCulloch via OpenGameArt, under CC0, from https://opengameart.org/content/cinematic-horror-ganglands

  32. Falling Body, by remaxim via OpenGameArt, under CC-BY-SA 3.0, from https://opengameart.org/content/falling-body

  33. The Monkey's Paw, via Barnes & Noble, from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-monkeys-paw-ww-jacobs/1113062699


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