Michael Potts's Blog: Bits and Pieces: Book Reviews and Articles on Writing, Horror Fiction, and Some Philosophy - Posts Tagged "fear"

I have read a great deal of contemporary horror, but have found that much of it lacks an essential element of horror--scaring the reader. Now people have different threshholds of fear. Someone else may find frightening what I find gross or boring. There are a few contemporary authors that scare me: Stephen King's early work does, and the classic ghost stories by M. R. James or Le Fanu are chilling. Russell Kirk's ghost stories not only chill me, but create a sense of awe that crawls up and down my spine. Lovecraft's fiction sets an atmosphere of fear and dispair akin to anxiety.

My desire as a writer is to say something important about the human condition, but with horror fiction I have the further desire to frighten my readers. Different writers have different methods of doing this. Suspense is one of the best ways--when I watch a scary horror movie or read a horror story or book, I find myself most fearful during the time of anticipating a monster's visit rather than when the monster actually visits. In my favorite horror movie, Ghost Story, there is a scene near the beginning of the movie in which a young man has slept with a woman who is now lying on the bed. He asks her, "Who are you?" and she says, "You know." Now I am suspecting that she is not all she appears to be--perhaps she is a ghost or some inhuman creature. He touches her and she is ice cold. Then he turns her around--the peak time of anticipation. When she is turned around, her face an body are rotting, and the man panics, stumbles back, and through a window, falling to his death. I have a video on YouTube in which I recorded my heartbeat during the first ten minutes of that movie--and the maximum rate occured just before the man turned the woman around, not when her rotted face appeared. Setting up suspense well is difficult and demands exquisite timing. If a scene is too short, a reader of a horror story is not sufficiently frightened, but if a scene goes on too long, the reader may get bored.

Another means of increasing a reader's fear is to describe the horrible appearance of a monster in great detail. Yet that is usually not as effective as describing the monster's speech. I gave my monster in my novel a sick sense of humor (similar to my own, unfortunately) that, I hope, made the demonic character more frightening. He is also malevolent to an extreme and enjoys torturing people to the point of despair. It is the psychological portrait that is often more effective in causing fear than the physical portrait.

Awe can be part of fear; one can feel awe for an evil creature as well as for a good one. Cosmic horror acheives this well, especially in Lovecraft. If a monster is so powerful as to be awe-ful, this increases the intensity of fear. Of course awe-fulness must be communicated through story--through characters' actions and through their dialogue.

One question people ask horror writers is, "Do you like to scare people?" Obviously, the answer is "yes"; otherwise, why write horror. The scarier horror is, the better--I like to be scared when I read a horror story, and I am sure that regular readers of horror desire that as well. I only hope I succeed to some measure in scaring the hell out of my readers!

"Fear" is said in many ways. A summary of the different kinds of fear may be useful to some writers, since different ways of writing elicit different types of fear.

Types of Fear:

"Startled" fear--for example, to a sudden noise, to a window breaking. This is often used in horror flicks, though it is more difficult to communicate via writing.
Awe--includes fear and fascination, Rudolf Otto's "mysterium tremendum et fascinans." This is the fear elicited by stories such as Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" or Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."
Dread--the fear of knowing or believing that something bad will happen. In Ernest Hemingway's story, "The Killers," it is the kind of fear the man holed up in his home waiting for the inevitable mafia hit feels.
Anxiety--existential dread, dread of annihilation, dread of death. Regan's mother in William Blatty's The Exorcist experienced that fear. It can also include fear of long-term disease or fear about being "thrown" into the world, a world for which one did not ask. Also compare any of Kafka's or Rilke's characters.
"Running for one's life" fear--a person is in immanent danger of being killed by an animal, human, or monster. This version of fear is found in most horror literature.
Phobias--fear of the dark, being outside, elevators, heights, etc. A story may have a character with one of these fear and face the situation they dread the most.
Fear of the death of loved ones--one example is when a woman dies of breast cancer and her sister fears she will have the same disease.
Panic attack--fear that one is dying when there is little or no danger of dying. A character having a panic attack is already stressed, and placing a monster with the character during an attack can up the ante on the character's fear.
Fear of harming oneself or others. For example, a character with dissociative identity disorder. One of that individual's personalities may be murderous.
Fear of the unknown--one of the best kinds of fears to elicit in a reader through suspense, as I mentioned in a previous post.
Terror--fear to the nth degree--the fear of a woman who was attacked by a man who sees the man in a lonely alley wielding a knife. Can include many of the other kinds of fear mentioned above.
Horror--fear of a monster, whether the monster be human, such as a serial killer, or of a nonhuman monster (lions, ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc.)

Those are types of fear of which I can think at the moment--if you want to add to the list in a comment, feel free to do so.