[Perry] How to Scare People

So in the spirit of the holiday, I’ve decided to share with you all a little something that I’ve learned about scaring people.

A number of years ago, I had a pretty big phase of horror novel reading. It was a pretty big fascination at the time and I gobbled up just about whatever I could get my hands on.

Of everything I’d read, three authors stand out to me to this day.

H.P Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and (of course) Stephen King.

What interested me, though, was that all of them scared me in completely different ways.

With Lovecraft and his short stories, it was all about the unknown. Entire dimensions filled with unspeakable things pressed right up against ours that sometimes bled through to our world. His stories of colors and angles that were just wrong and shouldn’t exist in our reality. His deathless gods kept me up a number of nights, wondering if maybe he was onto something.

With Barker, it was all about the macabre and the possibility of running into it in our daily lives. It was about people meddling and stumbling onto things in our very mundane world; things probably better left to the darkness. It troubled me because for a while after I read his Books of Blood, I too had a sneaking suspicion that maybe my next ride on the subway would end up with me on the midnight meat train, with a serial killer in service to the shadowy lords of the city.

And with King…well, King has monsters. Many, many monsters.

And killer clowns.

Fuck clowns.

In any case, reading these types of stories scared the crap out of me. It got to the point where if I was reading them before bed, I’d keep a backup book by the bedside, one more lighthearted that I could switch to and read a chapter of before I actually went to sleep.

It made me wonder how it was done though, I mean, it’s only natural to be curious right?

I’ve always felt that writing was one part story-telling mixed with an equal portion of provoking an emotional response.

Well, terror’s an emotion too, isn’t it?

I remember the first time I was reading IT by King, when I put the book down by my bed every night, I’d make sure that it lay face down, so that the picture of the clown skull on the cover wouldn’t be watching me when I slept.

Oddly enough, that didn’t help much. It probably had something to do with the fact that the back cover was this picture of Stephen King and, let’s face it, that man doesn’t exactly look like he’s about to sing you a lullaby and tuck you in, you know?

But you get kind of curious, don’t you? I mean, you read enough of something that affects you and you want to know if you can do it too.

So I tried to write something scary…

…and failed utterly.

Apparently, there was a lot more to this business of scaring people than I’d initially suspected.

But a lot of study and thought did help me isolate one or two tricks when it came to scaring people through text, one of which, I’ll share with you now.

One of them is this:

Be relentless.

It seems just a little counter-intuitive, right? I mean, if you’re jumping out of every doorway at someone, after the fourth or fifth time, they’ll be expecting it and get a little blase about it.

But strangely, the tactic of just keeping up the pressure until you reach their breaking point works.

Take this video for example.

The video shows two guys making their way through a haunted house. At the start, you can see that they’re trying to tough it out. They try to act like it’s all a laugh and they try to put up a macho front.

But about a minute into the video, you can see little cracks starting to form in their demeanor.

At two minutes in, you can see them grabbing at each other for comfort (2:25 is hilarious).

At three minutes, you see them running in terror from a guy in a mask.

The interesting thing, though, is that none of the fright elements were all that scary by themselves. I mean, a couple guys in masks? Girls looking like crazy ghosts screaming at you? That’s not enough on its own to provoke that level of fear.

It was simply the relentless onslaught on the senses that did them in.

These guys were more than capable of handling any of these scare tactics alone, or even if they were given a little more time in between scares.

But it was the fact that the scares hit them in rapid-fire succession that overloaded whatever tolerance they had.

I think that most people can take a scare here and there without too much fuss. It’s when the scares don’t stop, when it’s a relentless pace, that you can start pushing for that fight/flight reaction.

If I write a horror novel, I don’t want it to be the kind of book that people will read in one sitting and think to themselves, “damn that was a great novel.”

No.

If I write horror, I want it to do what IT did to me when I was a teen. I want people to keep a spare, happy book by the bedside to read in tandem.

And more than anything?

I want push someone to the point that putting my book in the freezer is the only way they feel safe.

 

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