Sara Tantlinger asked Michael A. Arnzen:

Falling into overused tropes while writing horror is an easy thing to do. What are some ways to avoid the cliches, but still keep readers interested and scared?

Michael A. Arnzen Great question, Sara, and it's hard to really answer in any simple way because a writer can make any number of choices, and one of them includes not using the tropes and cliches whatsoever. Horror is fantasy, horror is violence, horror is absurd nightmare, and horror is evil. Those are abstractions, feelings, and actions, not tropes or cliches or even conventions, really, so much as human qualities. So as long as a writer is being honest to those elements, they're probably doing it right.

So my first answer is itself a cliche among writers: "write what you know." Be genuine about what scares you, what disturbs you, what freaks you the hell out. Sometimes writers use cliches or overly familiar character types because they are more infatuated with them than they find them frightening.

Being inventive with these things is precisely what a horror reader wants -- surprise is everything when it comes to the "unknown" and originality is everything in the fantastic -- so writers also work hard to undermine expectations. I have a list of techniques for "Making Modern Monsters" in the book Many Genres, One Craft, that might work as a cheat sheet for brainstorming new ways of representing fear, but truth be told sometimes the originality comes in the way something is written and represented, rather than content (it's not the vampire that's scary, it's the way its fangs puncture the skin). One technique is to spend time zooming in and detailing concretely the stuff people would normally want to look away from. Writing a prose scene of terror as if it were poetry, for instance, could also make it fresh and original. I think readers want to see us work the words in a clever way that no one else has done before, and appreciate our uniqueness as much as the standard archetypes of dread.

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