J. Kevin asked Alan Moore:

Is it harder to scare audiences these days? It seems like as a culture, we've gotten, if not more sophisticated, at least more jaded. Or is that just a facade, and underneath we're still the same superstitious, cowardly lot we've always been?

Alan Moore I don’t think it’s harder to scare audiences these days than it’s ever been. Wherever we happen to be in our cultural history, it’s a safe bet that the things that scared our parents no longer possess the same frisson when it comes to ourselves. What is required of horror writing, then, is that it relentlessly moves forward and discovers new ways of frightening or disturbing its contemporary audience. Look at the work of Thomas Ligotti for a superb example. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that with our modern audiences programmed to only expect horror within certain established parameters – a kind of almost comforting state in which the audience can always pretty much predict where the horror is going to come from – then it might even be easier these days to genuinely scare one’s readers. I know that in Providence, where we’ve gone out of our way to come at our horrors from unusual angles and to present them using novel storytelling techniques, we have a few scenes coming up which I believe the readers will find genuinely frightening. It’s really all just a matter of being prepared to put in the innovatory effort.

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