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What Stephen King Can Teach You About Writing Great Horror
Two key elements: setting (what’s normal vs what’s not) and characters.
“I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.” — Stephen King
But, believe it or not, there’s a lot more to writing good horror than simply scaring people out of their wits. Although that goes an awfully long way towards getting it right. Because we all love a good scare.
We have an ongoing love-affair with thrills and chills.
In the latter half of the 20th Century, Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, was the king of scary movies, weird and frightening stories, and delighted in terrifying his audiences half to death.
No-one who’s seen it will ever forget the shower scene from “Psycho”, or the detective’s fateful ascent of the sweeping staircase in Bate’s gloomy mansion.
We all love a good scare.
Another 20th-century master, Daphne DuMaurier,¹ wrote Gothic novels and short stories which were usually more suspenseful than bloody. Her short story “The Birds” published in 1952, in which a farmhand, his family, and his community are attacked by huge flocks of birds, inspired Hitchcock’s film version of the tale.
DuMaurier’s anthology “Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short” still stands as a fine collection of classic horror tales.
An earlier maestro of the horror genre, H. P. Lovecraft’s² early works were influenced by the writings of Lord Dunsany, an Irish author of fantasy tales, as well as Lovecraft’s early favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe.
Lovecraft wrote and published his tales of other-worldly beings from 1918 his death from cancer in 1937. Sadly, during his lifetime, Lovecraft’s writing never achieved the popularity it gained after his death.
“Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” — Stephen King in American Heritage Magazine
