Writing Horror: Ways to Wield Darkness

Matt Wesolowski, tutor on Faber Academy’s Writing Darkness: Horror, Mystery and Suspense course, shares his tips for delving into the darker side of fiction.

There’s nothing quite like being scared. I mean really scared, that sort of fear you can feel creeping icy fingers along every nerve ending – that fear that renders you a little child again, terrified to extend a single digit from beneath the duvet (it’s an industry secret how exactly they make duvets monster-proof).

When it comes to films, there are plenty that deal out horror, but only a few that can genuinely induce fear. Of course, it’s different for everybody but there are only a couple of films that have really scared me: The Blair Witch Project and Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson, The Haunting.

The interesting thing about these films is that neither of them actually utilise much in the way of special effects, nor do either of them show a monster, a ghost or even a witch.

I feel like there is an important lesson here when it comes to writing and it’s one that I would swear by.

If you really want to scare your reader, you need to let them create the monster

I could sit here for hours, writing elaborate descriptions of some five-headed, bat-winged monstrosity and you know what? It’s never going to be as frightening as what you imagine was that noise downstairs in the dark . . . yes, that one. I heard it too! You definitely didn’t open that old box you found in the attic, right? The one sealed with candle-wax and inscribed with gnostic text?

Of course, you can suggest that an old box might contain a hideous, five-headed demon and plant that seed in your reader’s mind, but ultimately what scares you might not scare someone else. Try and lead your reader up the path but at the critical moment, let their own terrors do the work . . . after all, we never found out what Henry Bowers saw in the deadlights did we?^[1]

Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s protagonists stare into the depths of some eldritch, cosmic abomination and lose their minds, but Lovecraft never actually told us what they saw . . . and maybe that was for the better.

Whatever it was that Henry Bowers saw or what dwells within the outer reaches of the cosmos, it’s never going to be as frightening if we’re told what to be scared of. Your darkness is your darkness and you can weaponise your reader’s fear against them!

^[1] This is a reference to It by Stephen King and I’d heartily recommend it.

Play to the emotions as hard as you play to the fear

We need to care about your characters if we’re going to empathise with their fear. We don’t have to like them but we do have to understand them a bit. A character’s backstory, their frailties, their fears are all part of that buildup. Being scared is so much more about who a person is: their past, the trappings of childhood, the vulnerabilities that only they know about. The Apparition Phase by Will Mclean – an absolute masterpiece in fear – deliberately prods at the sepia-tinged era of a ’70s/’80s childhood, when we flicked through Usborne’s Mysteries of the Unknown books without Google or YouTube to tell us whether those blurry ghost photos were real. Those of us who are a certain age will have our chords struck fully by these references (anyone else remember the drawing of Gef the Talking Mongoose’s claws poking through the ceiling? That scares me to this day!)

Be a little bit weird

Yes, a great, creaking, ghost-ridden castle where a headless horseman thunders past in the dead of night is scary enough but I believe that sometimes something subtle goes a much longer way. Try and avoid the obvious and go for the oblique. In the seminal Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley, a young child is troubled by a tree that is ‘sometimes there and sometimes not.’ For me, this speaks to something much more unnerving: that strange, child-like logic of another world that we have grown out of.

In Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror, the image of Jodie the flying pig with glowing red eyes tapping at Missy Lutz’s window stayed with me long after I put that accursed book down and lay beneath my duvet, shivering as a child.

Out of context, a disappearing tree and a flying pig are both quite humorous, weird images but perhaps that’s what makes them crawl beneath the skin? After all, people remember weird when a trope is easier to forget.

Like I say, what scares me may not scare you, and it’s always useful when a book has scared you to look again with an analytical hat on and work out what it was that author did to open that sealed and dusty box in that dark corner of your imagination.

Happy spooky season!

– Matt Wesolowski