What makes for good horror?

[Lobolover]

Atmosphere and novelty or if not,then at least originality of aproach or a specific style of having it done.

 

[Urlik]

I have to agree with JD, Nesacat and mosaix.

a normal situation and setting with something very slightly out of place can be far more terrifying than just gore in a contrived setting

this is why I like some of Clive Barker's stories where the settings are familiar.

another aspect of terror is believability and liklyhood of the situation occuring.
the opening scene's of King's Kingdom Hospital were truely terrifying in a way that many "horror" films fail to achieve.
a paralysed and helpless man at the side of the road, after an accident, imagining that he can hear the thoughts of the crow sat on his chest as it is about to peck out his eyes.

it isn't the repulsion or possible gore, but the fact that it could happen to anyone at any time, and doesn't need any "dark force" or "family curse", that makes it terrifying

 

[mosaix]

Urlik is right, the most frightening thing that ever happened to me:

I was working late on my own in an office block in Manchester. It was about 10:15 at night and it had gone dark, the only light was from my desk lamp. It was very quiet and no-one had been around since about 6:30.

I was packing up to go and just needed to attend to a call of nature, so to speak. I went into the toilets (bathroom I think you call it in the Sates). I turned on the light and noticed that one of the doors on the four cubicles was closed. Just out of curiosity I pushed it.

It didn't budge - it was locked from the inside.

I have never left a building so fast in all my life.

 

[Lobolover]

well,that was frightening-but-itd be much worse if someone PUSHED the door closed from the inside-otherwise it couldve been some homeless bozo or drunkard falling asleep in thre.

 

[Urlik]

otherwise it couldve been some homeless bozo or drunkard falling asleep in thre.

not in an office block in Manchester
those places have pretty good security to keep undesirables out and a drunk or homeless person would not have made it past reception in the foyer (lobby)

 

[Lobolover]

well,it mayhave been an employee with a heart atack or something.

 

[Nesacat]

The best horror is that which leaves room for your own imagination to imagine the worst.

Succinct and hits all the nails on the head. There is probably nothing as terrible as what one's own imagination can conjure up. No matter how good a writer is, my mind knows best what frightens me and all it then needs is a suggestion or a hint of an idea to get going down those dark corridors with dancing shadows.

The non-Euclidean architecture really gets to me and it does not help that architects now have some very funny ideas that play with glass and steel and distort.

 

[Urlik]

after the thread on the Pan Books of Horror, I started rereading the 2nd volume and the 3rd story (Vertical Ladder) is one of the simplest and most terrifying stories ever.

so simple a plot set in so familiar a background and so primal a fear to tap into

 

[FONTAINE]

i would say. zombies and demons don't scare me. but something that gets you thinking does, like phycological. i agree yeah, its what your own mind can summon.

 

[Joe Meils]

For my own part, I think horror happens when you, or the protagonist that you're identifying with, has to deal with death, or breaking some deeply ingrained tabboo. (This is why the "Saw" films, otherwise utterly detestable, are so popular.)

I think one of the best horror stories I've ever read, one that literally gave me a shudder, was only about two and a half pages long... But the subject matter, of a father out on a highway, desperately trying to pick up the last peices of his daughter who had been hit by a truck on a searing summer's day, while the cops behind him are saying, "Comon, Sir, we can't hold traffic up forever...the EMTs got most of her body..." and him scrambling for the last bits, mumbling in shock, "...got to find all of her... can't leave here here, like roadkill... got to find all of her..."

I wish I could remember the actual story's name and author.

It's an absolute wonder of gut-wrenching emotion.

 

[weirdside]

Anything involving phobias, especially claustrophobia (even more especially, anything being buried alive).

 

[j d worthington]

In working on something else, I was reminded of the following passage from a letter from H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, dated 4 December 1930:

I agree with what you say about suggestion as the highest form of horror-presentation. The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. In Machen, the subtlest story -- The White People -- is undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn't the tangible, visible terrors of The Great God Pan or The White Powder.[...] Of course, there is such a thing as excessive indefiniteness, especially among novices who do not really understand how to handle cosmic suggestion. Crude writers use the old trick of calling a hidden horror "too monstrous to describe", merely as an excuse for not forming any clear picture of the alleged horror themselves. But the skilled author who knows what he is doing can often hint a thing much better than it can be told. Drawing the line between concrete description and trans-dimensional suggestion is a very ticklish job. In the greatest horror-tale ever written -- Blackwood's Willows -- absolutely nothing takes open and visible form.[...]

-- Selected Letters III, p. 174​

Now, I will admit up front that this is very much my own view of the matter, and one of the reasons I so often have trouble with many modern horror writers: because I feel that their tendency to pile on more and more visible, concrete horror actually shows a paucity of imagination and an excess of authorial sadism and a relish for the merely mundane physical level of horror, rather than the more difficult, and more genuinely terrifying, metaphysical terror which -- even if only for a moment, and for the duration of whatever tale it may be -- causes us to question or doubt our conceptions of what the universe and the nature of reality may be really like. No matter how unnerving a horror of the first type -- whether it be a serial killer, a ghoul, a zombie, a werewolf, or a particularly violent ghost -- may be, it remains more a physical threat or menace, rather than a "spiritual" something which genuinely unsettles a person's view of the fundamentals of existence.

After all, death is a thing we all face, sooner or later; but very little in life actually challenges us on the ground of our perceptions of existence, and it is this, I think, which constitutes truly good "horror" (or, to use the term I prefer, terror) literature whose impact lasts beyond the closing of the book. True, you can have tales which use the first as powerful symbols of the latter; Ambrose Bierce did that sort of thing quite well, perhaps never more effectively than in "The Death of Halpin Frayser", with its terrifying implications. But so few writers of today (not none, by any means, but very few, it seems to me) seem capable of doing this, let alone going straight for the basic underlying terror of that "violation of the order of nature" in its purest form, with all its metaphysical implications. It is here, I think, that the best "horror" verges on the realm of great poetry: the realm of the sublime.

At any rate, I thought I'd bring this quotation (and my thoughts) in for discussion, as I'd be interested in hearing what others think on this one....

 

[Fried Egg]

I would like to add that maybe the art lies in finding just the right balance between cerebral and physical horror? A story that works primarilly on one level or the other can be good but when they get just the right amount of both, it can be brilliant.

 

[j d worthington]

I think I'd say a balance between cerebral and "emotional" horror, or horror which plays on the cerebral and emotional levels combined; but yes, I think such a balance is what makes even a very good story a great one....

 

[Lobolover]

I would have to say that Chambers' King in yellow stories are amongst the most superb stories that do not openly state but hint at an array of posibilities .

 

[Jack Mowbray]

Good horror is writing that, while scaring you to the depths of your soul, when you finish it, leaves you feeling that you have gone beyond fear, leaves you feeling cleansed and better able to cope with your fears, irrational or rational. Horror must ultimately be therapeutic, otherwise it's not life-enhancing, but just a way of passing the time of day and avoiding boredom, a drug. All in all, it's probably better to write horror than read it, being more likely to be beneficial and therapeutic as there's more of the active imagination involved. Being active has always got to be more beneficial than being passive.

 

[j d worthington]

I would disagree that reading is necessarily passive. That depends very much on what you bring to the experience/process. An active, critical reader, receives tremendous benefit or catharsis. Nor does writing horror necessarily serve such therapeutic ends; that, too, depends on what the writer brings to it. And, as has been pointed out in the past, even where such may prove therapeutic for the writer, it may be anything but for a reader in such cases; nor is it by any means always good art. For that, it takes considerable conscious control in molding what emerges (not necessarily at first, but at very least in the later stages of writing, such as revising, editing, etc.); whereas "horror" writing which is good or even great art can (and often does) prove very beneficial to the reader.

But I also question the idea that it must be "therapeutic"; an expression of a genuine human emotion, yes; but not necessarily therapeutic per se....

 

[Fried Egg]

Many writers require to reader to make deductions and generally fill in the gaps making the reading experience an active affair on the part of the reader.

 

[j d worthington]

Many writers require to reader to make deductions and generally fill in the gaps making the reading experience an active affair on the part of the reader.

Indeed; and you'll find plenty of that with writers such as Machen, Aickman, Campbell, Ligotti, etc.... you'll even see it now and again with Stephen King, as in "It Will Grow on You"....

 

[dask]

Literally squirming in my seat is a pretty good clue.