Horror - Origins

I started in high school, well before that actually, in English classes. I was a Lovecraft fan(still am) and wrote a few stories that scared the hel out of my teachers.

When I was 5, my dad and I started our tradition of staying up on Friday nights to watch Hammer films. And Saturday afternoons. And drive-in double features. The rest is history.

Fairytales. I'm serious. Queens who order the hearts cut out of little girls, wolves who pretend to be beloved family members to attract prey, parents who ditch children in the woods, etc. Whether I'm writing horror or dark fantasy it tends to flash me back to the fairytales I heard as a kid.

As a child I was well ahead of the curve in my reading ability and would devour every book I could find. Spent a lot of time at the library. The first time I got a hold of a book of works by EA Poe, I was hooked. I started reading anything and everything scary. That obsession has followed me into adulthood and when I decided to start writing, horror is what came naturally to me.

If you stop and think about it.

I find it most interesting that from just the use of words one can conjure up such a story or scene that will actually cause the chills to run up my spine; the hair at the base of my scalp to stand on edge; cause me to turn on an extra light; my stomach to do a flip. Do you truly understand the power of words? For me, the ones that master this are really something. To ignite my imagination in such a way as to almost take my breath away....wow. That, to me, is talent.

I don't think I shall ever achieve this, so my hat is off to those that do.

When I was a little kid, TV really got me interested with Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, old Vincent Price movies, etc. I've always like Poe. In terms of reading/writing, horror really clicked for me when I read Fire Starter by Stephen King. It's not exactly classic horror, but it sucked me in to other King (and Straub, Koontz, Barker, etc.) writing.

I'm finding myself drifting into Horror/Dark Fantasy in my writing lately. Considering I started out with writing fluffy Fantasy and went to Genre Romance, it's kinda remarkable. At least to me.

See, I generally dislike horror stories. There's few things in the world I hate more than "getting got" and having that jolt of fear, especially in movies. I've always been that way. It's why I don't generally read King or Koontz--though they're both superb authors, I don't read them simply because they ARE superb authors and can get me involved and "get" me every time. I hate that. It's not enjoyable, so I try not to do it.

So why am I writing Dark Fantasy/Horror?

Because the darker side of people fascinates me and I want to explore it in my writing now. Socio/psychopaths, serial killers, all those evils that people can do to others and still be all right within their own minds, especially when mixed in with some kind of Fantasy element--that's what I'm drawn to write, and that's what I'm finally beginning to have fun with.

Sounds like I'm the odd-ball out, eh?

virtue_summer said:

Fairytales. I'm serious. Queens who order the hearts cut out of little girls, wolves who pretend to be beloved family members to attract prey, parents who ditch children in the woods, etc. Whether I'm writing horror or dark fantasy it tends to flash me back to the fairytales I heard as a kid.

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Hell yeah on the fairytales. I love that they're considered kids' stories when if they're broken down to their basics, they're fucking horrible. Take Hansel and Gretal. Child abandonment (and possibly abuse), witchcraft, cannibalism, murder. Yeah, sleep well, children.

As for me, I can't really pin down where my love of horror came from. I always liked ghost stories when I was a kid and my eldest brother was into Lovecraft and mythology so maybe that rubbed off on me. Or maybe those of us who have a love of horror get it from something inbuilt - a need to look for the darkness in a story.

PEBKAC said:

When I was a little kid, TV really got me interested with Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents,

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Ditto to this. That's probably when my interest in horror started.
Then, as I got a little older, I really got into things like Tales from the Crypt and other late night stuff, even though I didn't really write monster stuff.

From a young age I wrote more non-supernatural horror. The horrors of man, I guess.(??) Abuse, murder, mental illness, fear, trust. I think the supernatural horror fed this, though. On some level, even at a very young age, I think I could see metaphors within what I watched, I just didn't know how to articulate them. If that makes sense.

I had nightmares a lot as a child. And I loved to write them out later. I was fascinated by them and thought they made good stories. On occasion they were supernatural/monster related, but often times not.

I always had a special place in my heart for fairy tales/folk tales, but it wasn't until college that I really started seeing the horror in some of them. And I remember particularly in college that I took an American Gothic class, and yeah, that freaked the you know what out of me. I was afraid to walk to my car at night. And for that class I wrote a short story, that I realize now, had been dying to get out my whole life.

Though, to be honest--I never really thought of what I wrote as "horror". I just wrote it. I don't think it was until I joined AW that I thought it might fit in that genre (and at times I'm still unsure LOL).

I never really decided to write horror. It just kind of happened. I found my love of horror through a shiny copy of S. King's "The Shining" at age 9 (the story has been recounted so many times here that I just can't bear to retell it yet again) but didn't start writing horror until I was 16 or 17. I was working my way through genres, trying to figure out what worked best... I tried thrillers, romance, dramatic romantic westerns (yes, I did), YA, MG, and came to horror last. It stuck.

I wasn't allowed to watch scary/thriller shows when I was a kid - I grew up in a rather restrictive house. But I loved ghost stories and was convinced our cellar was haunted.

In first or second grade we wrote stories and bound them in wallpaper to present to our parents on parents night. After reading mine, my father asked why I didn't write a nice story. Apparently reading about an earth-child being kidnapped by aliens and married to an alien prince then having multiple deformed children wasn't something he expected from me. That was my first story. Kinda sf/f, kinda horror in a little kid kinda way.

Through the rest of school, I wrote the occasional ghost story/poem/thing. But then I was told I needed to grow up, had to get a "real" job. So I did. When I started writing again about 3 years ago, I came up with pb/kid stories and struggled mightily. Then one day, I stumbled across the Horror Hounds Weekend Report thread. It was like a switch opening a hidden passage that I'd forgotten about. Oh yeah! I used to write stuff like this!

And so, I write darkly.

I've been a closeted horror fan for almost my entire natural life. I say "closeted" because it hasn't been until college that I admitted how much I love these creepy little stories.

When I was little, I both loved ghost stories and hated them. I was so sensitive, so imaginative, that whenever I saw a scary movie it would get under my skin and give me nightmares for weeks. I had a LOT of nightmares as a kid, too. The stories I read and movies I watched were more in the realm of fantasy and fairy tales, although there were always a couple of spooky ones that I kept being drawn to. I was always hyper-aware of scary stories simply because of the way they affected me. The images and ideas stayed with me in ways that fairy tales and fantasies didn't.

Then I started watching scary movies on purpose, and getting really annoyed and frustrated by the way that most of them had unhappy endings. See, I was used to happy endings by then, and it made me angry to invest myself into characters that wouldn't find a way out of their troubles. I don't need everything tied up in a nice, shiny bow, but I'm more interested in seeing people face horrible, horrible things and then use that fear to find some previously untapped inner strength, and then get out of it.

That doesn't seem to happen much in horror. Or if it does, I haven't seen it enough. So I started trying to write stories where that does happen. The more I love my characters, the more I torture them, but I do it because I want to make them stronger. I like the creepiness, I like the dread, but the real reason I'm into horror is because it's so much more inspiring and uplifting--for me, anyway--when a character can find a way out of that.

Been a horror junkie since I was little. Can't think of any specific moment necessarily, but I always gravitated toward it. In the tiny school library we had back in elementary school, I consumed every available book about fictional or allegedly "true" hauntings and ghostly happenings I could get my hands on. When I burned through the relatively few they had available, I re-read them over and over again. I can remember Monsters You've Never Heard Of and Ghostly Terrors by Daniel Cohen being two of my favorites about ghostlore, and an (out of print) anthology called Shudders that introduced me to "The Monkey's Paw" and Robert Bloch's awesome short story "Sweets for the Sweet."

I remember that back then the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series was like some sort of holy grail of children's horror for me and my classmates.

I remember that the first really adult horror stories I read were in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew, and that back then the story that scared me the most from that anthology was The Bogeyman.

By about fourth grade I was dabbling in some (truly terrible) horror short stories of my own and it just kept building from there.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the love affair with horror began.. I'm pretty sure Stoker, Angela Carter, and The Monk played a large role, back in (the local equivalent of) high school. As I grew older, I grew to love it more, and I think it was probably Clive Barker that did me in eventually.
Also, how could anyone not love the things that go bump in the night?

I'm with Effie, I didn't make a conscious decision to write horror, that's just 90% of what comes out. I've always read all genres and didn't start reading horror until I was 18 (mostly because my uptight school and library didn't stock such rubbish).

My favorite writers as a teenager were Tolkien and Azimov. I wrote off an on over the years but didn't get serious until I was 39. Then what came out was horror, with an occasional odd story that is harder to classify.

In my early teens I discovered Lovecraft and his mythos, read Stoker's Dracula, always enjoyed Poe, and other writers of horror fiction. I remember enjoying a short story by Asimov that had vampires with 400+ IQs.

I have written mostly contemporary and historical fiction.

My only attempt at writing a horror novel, A Gathering of Vultures, pub. in 2007was the result of experiences we had when we lived on the beautiful Brazilian island of Santa Catarina, which had Florianópolis the state captial, dozens of great beaches, and plenty of incredible ubiquitous black vultures.

Honestly, I was a fragile violet of a child.

Goosebumps scared the hell out of me, yet I read it. All my friends loved horror movies in gradeschool. I'd watch them with them, but cover my eyes for the majority of it.

My love for horror writing is directly attributed to the works of Stephen King. I didn't even know they were horror, I just knew they were intricate, subtle, and entertaining. It wasn't until later that I realized I loved the fright that came along with them.

Hell, truth be told, I still don't like being scared.

It's a lot more fun to inflict it on other people

I guess I was born with a passion for the horrifying. Ever since I can remember, I have loved anything meant to scare, anything spooky or mysterious. I'm sure it helped that my mother was a big horror movie buff, so I grew up watching scary movies from the tender age of birth. If you'd asked me at the age of four what my favourite movie was, I would have told you it was Child's Play. In fact, I had a Chucky doll I carried with me everywhere.

At five or six I was reading Goosebumps and enjoying them, but craving something 'more'. At seven I discovered Fear Street for a few months, but the series was soon eclipsed by my discovery of Stephen King. Soon after King came Poe, and any other type of horror I could get my hands on. And as I started reading these delightful tales, I began creating my own.

"Write a story about what you did this summer!" would often be followed by tales of zombies feasting upon the brains of the God-fearing and mentions of voodoo cults carving still-beating hearts for sacrifice.

They called me a weird kid. People in my first-grade class were convinced I was a witch - I know that because when I finally started talking to them they all told me so (and some still kept their distance).

Honestly, I think most of my horror for passion comes from my juvenile need to prove I'm not scared of anything. As a little kid, I reveled in the title of being fearless, I loved being the only girl with the guts to lock herself in the darkened concrete passage that for some reason was housed within our school. I got off on being brave.

Nowadays, it's not so much the urge for people to think I'm fearless that drives me, but the fact that I've become so desensitized to all that we term 'scary' that I am compelled to quest for something that does indeed scare me on a base level.

If I can chill myself with one of my stories, it is one of the greatest feelings on earth!

As a side note, after long years of searching, I found that Paranormal Activity of all things really managed to disturb me and keep me thinking about it long after watching the movie.

When did I start writing horror?
Not long ago, bad dreams, always have them. Do I write horror? Lmao, feel I miss the mark on horror. It either turns out comedic or erotic or thriller (damn it).

I always loved the thrill that came from being frightened (Halloween was one of my favorite holidays, still is. I always loved to dress up and one year we built a haunted house in the garage.) and I love using the words to strike something in readers. I don't just like horror. I like to write anything that digs deep into the human mind and pulls on its nerves. Pain, love, sadness, joy... it's all good!

I also enjoy tormenting my characters and horror is the best way to do that.

I didn't make a conscious choice to write horror. But I did fall in love at an early age.

When I was younger, I was a masochist; I'd watch Twilight Zone, alone, in my basement, in the dark.

*shrugs* Maybe it felt like a small victory, surviving yet another heart attack.

It wasn't really a decision, it was just what came out on the page. Horror or dark Sci-Fi mostly or the occasional dark piece and doesn't really fit into any category I know of. I guess I write these types of things because I enjoy reading these types of stories.

I liked to be scared as much as the normal person when I was a kid and teenager, but when I did write it was a little dark. Dark fantasy, murder, etc, which really didn't help me as a teenager a few months after Columbine.
But what made me realize I could write good horror stories was some writing exercises.
I wanted to practice my writing skills so I thought of some ideas I didn't think mattered that much, zombies. After a few attempts I found out I had a knack for it especially after throwing children into it. So I kind of drifted into it due to my personality, I just can't do light and fluffy stories very well.