- Joined
- Dec 21, 2007
- Messages
- 95
- Reaction score
- 17
It's widely held that turning the lights down can make a creepy book or film that little bit more creepy, but what's the scariest thing you've read or seen in broad daylight? I ask because in my horror writing, scaring the willies out of readers no matter when or where they're reading is one of my prime objectives (though of course stories have to be good in their own right too).
The scariest for me was a short story I read a while back about a doctor in a hospital who liked to anaesthetise patients, cut them open as if for surgery but then immediately sew them back up, making the stitches only just tight enough to hold the incisions closed -- and no tighter. Then he'd wait for them to wake up, take them to a locked room somewhere in the hospital, and beat them up with a baseball bat with predictably messy results. While that might sound more gross than scary, it actually put the shivers up me in a big way. If I can call out in horror while sitting in the middle of a sunlit park, that's good scary writing...
(The bit in Sixth Sense when the cancer girl's ghost appears under the blanket had the same effect, if I can briefly digress into film)
T.
The scariest for me was a short story I read a while back about a doctor in a hospital who liked to anaesthetise patients, cut them open as if for surgery but then immediately sew them back up, making the stitches only just tight enough to hold the incisions closed -- and no tighter. Then he'd wait for them to wake up, take them to a locked room somewhere in the hospital, and beat them up with a baseball bat with predictably messy results. While that might sound more gross than scary, it actually put the shivers up me in a big way. If I can call out in horror while sitting in the middle of a sunlit park, that's good scary writing...
(The bit in Sixth Sense when the cancer girl's ghost appears under the blanket had the same effect, if I can briefly digress into film)
T.
