What are some effective writing tips for the horror genre?

Feidb

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Everyone has already covered a lot but my tongue in cheek B-movie input is that the monster has to eat half the cast, they should say "f..." a lot and there has to be naked chicks, gratuitous (or naked guys) that has nothing at all to do with the plot!

Seriously, you need to make it creepy if possible, but also have fun with it if you can. Also, have a decent payoff at the end so it makes it worthwhile for the reader to sit down and invest the time and money into buying and reading it. That should be a given, but I've read some horror and felt ripped off with bad endings. Not everyone will agree but still...it IS entertainment, after all. Scary fun.
 

Denevius

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One technique that creates good horror is making the cruel seem casual, or even normal. Readers are disquieted when they slip into a PoV that takes them to the inhumane before they’re even aware of it.
 

MoonTheLune

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apparently, horror sells
lmfao who told you these lies??

All joking aside, I think the best advice I can give is to watch scary movies. All of the scary movies, from the Nosferatu-style silent films to the Alfred Hitchcock classic suspense movies, to the latest slasher and slasher-parody blockbusters. Develop your own personal taste in scary movies. Once you have that, it'll be easier to find the kinds of horror you want to read, and from there what you want to write.

And I think my most important advice would be to never stop consuming horror. Like any genre, there's never going to be a point at which you can say "alright I now completely understand how to be good at this and therefore no longer need to study the masters". No. Bad. Stagnation. We are always studying the masters. :D
 

Cal_Noble

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There are big differences between horror flicks and books. If you aren't specifically looking or deconstructing the movie, you won't notice.
For starters, pace. Movies use music to set or punctuate a pace. It's a bit of faking that you can't fake in writing. Movies use a lot of jump scares (loud noises, cat jumping into view, etc) can't do that in novels either.

To write effective horror you must:

1. Make the reader care what happens to the characters
2. Make the reader fear what will happen to the characters
3. Create a suspension of disbelief that transports your reader to your world

Then pick what type of horror you want to write, read many books and go.
 

pattmayne

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The "bad guy" should probably be overhwelmingly powerful. There's a HUGE power difference between protagonist and antagonist in horror stories.

Imagine the SCREAM movies (or any slasher movie where the bad guys are NOT supernatural). The "good guys" have to be a bunch of suburbanites who don't know how to fight. If it were RAMBO vs THE SCREAM GUY (or RAMBO vs MICHAEL MYERS) then it would not be a horror movie. Rambo would annihilate the lame serial killer immediately. But Rambo vs Alien would still be scary.

In Cosmic Horror the bad guy permeates the whole cosmos. You can never escape the aliens who have learned to weave themselves into the fabric of existence, or the horror-gods who created the world. In the Alien movies, the true horror isn't the killer-bugs, it's the nearly occult process and phenomena that generated them. The Engineers, the black goo, and where did it all start?

Horror is an opportunity to conceptualize what scares you and paint a big scary picture of it, and weave that picture into a structured narrative. Demonstrate all the ways this Force looms over you.