Spooky Scary

A reader's imagination can come up with something much more scary than anything you could describe in writing. One useful technique is to only give us tiny glimpses of the monster and allow the reader to fill in the rest of the blanks. Another technique you can use is focusing on the reactions of the characters. If you have a character who you've previously depicted as brave and impossible to frighten and you show them freaking out in reaction to the monster, that'll get the point across. A third tip is to highlight the sense of uncanniness by describing things that are familiar but ever so slightly "off", like eyes in slightly the wrong position, or proportions that are just a bit wrong. Shirley Jackson does this in The Haunting of Hill House, where she describes all the right angles being a fraction of a degree off.

Try this: instead of focusing on what the monster looks like and the danger it poses, get deeper inside your point of view character's head. Share her reaction to everything, from the first glimpse to the first full look. Don't limit yourself to what she sees and hears. Include smell, memory, physical sensations, everything you can think of.

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Have you ever noticed that in horror movies if the beast is kept mostly off camera, with only slight aspects of its physical form seen, it's more frightening? Consider the first Alien movie. We only saw brief flashes of it, which made it more terrifying. This is why being in the dark is scarier than full daylight.

It's definitely easier to do in the movies.

A lot of times the scariest scenes are unexpected. Everything seems completely normal and then wham, the monster appears.

Can you recall how King, Bradbury and Rowling dealt with situations like this. They are your three favourite authors.

I'm assuming you can see it in your mind's eye. Imagination is the thing to draw on here. You must draw on imagination. You have to let go. 'White and horny' is far too vague to be scary.

How would you react if that creature rumbled out of the woods (in daylight? at dusk?) and headed for you?

What would you notice? White and horny? Nope. Possibly...

Effing enormous. Legs like oak trees. No arms, but a mouth like those things in scrapyards that crush cars. A belly -no... three bellies intertwined. Oh God- I can see through the belly. I stagger backwards, trip and fall into the hedge. I scrabble to my knees and hold my breath. Breath. It's breathing green liquid and smoke for God's sake. Please don't come any closer.

You get the idea.

What would you think? Even if you can't think anything, that's a start. Are your legs going to move? Can you comprehend what's coming towards you. What can you compare it with- size? bulk? sounds? Is the ground trembling? Does it keep coming? Does it stop? Is it sniffing? searching? pawing? Can it see you? Has it seen you? When were you first aware that 'something wasn't right' - maybe seconds before you see it? What features or lack of features draw your attention? Does it seem deformed in some way? Eyes? Mouth? What images or fears or thoughts do they trigger?

"Holy Shit! Holy effing shit!" is as good a way as any of starting to imagine how you would react.

Are you alone?

If not, who is the POV character, because it's the observations, actions and reactions of the POV character that have to be the focus of the writing.

Good luck, friend. You can do it

When I was a kid of barely seven or eight I think? Two recurring nightmares always managed to wake me up screaming and in tears...

One of them was from my grandparents home, which was in a village. It was a dream where I who didn't know how to climb trees, somehow found myself on one in a dark environment I can only describe as a starless night. There would always be other trees around me, with only their black, shadowy forms visible against a dark grey sky. They surrounded a pond of dark water, where I used to fall from the tree with a strangely realistic splash. I didn't know how to swim, so while I splattered and splashed trying to stay afloat, dark featureless heads used to rise all around me from the water. I woke up at that point.

Another was about me going to the bathroom alone in the night. While the previous one was in the darkness, there was an incandescent light bulb lighting up the place in this dream, and somehow that made it even scarier than the previous one. When I turned on the faucet, instead of water, a clown used to come out of it. I don't remember it's exact features, but 'it'(yes, 'it') used to smile at me, and I used to fall as my vision distorted in a weird nauseating manner. The most frightening factor was that I wanted to scream, to call out to my parents, but all I could manage was a strange sort of groan. and my sleep thankfully used to break there.

Both of these dreams were almost too realistic to be one. And in both of them, I used to be aware of the fact that they were dreams. I desperately wished for them to stop from continuing, but they didn't stop unless someone woke me up.

My point is, think about what used to scare you or does even now(sadly I am short of becoming less and less scared of things of late), and what emotions and physical reactions you experienced in your scariest moments. I try to do that. I am also more into atmospheric scares than jump scares. Yeah, a grotesque monster suddenly appearing is shocking, but I think the terror when the danger is slow but inevitable is a lot better.

I would like to fourth(third? fifth) the point that the character's reactions are what make a thing scariest. It's one thing to see what they see, but If we're sufficiently in the head of the MC, I'm going to be feeling what they're feeling too. I was not a child the first time I read IT by Stephen King, and honestly a straight up description of the various forms of ol' Bob Gray wouldn't have bothered me, being a product of horror books and movies galore, BUT the way he brings us into the characters minds breaking apart as they take him in scared the crap out of me.