Help Needed: What is horrifying?

InkFinger

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I really need some counsel from people that know. What makes something horrifying? I'm really struggling to write something that I would consider horror because while I can create tension, and maybe a thrill, it's not horrible or terrifying. Here's my problem. I've read King, Koontz, Lovecraft, Poe, and others. I don't find them horrifying either. I've only ever been scared in one movie, and it was terrible, I'm not sure what was going on with me. Maybe I was kid - I was, a kid. So maybe I'm just broken.

For those that know, what makes something horror instead of a thriller?

Thank you for your comment.
 

Kjbartolotta

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For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
-Rilke

I genuinely believe that's relevant here, but maybe I'm just spamming quotes that I like. :) Horror, and not just comic horror necessarily, includes elements of the unknowable and uncanny, it's not so much human dangers and extreme situations as realities intruding that we can't contextualize.
 

Introversion

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Is “Jaws” a horror film or a thriller? Yes. ;)

I think “horror” speaks to primal fears. Swimming in open water where something unseen might pull you under? Horror. On a boat watching the huge shark circle and wondering how to kill it? Thriller.

Horror is the unseen thing circling at night beyond the light your fire throws. It’s buried alive and clawing at its coffin lid. It’s too many legs and eyes. It crawls into your ear while you sleep and makes itself at home. It looks human enough at a glance, the better to lure you into dark alleys and wrap you tight in webbing.
 

InkFinger

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Part of this may be that I find the unknown danger thrilling. What actually scares me is not being able to feed my kids. The movie that terrified me as a child told me something I knew intellectually was BS, but knew in my gut should be there was real.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Part of this may be that I find the unknown danger thrilling.

Is that a bad thing in horror? I feel like the allure of the unknown is a major feature of the genre. Otherwise vampires wouldn't be sexy.
 

InkFinger

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It’s been a long time since I’ve seen vampires treated as truly horrifying. They’ve become a romance trope for the dangerous hunk.
 
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InkFinger

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And. There is nothing wrong with thrilling. I quite like my thriller dressed up in a scary costume, but I actually want to scare myself.
 

InkFinger

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I should also point out that romance is kind of my thing, so nothing wrong with hunky vampires either, but co-opting them has taken some of the edge off.
 
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PyriteFool

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Not to sound trite, but if you want to scare yourself, write about what scares you! Write about parenthood and being unable to provide. The Babadook and Hereditary both use that subtext for their horror/scares. I think a lot of horror incorporates thriller elements because for most *only* being scared isn’t fun or entertaining. But that’s not true for everyone, so do what works for you.

(Side note: I actually find the transformation of vampires into romance trope fascinating since it lets us see how out-groups have reclaimed imagery used to demonize them. So many early literary vampires were “horrifying” because they played on xenophobia and fear of female sexuality. Cf: Carmilla and Dracula. Over time, those minorities (women and queer people especially) identified with that “other” and reclaimed the trope to express and sympathize with their own struggles)
 

Kjbartolotta

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True, and plenty of us get annoyed when the sparkle in just a certain manner, but sexy vampires go back at least as far as Dracula. I think the problem there is defanging (sorry!) the danger that is inherently the sexiness.
 

RedRajah

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Always liked Stephen King's take on it...

[h=1]“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”[/h]
 

Woollybear

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Is it possible that horror is the cost/danger of death/dismemberment with no reward whatsoever, whereas thriller has a potential payoff?

Personally, what horrifies me is the trope of a person being transmuted into something else, against their will. Picard becoming Locutus of Borg is horror, to me. Vampires, and becoming one, can be horrifying. Lose your soul and humanity, be unable to ever again enter the light of day, for time immemorial whether you want it or not--this happening to you against your will, at the hands of a monster--that's horror. Immortal life and great sex is less horrifying, :) .
 
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Cindyt

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Supernatural mass murderers and serial killers scare the living daylights out of me. Michael Myers chases me in my dreams some nights.
 

Kjbartolotta

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I have an aversion to demons. Nothing else ever scares me and demons get me every time.
 

InkFinger

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Thank you, everyone, these are all great thoughts to labor on. I guess what we are all saying in one manner or another is that we fear what we do not understand. To name it is to take its power over you. I'll have to work on it for awhile and see if I can make my gruesome thriller a little more chilling before I'm done with it.
 

Cephus

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That's really one of the reasons I've never been taken by the horror genre, because I really don't think any of it is particularly troubling. I've read a ton of horror in my life and none of it is scary. Like you, I think any fears I might ever have are going to be based in the real world. Once you start throwing in monsters and all of that, my suspension of disbelief goes right out the window.
 

InkFinger

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There is definitely a place for horror, it's one of life's many thrills, I'm just no good at it. I really want to find a way to make it work, because it's a rich vein to mine.
 

InkFinger

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My son and I got into this over dinner. He kept going for irrational fears, but I don't really have any. I'm uncomfortable in institutional buildings late at night (I was an overnight security guard in college) and the odd late night stroll in the rough part of town can be too. He's got a thing for spiders, but that's not really irrational, silly maybe, but it's rational.

In the end, I think it must be control.
 

TashaWinter

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I would have to go with @PyriteFool here. Fear and horror have so many different shapes, but if you want to scare others I'd think you'd have to delve into what really scares you. And that does not have to be the obvious, like spider and dark cellars.
For me true horror is someone dissolving into madness as in "The yellow wallpaper" and "I'm thinking of ending things", books which apparently others don't find scary at all. If your fear is not being able to provide for your family properly you should use that and go from there.
Another example: Racism was turned into a brilliant horrormovie in "Get out".
I think existential fears are the best place to start, but you would have to find a kind of metaphor for them.
 

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I see horror as hopelessness and without rationality. When I watch a horror movie (because I don't read horror) I always shout out "why would they do that?"
 

InkFinger

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I think the whole insanity thing can be a fertile field for horror, but I really haven't explored it. I felt that "Into the Mouth of Madness" had real potential. It made me quite tense, but I think I knew he would escape so it didn't really terrify me.
 

PyriteFool

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I think the whole insanity thing can be a fertile field for horror, but I really haven't explored it. I felt that "Into the Mouth of Madness" had real potential. It made me quite tense, but I think I knew he would escape so it didn't really terrify me.

It definitely has potential, but I have seen it descend pretty quickly into stigmatizing mental health/treatment. There are some pretty dang cringe-inducing “scary asylums”! Good horror generally is a metaphor for something (see the Get Out example) so we have to be careful what metaphors we’re drawing on
 

jennontheisland

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The truth.

Utterly horrifying and something we rationalize away in ourselves and others all the time. Often that's the underlying premise of ghost stories. It comes off as guilt usually, but if you dig a bit deeper, it's the truth.

If you know the truth your character has evaded, hid, skirted, and turned into a joke their entire lives and you can make them face it, you can horrify the reader.

I also started reading horror at 13 and nothing really "scares" me either. If I align this state with comments from my shrink about "hyper self awareness", I'm not scare-able because I know my own truth (aka, I've spent enough time navel gazing in states of self-hate) and am therefore unafraid of facing other peoples.

Dunno. It's a theory at least.
 

Woollybear

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That's a twist. (By that, I mean the amalgamation of stuff said above by various folks.)

The particular sadness of lemon cake was disturbing to me. It wasn't horror, but it disturbed me due to the bizarreness of each character's position. Depending how much you are interested in doing, this might be a title to look into.