How to Create a Good Horror Setting
What and what not to do
Oh hey! Thank you and the person behind you for reading this post!
… Wait, you thought you where alone?
Okay, jokes aside, I decided to write an article about horror. Since I was working on a horror game for the last 3 1/2 years and therefore I thought a lot about what “real” horror is and how to implement it successfully.
I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned with you.
The three parts of horror
According to Steven King, you can divide horror into 3 parts:
- Gross-out
- Horror
- Terror
The Gross-out
This is the easiest part of horror to create. It shows the viewer's brutality. This part of horror is not really scary, it is more disgusting for the viewer.
Blood, body parts, and torture, as an example, are all a part of the gross-out.
Horror
Yes, “horror” is also a part of the horror. Steven King defines this part as when the monster is actually visible in the scene and taking the main role in it.
The viewer feels the fear by seeing the abnormal, or something terrifying that he or she cannot understand.
Terror
Terror is the scariest part, but also the hardest to implement. Terror is subtle, it is the type of fear that is only in your imagination.
When creating terror, you only give the viewer just a little information about what is going on, and the rest is up to his/her imagination.
Here is a quote from Steven King about 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…
Creating good horror — Some tips
Okay after the theory, here are some of my tips on how to create good horror.
A little information right away: I will write about the “viewer” a lot. What I mean by this is the person who consumes the horror e.g: The player in a horror game, the reader of the book, etc.
Imagination
Let’s start with the most important tip: Imagination.
Playing with the imagination of the viewer is not easy to do right, but it’s the best way to really scare the viewer.
You probably know the moments when you wake up in the middle of the night and watch your room from your bed. The silhouette of the chair becomes a person who stares at you, when a furniture cracks it is a creature in your wardrobe and so on. You get scared over nothing, this is the power of our imagination!
This is the “Terror” part of the horror. Do not let the viewer see the monster right at the beginning, instead let the viewer build its own version in his/her mind.
Give the viewer some hints of the monster. Bad quality pictures, show him small parts of its body, it’s footprints. That way, the viewer's mind will create its own version of the monster and will start to fear it.
Imagination is the best way to build up tension. If you would show the whole monster right at the beginning, it wouldn’t be that scary and the tension around the creature would be gone pretty fast.
Sound
Sound is a very powerful tool to create horror. It plays a lot with the imagination of the viewer, because you don’t see the thread, but you can hear it.
Imagine being in the woods and you know that there is some danger near you. Every sound around you would scare you. That’s why sound is so scary, you don’t know if that crackling sound behind the bush is a puppy or a bear who is hungry for you.
And don’t forget that sound and music is also a mood enhancer. It tells the viewer how to feel and can increase the viewer’s mood strongly.
Familiar things where something is odd
Imagine some balloons… Nothing scary about this hu? With balloons, we usually associate something happy.
But what about balloons in a dark hidden cellar room, sprinkled with dirt and although the room has been closed for many years, the balloons are still flying! Now that is scary.
Familiar things in a weird context unpleasantly confuse us.
Things we avoid
There are some things that we do not want to do.
You probably know these movie moments when you just think “Oh no, please don’t go there”.
Forcing the viewer to do things that he/she does not want will create a very uncomfortable feeling.
It is scarier when we know scary things will happen
The horror game “Slender” does a really good job at that. You know that sooner or later the slender man will come. But you don’t know when. This builds up a lot of tension.
When we know that something bad will happen, we start to think about how bad it will be. Our imagination will make us really scared before anything will happen at all.
Isolation
We as humans are social beings. We do not want to be isolated from other humans. Because based on evolution that would mean our certain death.
There are two types of isolation:
- Location isolation: takes place at an isolated/remote place
- Social isolation: Isolation from a group
While isolation based upon location is easy to understand, social isolation maybe needs a bit more explanation:
Take a look at this scene from IT:
This is a good example of social isolation. Even though the character “Richie” is surrounded by people, the horror only affects him. The people around him don’t notice pennywise at all. That isolates Richie from the rest of the people around him, which makes the situation far more helpless and horrifying for him.
A mix of horror elements
The mixing of different horror elements creates a more intense feeling of horror.
So be creative, include as much horror elements as possible in your creatures or scenes!
Things to avoid
There are also some things you should avoid.
Jumpscares
Jumpscares are not always bad, but often!
A jumpscare itself is not scary, hearing a loud sound and seeing a flashy image does not scare you it just startles you.
What a jumpscare does is that it releases all the tension you build over time almost instant. So that means, you have to build it up again after it.
If you use Jumpscares, use them very carefully.
Too much gore
Too much gore can turn the horror into just something brutal and nasty. Too much brutality will not produce more horror, rather the opposite is the case! It will quickly start to change the mood to something gory and not to something terrifying.
These were some of my ideas on good horror.
I hope you liked it, and I could give you some ideas :)
