It's late in the game, but you know what? I'm gonna mind the café again. Quick-and-easy topic for you, too. It's the season of Halloween, so let's discuss horror fan fiction! How do you feel about writing horror fanfics? Have you ever tried writing horror? Would you try writing horror? If you have, what did you think? Would you do it again? What types of horrible happenings do you like to write about? Are you into visceral horror? Psycho-horror? Erotic horror? Redneck or backwoods horror? What type of monsters do you like? What type of characters do you feel work best for horror? Settings? How did you write horror? What got you into writing horror? There are lots of potential discussion topics for this one, so let's get talking!
As usual, the rules: Talk about your fan-fiction only and No condemning others' work and "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. Along with the civility and whatnot. But, enough of my rambling, let's get this show on the road! Trak Nar Ramble on 08:34, October 23, 2012 (UTC)
Discussion[]
Solus[]
FIRST! ^-^ :p
Anyhoo, this cafe is relevant to my interests. For one, yes, I have written horror before - a short story called Rakata. I like how it turned out, I was planning on writing more short horror stories but none of them I felt were nearly as strong as that one, so I didn't.
- Would I write horror again? Maybe. It depends on if I could come up with a story I really believed in and that I felt was strong and fresh.
- What kind of horrible happenings to I like to write about? Mostly psychological stuff. I'm a fan of the "less is more" camp when it comes to horror - the unknown is frightening. If we know that the strange sound coming from upstairs is just the dog, it's not scary anymore. I'm a fan of not overexplaining and trying to be subtle. At least, that's the horror I like to read/see, I don't know if my stuff actually is.
- My kind of horror? Psychological horror or "realistic" horror; that is, terrible things that could actually happen to you or horrible things that could never happen, but are presented realistically. I don't know if I explained that well. >.> I like mostly atmospheric stuff, where the horror is not seeing things happen, but imagining or waiting on edge for them to happen - but they don't and don't and then THEY DO! That kind a thing.
- What kind of characters work best for horror? If you're actually going to go for a horror, the dread is seeing bad things happen to people we like - therefore, most of the main characters should be likeable. Sure, you can have an unlikeable dude in there for the catharsis of him dying, but if we want him to die, we'll be cheering for the monster, and the monster ceases to be scary, at least for that moment. Now if you're going to write a slasher (which is not a horror), you can make the main characters as despicable as you like. We're here to see them die, anyway. I suppose that's why I don't really like slashers - the characters are often so grating.
- What settings work best for horror? Either a familiar setting (house, office, school, hospital, woods, etc.), where we the horror comes from it being too close to home, or at least somewhere tight and enclosed, where the characters have nowhere to run (Alien, Event Horizon). Claustrophobia and helplessness are scary. Also, playing off primal fears are scary. One building-sized cockroach crawling around isn't creepy, a lot of little ones crawling all over are creepy. That kinda thing.
- How did I write horror? Ah....I dunno. I came up with the story and tried to write to fit it. Tried to convey things like helplessness and simpleness. I dunno.
- What got me into writing horror? Reading/watching horror stories. Rakata, as those of you who have read it may have guessed, is inspired by the Twilight Zone. Read/watch horror things that you like, see what works, analyze why it is scary, and work off that. Get ideas from other stories - there's no shame in that (unless you are blatantly ripping something off). A good writer can take a used concept and make it his own fresh, new thing. -Solus Talk to the Hand 16:48, October 23, 2012 (UTC)
Trak[]
I've written a couple of short horror pieces, which are not on here. If you're interested, go hunt on TFN for "Unexpected" and "Night of the Living Beer Goggles". While I've written dark vignettes in the past, those were my first published horror vignettes, and most certainly my first foray into the realm of zombies. Reeka Chorizzo and Tuffass fighting zombies. How can you go wrong?
For those pieces, I played up sensory descriptions; smell and sound, with taste and touch following closely. Sight was the sense I used the least, as for the first one, the scene was dark and there simply wasn't anything to see. I never fully explained what exactly the zombies were, and I kept their forms rather vague, because what the reader will envision in their head is always far better than what I would describe on the page. Just give them enough clues to form the creature and let their imagination take over the details. I feel this works better for the horror genre, and many horror fiction writers will go this route. Simply put, when the description spells it out for me, I find it to detract from the atmosphere. And for a horror story, atmosphere is hugely important. What I felt made Death Troopers work so well was the atmosphere. The settings were atmospheric. They had sounds, distinct sounds. They had a smell, and that smell had a taste. And the scenes in that book that had the most impact were the ones that employed all the senses, particularly smell and touch. And if you want someone to truly see the horror of your zombies, you would do well to give them a smell, and give that smell a taste. It will last longer in the reader's memory.
My favorite type of horror would have to be psycho-horror. I like it when the story messes with my head, and with my interest in psychodrama, I like to mess with the reader's head. For my two horror fics, though, I went the classic route with the zombies. I had some psychological elements, but for the most part, I was going for a good old-fashioned zombie slugfest. The second story in that short series was my attempt at erotic horror. It was written for the Monday Mush Mania Challenge, and our challenge was to combine horror with mushy love. So, I combined horror with everything but the actual sex. Lots of foreplay, and the story was quite erotic without being explicit, but it did not have any sex in it at all. The thing about an erotic horror is that it needs to play equally on both levels. It needs to be an erotic story and it needs to be a horror story. And at the time... I really had no idea how to write "mush" so my attempt was a soap opera love scene. Oh well!
In terms of settings, the more mundane tends to work the best, though popular locales are hospitals. The thing about horror, to paraphrase from On Writing Horror, is when the ordinary is invaded by the extraordinary, horror happens. A row of mailboxes on a quiet suburban street... and a slimy tentacle slithers out of one of them. That small crawlspace door in the loft... and the weird sounds that emanate from beyond it. The dianoga slithering from the toilet... and you had chosen its first victim by calling the plumber. Your normal world has just been invaded by something decidedly weird. In "Unexpected," two Republic Marines are heading back to their motel room after a night on liberty. As they walk down the street, they hear suspicious sounds coming from an alleyway. Reeka and Tuffass go and investigate, and their normal world is invaded by zombies. Horror happened, as they were not expecting that at all.
Would I write horror again? Most certainly. I enjoy the genre very much. I like my psychological horror, backwoods horror, Gothic horror, cosmic horror, and slasher flicks. I have been tempted to toy with the cosmic horror genre, perhaps play that angle with a psychodrama. It would be an interesting writing experiment. Problem is, my flighty muse isn't in the mood to let me write any horror right now. Trak Nar Ramble on 07:48, October 25, 2012 (UTC)
MPK[]
I really should be getting to school, but whatever.
It's hard for me to talk about horror. I actually wrote a short story in the genre set on modern Earth about a pyromaniac who is followed by a demon, but I never got much feedback on it. As far as my fan fiction goes, however, I made an effort to infuse some horror into two stories, River and The Beast of Rutan, more the latter than the former. The former's horror concentrated on the various unnamed residents of its town (particularly the man in the hat) trying to solve all the murders that's been going on (even though the reader knows that the culprit is obviously a Sith) and being totally unprepared to deal with it. The latter comes much closer to being a horror story, I think, as the action is set in a remote burial ground littered with tombs, dead man's bones, and more grotesque imagery and deeds as it goes on.
For what kind of horror I like, it's hard to say. I've no respect for the kind that relies on having some bigass monster chasing people around and killing the shit out of them (especially when by all rights any significantly serious physical force would be able to take them down). Nevertheless, blood and copious amounts of it have their place and can be pulled off masterfully (I think one of The Beast of Rutan's major influences in this regard would be the canon novel Crosscurrent). But I guess you could say that I prefer the psychological-type of horror. I mean, if horror is about fear, then it's about the mind, therefore it's about the psychology of your characters. So if that's the case, it seems to me that the focus of the horror should be how the horrifying events are affecting the characters' minds. Everything else should be building to how it affects the characters. That's one reason I hate zombie fiction (no offense to Trak) - anyone would get freaked out if they had to contend with really gnarly dead dudes who chew on you, and for the exact same reason. You don't have a whole lot of room to have psychology stuff going on, y'know?
Related to the psychology, I think, is part of the proper use of buildup and foreshadowing. You can get away with all kinds of stuff by showing only little bits of it at a time, making the wheels in the audience's head turn more and more as the story goes on - so that they're motivated to read on in part because they always have a Why? or How? question about what they've already seen. In this means, you can have great atmosphere and great storytelling for a concept that, without the buildup and foreshadowing, would be hamfisted and cheesy.
For the type of monsters I prefer, it's really hard to say. I've already mentioned that a bigass dude with a big knife is entirely unsuitable for what I'm talking about - and since I've neither written or read a whole lot of horror fiction (unless a handful of Slender man blogs counts for the latter), I'm not sure what type of monsters I like. But I think it's just as important to flesh out the monster's psychology as it is the protagonist's, if only to yourself. Make it behave consistently and know why it behaves that way. If the monster is just an insane, sick, or somehow corrupted person, though, it's probably best that his/her/its psychology be explored or hinted at just enough to be reasonable. If it's more inhuman, though, still know what its goals and modus operandi is, and try not to give it a voice unless necessary.
What kind of characters work best for horror? I'm going to go with Solus here and say that it's best to have likable people - but that's a rule with almost any type of fiction. For me, though, I prefer whenever the protagonist is given a personal stake in whatever kinda crazy shit is going on - and by that, I mean something more personal than, "I need to move my person out of the way of this bigass monster that's coming to kill me". Like I said above, a big monster that kills people for no reason isn't scary. But what if the monster is, was, or turns out to have been someone the protagonist knows? Or what if the protagonist is responsible for this stuff that's going on? Or what if the stuff going on keeps reminding him of some problem of his own that has nothing to do with it? That sort of thing.
Settings, I really don't know. Isolation from help by either walls or sheer distance is useful, I suppose; it depends on what you're working with. But I think that keeping your important characters away from non-important ones whenever important stuff is going on is a key. For instance, my story about the pyromaniac was set in a community college. I needed to have the important happenings occur with some sort of isolation - gradual isolation. In earlier scenes I isolated the protagonist by having him be, say, contemplating the weird shit going on while in the middle of a classroom lecture - he's with other people physically, but he's not at all free to move or speak. Later on, when stuff is getting more and more real, his talks with his sidekick (the only other important character) occur in public places at evening hours, when there aren't bystanders around. Getting the bystanders and muggles out of sight is good - otherwise you have to contrive ways to kill them all, which can be very distracting and unnecessary.
As for specific settings (I suppose the above paragraph was more about what to do with them): public places, private places, remote public places, urban areas, rural areas, nature areas. But the setting is important - it needs to jam well with whatever the actual horror is.
What got me into writing horror? Not entirely a valid question for me, as I've only written one story in my life that's entirely horror (or maybe two, if Beast of Rutan counts). But what got the ideas I had (and have) into my head are just mostly the horror stuff I've been exposed to. I haven't actually watched many horror movies at all (last one I remember seeing was Cabin In the Woods, in the theater, because my then-girlfriend's best friend dragged us into seeing it with her - fuck that movie), but I've read a few choice stories in the genre. The Haunting of Hill House and Poe's Fall of the House of Usher come to mind. But I've watched a lot of online amateur horror series, pretty much all of them the Slender man serieses on Youtube (if you know what those are) - I like them because they're about ordinary people having to deal with things they don't understand, and their horror doesn't rely on being gross. -MPK, Free Man 13:53, October 26, 2012 (UTC)
I'm the Chosen One[]
Of all the half-completed crud fiction I have written, I have yet to do a horror fiction because I didn't feel like I had the ability to write it well, until now. I was recently convinced to try it out, which I am currently trying to write now. The difficulty I feel in horror fiction is making an evil that is not cliche or overdone and that is compelling.
As with my other esteemed colleagues, I prefer the psychological terror and not so much the in your face gore that stands-in for horror (basically slashers, but not limited to that sub-genre). Really, I am into the Hitchcock-ian/Jaws horror that builds on suspense and doesn't rely on graphic imagery or cheap scares to scare the audience. Build the suspense. Also, I like the thrill of the hunt where the villain is constantly on the heels of the protagonist and will not let up (basically Terminator-esque). If you combine that, it provides the definitive horror experience to me; it keeps the audience on edge and makes them question whether the character in front of them will survive. It will have them asking whether the villain will triumph. I am very much in the vague, suspense-filled camp and not the Saw or Hostel camps.
Characters that work best for horror are average joes. If the characters are believable and rooted in reality, that engages the audience on another level and makes it more compelling since they can easily see themselves in those shoes and compare and contrast their actions with the protagonists. Sure Jedi and other super beings can be used for good horror because of their heightened senses and abilities, but I feel that it is more engrossing if they are real people.
Setting, this is the one thing that is not entirely important for this genre. Horror can work well anywhere. In an isolated forest or ship or even in the middle of a traffic lane on Coruscant (heck that could even be more tense/appealing since the character is surrounded by millions of beings, yet none of them can, or care to, help. They are alone in an ocean of life). Setting is a sandbox. A very good thing about horror is that it can be very stylized to add to the visceral experience, whether it be the sterile spacecraft in 2001 or grimy, neony post-Apoc environment of Blade Runner. Setting in itself is very important for the story, but the choice of location is up to you.
I tend to describe the the senses with horror like Trak, but place just as much emphasis on the visual, which is a very important and can be most unsettling with proper description. I am trying to fulfill my the style I subscribe to, which is to keep things suspenseful and avoid the slasher. It is difficult to keep the proper balance though. Time will tell how I can pull it off. Probably not well. LOL-I'm the Chosen One 06:38, October 28, 2012 (UTC)
Suggestions for other topics[]
Got any suggestions? Anyone else want to take over hosting on occasion? Should we try to adhere to some type of schedule? Trak Nar Ramble on 08:34, October 23, 2012 (UTC)