A fiction epiphany...

[rightwing401]

It kind of just hit me while at work today. I was thinking of what makes a story scary. The only answer that I could come up with was...
...playing human emotion.
I have read dozens of horror novels, countless online stories, and not a single one of them has managed to scare me. No matter how much blood or guts gets splattered, it just doesn't make me feel any worse or greater affection for the story, unless the death has deep meaning.
To date, only two 'horror' novels have ever had an effect on me.
Carrie. The absolute depression with a faint flicker of hope that was crushed in the end made me finish the book feeling horribly sad.
I am Legend.
The complete isolation of a man with no one and nothing left after the whole world is gone really sinks in dispare unlike any other I've ever felt. Honestly, I would have never thought that I would be so upset by reading about a dog dying.
So understanding this, I feel that this will be how I'll apply my writing. Sure, there will be gore, but from now on I'll do my best to strike as deep into the human element as I can.
Now I want to know from the rest of you. What is it about horror that scares, or captures you? The more I know what others like or expect, the greater of an understanding I'll have to know how I'll go about in my writing direction.

[Arcades057]

It's hard to read something and be frightened. Besides getting all into something you're reading and then there's a loud noise in your house, that is.

Stress is what gets me in a novel and movies. The original Dawn of the Dead did that pretty well, raising your stress level to unbearable points and then never relieving it. As for a book doing that to me? Not so much. I've read a few pieces on here that had me looking over my shoulder late at night, but then again I live in an old house with a lot of weird sounds so, I could've been reading comedy and had that reaction.

The only thing I've ever read that made my skin crawl were posts in a thread on another forum about Skinwalkers and stuff. One of the stories got me scared out of my wits (dude was sitting in the cupola of an M60 tank and said that he could feel something sitting on the hatch right behind him watching him). That got me pretty freaked.

[rightwing401]

Any chance you could tell me where I could find that Arc? I'm kind of interested to see it for myself.

[Yojimbo]

Only book that ever scared me was Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi about the Manson Family murders. Wasn't a novel, but was pretty scary to me all the same. One of those murders occured at a house close to my neighborhood, right down the street from where I went to High School. In the book, too, they talk about how the Manson family broke into a house when no one was home and were going to wait until the family returned home so that they could slaughter everyone, but saw pictures of children on the wall and decided to find a different family to murder. That kind of thing chills me since it could have been my family's house that they broke into.

[Arcades057]

It was on AR15.com, in a thread that's now archived. The only way to get to the thread would be buying a team membership (which I used to have but no longer do).

That site usually has some pretty amazing stuff there.

[Danny]

conveying emotion is bloody hard work.

ive watched dozens of horror movies and got zip, exactly the same response as watching paint dry, but i watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind the other day and that really got to me, youve got to try and be unbelievable in this day an age, since believability has been done so much that you get empty space fillers like "okaaaaay..", or "so, whats up".
Because movies, books, games there all about something happening....unless its animal crossing or the royal family, but the point is theres a situation developing so your goin got say something outside the norm, no matter how unessential to the characters life the event is, you get so many people writing to try and be believable, but the deal is that how many conversations have you had this week that would be listed as "believable" on screen, if you want to convey characters with emotion just do the smith, tarantino or brion route and make it an unbelievable set piece.

im digressing here but the point is look at a soap opera, they trie to make characters sound believable, but are you ever drawn in?, do you ever feel for the characters?, 'course not, because they arent unbelievable enough.

[Arcades057]

http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=708053&page=1

Here you go, Rightwing. That's a pretty interesting article there on Bigfoot. Expect thing to grow to about 50 pages before Monday.

[rightwing401]

Thanks for the link arc, I'll be dropping by very soon.

Hellsing, I can always handle disagreement, but I don't think you understood what I was saying. I wasn't talking about making things believable per say. I was talking about making something bad happening mean more, because I just don't see blood and guts being tossed about as a means of scaring people.