A MODEL FOR WRITING SCARY STORIES
Quick disclaimer: A model is an abstraction. It’s an artificial way of simplifying and organising ideas so that they can be applied in some practical way. Models are useful so long as we understand their limitations and don’t try to put too much weight on them. They all have their limits and this model – a mixture of loose thoughts, speculation, and borrowed ideas distilled from a lifetime of enjoyment of scary stories – is no different.
So, as already stated, I’m a big fan of scary stories (not unlike most audio-dramatists) and I was recently thinking about what makes us scared in fiction, drama, etc. so I hope you’ll excuse me if I engage in a bit of armchair analysis.
At base I’ve been wondering what story elements can be used to make us feel afraid (rather than simply the use of monsters to add atmosphere to an otherwise action-oriented story). Think Ridley Scott’s “Alien” as opposed to James Cameron’s “Aliens” (both fun films btw).
Here’s my personal take on a general model of the scary story. Not every story has all these elements in it, but I’ve been experimenting with using them, both as an analytical tool, and as components in a model for story design, and I feel reasonably confident that, in just about any scary story I can think of, some or all of these elements will appear.
STRUCTURE
Here’s the model…
In an unfamiliar place or a place rendered unfamiliar by circumstances and fear we discover there is something with antipathy towards us. It is half seen and difficult to define or describe, but we know it is there. It may appear familiar and benign at first but it is alien to our experience and wants to eat us (our relationships, our bodies, our minds). It undermines our faith in the things we trust and strips away our networks of support. Over and over we find the evidence of its passing but not the thing itself, glimpses only. By persuing it we become victims of its activity (blamed for its crimes, placing ourselves in increasing danger of (self) destruction, etc.) and we come to its notice. And just when we think it is defeated or gone we discover we have been marked as targets – it is now hunting us! We try to escape, our weapons and resources gone, and when safety seems almost within reach we at last come face to face with it and learn that it was smarter, stronger, faster, than we thought, and that it likes to gloat, and that we are trapped and as powerless as children. We may in the end defeat it, but the price will be unbearable (costing us our lives, our relationships, our health, our sanity, our worldly goods, our reputation, our future). In winning, we lose and in losing, we despair.
That is, I think a pretty good model for the development of the archetypal scary story. Each element contains one or more key emotional themes; fear of the unknown and/or immersion in the unfamiliar, the sense of a hostile presence, confusion and a sense of betrayal (by life) in the face of an unrelenting antagonist’s heartless purpose, isolation, loss of support, powerlessness, the sense of being hunted and chased, the feeling of being trapped, and, finally, despair.
THEME
A fundamental theme of the scary story is, I suspect, isolation and the betrayal of trust. Life just shouldn’t be like this, we think (or more accurately feel), as we react against the unfairness of the unnatural events being recounted. The unreasoning outer gods of the Lovecraft mythos were far more scary in the past because they undermined the widespread faith of the day in an orderly universe and loving God. The unstoppable zombie virus and plagues of modern story-telling similarly undermine our widespread faith in the power of science and progress. Good scary stories attack and take away from the audience, at least for the length of the story, those things that the audience-members rely upon for comfort, support, and protection. And in doing so, such stories render us deathly afraid.
A story doesn’t require the supernatural in order to be scary in this sense, either. Personally, I find Orwell’s Animal Farm, Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, and Takahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies” terrifying in their depiction of the results of cruelty (all of which use many of the elements of the above model – particularly the slow removal of trusted social protections – in their exposition). This is particularly true if I imagine, for a moment, the cruelty in these stories embodied as an invisible predator that is remorselessly hunting the protagonists; A predator that slips away at the end, secure in it’s achievements and invisibility, awaiting its next apportunity to stalk across the stage of human experience.
Before I finish, here’s a quote from Stephen King on the things we are afraid of…
“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…”
– Stephen King
If you have any other thoughts or elements that could be added to the model I’d be really interested.
BONUS
Here’s some great Youtube links about the use of sound to create fear.
What have I missed or overlooked in this analysis of the horror genre? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article is © 2017 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.
