Kelly Warner, author of the post-apocalyptic kaiju trilogy In the Shadow of Extinction, wrote about how he feels the advice “write what you know” often gets misinterpreted. I believe a similar piece of writing advice has gotten misinterpreted, except rather than the people receiving the advice, I feel it’s the people giving it that are mistaken. What piece of advice is that you ask? It’s that age-old horror hand-me-down:
“Write What Scares You”
So here’s the thing: if you’re scared of spiders and you write Eight Legged Freaks 2, that’s fantastic if what you wanted to do was to write Eight Legged Freaks 2. If someone suggested listing your fears out and using what scares you to scare the audience and you came up with spiders so you wrote it because that’s how you thought you become a horror writer, then that’s not so fantastic. The problem with writing what scares us is that a lot of us aren’t able to get into those deep dark places of our psyche where our fears really lie.
And, frankly, what if you don’t give a single shit about spiders? I know that I don’t, and I’m absolutely terrified of them.
When it comes to writing scary stories, be they film or prose, it is my belief that the deeper fears we hold will find a way to manifest themselves through our characters and our tone. The horror genre is such a primal place that a lot of unconscious themes rise within our stories. The genre often allows for a Freudian release; is it any wonder that the horror film and psychoanalysis have been so closely tied within academia?
The genre has also been used for so much more. Simon Barrett, writer of You’re Next (2011) and The Guest (2014), mentioned in an episode of Re:View (found here) that the impetus to write You’re Next came not from a fear of home invasion but from a complaint he heard about how many home invasion movies were just people tied to chairs.
The late Wes Craven, writer of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), spoke often about the inspiration for the legendary slasher film. The idea of a boogeyman that gets you in your sleep came from a newspaper article he read about a young man who thought that if he went to sleep, he would die; sure enough, when he slept next he never woke. However, the idea for Freddy Krueger came from recalling a man that did scare him when he was younger. However, that memory wasn’t where he went looking for the idea – he found an idea and that memory was able to help later on.
This piece of advice keeps coming up in so many of the “how to write horror” books that are on the market, these books would have you believe that it’s the “Show, Don’t Tell” of the horror genre. But the truth is that, frankly, it’s hard to be scared of our own writing. And that’s fine, our goal isn’t to scare ourselves.
It’s to scare them.
