Horror, deep in its dark heart, is about forcing characters to confront the unimaginable: the killer with a knife, the book that raises the dead, the alien life-form that shouldn’t exist, the haunted house you wish you hadn’t bought, the zombie apocalypse we’re all headed towards, and so on. The characters don’t believe they’re up to the task—and maybe they’re not—but it comes down to them to either triumph over their horrible circumstances or simply survive them.

All of us will face off with the unimaginable at some point in our lives. Hopefully, we’ll never have to contend with a bloodthirsty murderer or a hideously deformed monster – but horror comes in many forms.

Reasoning in Reality

I see tragedy as a type of horror, especially for the ones directly impacted by the tragedy. And in tragedy, we attempt to reason with the unreasonable:

The unexpected diagnosis from the doctor – “Surely we need to get a second opinion because this guy’s a quack.”
The accident that claims a loved one – “Surely there was something I could’ve done, something that would’ve changed all of this.”
The abuse we didn’t see going on all around us – “Surely there must have been signs did that I missed?”
The missing child – “Surely, there’s nothing to worry about, theyprobably just forgot to call.

Every day horrors visit us when we’re least prepared to deal with them. And prepared or not, we try to deny the horrors their pound of flesh, try to reason that this can’t be the way of things, not for me, not for you.

Reasoning in Writing

There’s no reasoning with a shark, an alien or a fucking Jason Voorhees. There’s only outlasting them and, maybe, if you’re lucky, outwitting them.

Horror fictions are like that. In Jaws (1975, which I contrasted against the book here and of whose script Paul Farrell took a look at here) the town of Amity tried to reason with the unreasonable shark so that it would meet their demands for a fun, profitable summer. The shark doesn’t give a shit about the Fourth of July. The shark just wants to eat.

In No Country for Old Men (2007), the antagonist Anton Chigurh is the manifestation of modern violence set loose upon the world. His violent ways seem random but he acts by a code that makes sense to him. He’s also seemingly uncatchable. “Sometimes I think he’s pretty much a ghost,” remarks Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Bell in the script as he fails to wrap his head around the monster he is chasing. And Chigurh is a monster. He’s a horror movie villain representing a world gone wrong.

In an early scene, he flips a coin with the promise that his prospective victim has everything to win. The victim—a confused store clerk—does not understand, but we do:

Writing Your Reasoning

That sort of behaviour is just as annoying as the asshole that goes into the woods alone because he heard a noise.

In your writing, try to recognize the very human need to reason with the unreasonable horrors. When a character too willingly accepts the unfair cruelty they’re confronted with, the audience picks up on it.

If horror is unthinkable drama + extreme circumstances, then your character is going to want to wish it all away or look for the exit before coming to terms with what is at hand. When a clean getaway proves impossible, then you work in the fight or flight mechanics of dealing with the situation.

Try to craft your character’s psychological profile so you know how they would respond in a similar situation.

Take from your own experiences (if you’re ready to do so). Some of us try to deny the horror, some of us try to bargain with it, and some become destructive and angry – the world is falling apart already anyway so why not break some shit?

In horror, those bad things just involve more buckets of blood.

Tragedies are unstoppable, unreasonable, unfair stupid fucking horrible moments in our lives. And I take no pleasure in revisiting them either. But you know how they feel. That is how being stuck in a horror story feels. If your monster/killer/haunted house is worth the audience’s time, then it’s going to be just as unstoppable, unreasonable, and unfair as any real life tragedy.  Bad things happen to good people all the time.