Something I’ve never been able to stomach is the slasher genre. Maybe I’m just squeamish, but I always thought there was something special about a subtle horror that doesn’t rely on excessive gore. Something amazing happens when a creator leaves part of the scares in the mind of the reader or viewer rather than putting it all on the page/screen.
What’s the scariest thing? The unknown. A known threat, I can deal with. But an unknown is terrifying because there’s absolutely no strategy. No calculating my odds of survival. Only a vague sense of terror from a threat I can’t track.
As Halloween approaches, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the art of subtle scares.
Mundane Environments With Strange Details
A pattern I’ve seen countless times is to start a horror story in a mundane, even pleasant, environment: a family gathering, a new home, a school or playground. We associate these places with ordinary life so our guard is not immediately thrown up as is the case in, say, a creepy abandoned hospital or a fluorescent-lit, death-tinged morgue. But if we’re paying careful attention as the audience, we’ll notice a small detail that feels off. This turns out to be a “clue” to the larger horror that is to come.
Sometimes, the unsettling detail is the first sign of a ghost, killer, or other threat. Other times, the detail that appeared so creepy at first glance turns out to be a protective gesture that was meant to keep the protagonist safe from the real threat. The Japanese anime series Yamishibai illustrates this method perfectly. It’s a formula the show follows in almost every episode. I’ll use the first episode of Season 1 as an example.
A young man moves into a new apartment and finds a talisman stuck to his ceiling, then spots a strange-looking woman staring at him from across the street in a different building. He’s unnerved by the talisman and removes it. (For context, in Japanese culture a talisman is an object with prayers written on it to ward off bad luck or malevolent spirits.)
The next day, when the man gets home after work, he finds another talisman on the ceiling and catches the creepy woman in his apartment. She’s arrested by the police. After she’s gone, the man finds a bunch of talismans stuck under his dining room table. He removes the creepy objects that were unnerving him so much, only to discover they were actually a shield from the real horror of the apartment: a horde of ghosts. It’s a wonderful reversal that’s actually not too far off from the big twist in a thriller or mystery story.
Limited Range of Vision or Gaps in Knowledge
The found footage genre plays with what viewers can see in the frame (and what they can imagine outside of it). The frustration of having a limited view of what’s happening to the characters, combined with fragmented information from what is heard off-screen, creates full-blown panic. There are plenty of novels that also make use of the found footage technique, piecing together a narrative through journal entries, blogs, interviews, and other unconventional literary devices.
The Blair Witch Project is one of the best models for this technique. As far as horror goes, the movie hardly shows any gore or jump scares. We don’t see anyone actually harmed on camera. We don’t catch a glimpse of any kind of entity. And yet, the viewer is terrified by the felt presence of the titular Blair Witch throughout the film. We piece together the narrative in fragments, our minds filling in the blanks from the limited footage we see.
I think of found footage as similar to the effective use of negative space in visual design. Some designs rely on what’s not there to create their impact, much like how the gaps in vision/knowledge in the found footage genre create an intensely scary experience for the audience with minimal gore.
A Slow Burn Scare
The art of the slow burn lies in gradually escalating the threat until it reaches a crescendo and the true nature of the horror is finally revealed. The Conjuring franchise does this expertly. The paranormal events start out terrifying yet relatively harmless, but then at the climax, things ramp up to deadly proportions.
In the movie The Conjuring, Carolyn Perron wakes up with a few bruises and the clocks stop at exactly 3:07 am every morning. Creepy, but no real harm done. No explicit threat to anyone’s life. Over the course of the story, the paranormal activity ramps up gradually until we get to a full-body possession that drives Carolyn to nearly kill her own children.
One particularly effective device in slow burn horror is a “rule of three.” The first encounter with the threat is strange or unsettling, but no real harm is done. The second encounter is more direct, yet still not overtly threatening. In the third encounter, the threat is suddenly imminent. I employed this technique in my own recent horror flash fiction Project Glimmerwood. I took inspiration from the horror podcasts I listen to that employ first-person narration of allegedly true creepy encounters.
The Fun of Being Creeped Out
If I had to sum up my preferred horror experience, it’s “creeped out” rather than completely disturbed. I adore unsettling old houses that feel fine in the gentle light of the afternoon sun, but turn menacing after dark. I enjoy leaning in to hear whispers of an urban legend, and then catching a glimpse of something I can’t explain. A slowly escalating feeling of unease that ultimately fizzles out with no answers, leaving me shivering in the fading light of dusk.
The occasional spike in terror is nice, but more than anything, I love a lingering sense of unease that quietly fades away like rain tapering off on a brisk autumn afternoon.
