 Horror/Scary: April 20, 2016 Issue [#7592] |
  Horror/Scary
This week: ATMOSPHERE Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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Setting the right mood in your horror tale is as important as creating your monster.
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Atmosphere! Atmosphere! Atmosphere!
If you're still writing, 'It was a dark and stormy night' your story has just failed to catch a reader.
The point of this editorial is to teach you, and show you, how to set-up a scary scene for your horror story.
Let's start with atmosphere.
In my story "The Watercourse" , I tried to describe a purgatory setting:
The banks were lined with old, gnarled trees that grew thick in the deepening shadows. Their crooked branches were twisted toward the ground so that they appeared to crouch in the darkness like deformed giants desperate to pull their roots free of the thick, black mud. Above, and all around us, tall, erect cliffs framed a strip of gray sky like a window into another world.
Notice key words here: gnarled, crooked, twisted, crouched in the darkness, and deformed giants. All these words create images needed to set the scene for your story.
In my tale "Adriana's Tale" I wrote:
They said that all the ground upon the Nob had strangely blackened and that every tree had become gnarled and twisted as if God himself had reached down and squeezed them between his fingers until they were grotesque and deformed.
I love this image. Imagine God reaching down and squishing the trees.
And here again, more trees.
There were no exotic flowers and plants as her father had described, but the deformed trees still remained. Living in the valley below, it was easy for her to assume that all trees grew straight and wide and strong. But here, they were misshapen and grotesquely twisted. It was as if the very ground itself refused to properly nourish them. They were leafless, black trees that thrust bare and crooked limbs toward the fulminous sky as if they were misguided believers praising a false and violent god. If there were trees in Hell, Adriana believed that this is what they would look like.
And one more from "A Shadow of Guilt" :
Black pines spread bristled arms through the charred night, and the moon cast down a jaundiced glow that seemed more to obscure than to illuminate. The death of his wife left him with nothing, so even the dark was but an inconvenience. He heard a sound then, just off the road and creeping in silence through the underbrush, unseen but undeniable, gliding as fluid and as cold as moonlight. He strained his eyes to see in the darkness. Whatever it was, he knew it was stalking him.
Why trees? Good question. To me, trees are scary. I remember when I first saw Disney's 'Snow White' and she was lost in the woods, those trees not only looked scary but they tried to grab at her. I guess that image stayed with my young impressionable mind over the years. Damn you Disney!
How about describing your classic Haunted House. I've read a lot of haunted house stories here at WDC and what grips me most is that the story is centered around what happens inside the house. But to me, if the house doesn't look creepy then what's to be scared of. In "The Granson Place" I wrote this:
The house was a huge, rambling wreck, with fancy gingerbread around the eaves, windows and railings. But storms had weathered the paint and ripped shingles from the roof. Where shutters still survived, they hung at a slant by a single mounting. I noticed the front-porch steps sagged, and there were gaps in the railing. Half the windows were haphazardly boarded shut, but the others were without protection and shattered. And the moonlight revealed shards of glass like transparent teeth biting at the empty blackness where stones had been pitched through. In spite of its shabby condition, the Grandson place did not have the air of a ruin; in fact, it didn't appear empty at all, as did many decrepit buildings; somehow it seemed vital, alive. If a house could be said to have a human attitude, an emotional aspect, then this house was angry, very angry . . . furious, in fact.
And in "The Photograph of Carolina Stump" :
The house was odd, not odd because of who lived in it, but odd the way you can sense something's not quite right about a place. It slumped down like a tired old man in an overgrowth of weeds and ferns that wove their spidery webs together into a green embroidery of cascading bougainvillea, laurels, palms, and fragrant eucalyptuses. I had hoped that all it really needed was a bit of repair and a new coat of paint, but the way the house sagged, it appeared as though paint would simply slide off. There had been an earthquake way back when, and looking at the place from the roadside, it seemed to squat upon its foundation like a hungry old ogre patiently hiding in the bushes and waiting to be fed.
The Haunted House is a character unto itself and should be described in the most horrifying way.
Let's try the weather (addressing that Dark and Stormy Night).
I love to describe the weather. It is an essential prop to any scary story. In "The Air Marshal" I wrote:
The pregnant belly of the sky hung gray and fat above the airfield. Even as its water broke to announce the birth of new rain, Gabe Harlow, Air Marshal, flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and shuddered from the damp and cold as if his skin crawled with transparent spiders.
And again:
He stared up again at the swarm of clouds and listened to the beetle-voiced rain as it spoke at the window of the promenade, click-click-click-click. The thunderheads boiled like a witch’s cauldron in the sky, an ever-changing Rorschach blot that held a secret Gabe could not see—a riddle he could not answer. The feeling slipped and tugged at him like greasy fingers. The second hand was counting down. Something bad was coming, and time was running out.
When I write about the weather, I am immediately taken back to the first time I saw 'Wizard Of Oz'. Those clouds, that approaching twister, all of it stayed with me. I tried to describe it in "The Uninvited Hat" :
It felt humid, thick and heavy, even with the approaching storm. So humid you could almost reach out and wring warm dribbles of water from the air itself. “Tornado weather,” he said, then wiping at his nose again, he stepped back inside. As if in answer, the hot wind whipped in behind him and blew something past his feet and in through the door. It skirted across the yellowed linoleum, flipped, wiggled and squirmed like an animal with a broken back, and then came to rest against the leg of the old man’s chair.
Atmosphere is important to any good horror story. Read Poe, he'll tell ya. The weather, the haunted house, the trees, or even the graveyard, all become essential props to lay your story upon. They create the mood, the atmosphere that will grip your reader and make them think they are in the story.
I hope my little rant was helpful to you. If so, please leave a comment below. Until next time,
willwilcox
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Great Horror From Yous Guys
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DEAD LETTERS
A*Monaing*Faith 
Love your quick Horror Leprechaun story! Is it real or just an exercise? I already have a plot in mind... Ugh, I self-edit a ton too, which is great but it severely limits my words/day so I try not to do it often.
*Yeah, of course it's real...  *
Quick-Quill 
I love it!!! Here's my twisted story.
"Little David"
LJPC - the tortoise 
Screams~
Hi Bill! Loved the newsletter! First lines are always important, and next to that are interesting twists. Your little story had everything! 
~ Laura
Angus 
Says~
Great Newsletter, Amigo!
The part about using more DESRIPTIVE VERBS, NOT ADVERBS really hit a nerve with me, and that's something I should work on. And that part about self-editing as you go along was also very helpful!
Keep up the great work!
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