 Horror/Scary: April 11, 2018 Issue [#8847] |
  Horror/Scary
This week: Real Fear Edited by: NaNoNette  
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Hello writers and readers of all things scary, horrible, and fear inducing, I am NaNoNette and I will be your guest editor for this issue.
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Real Fear
What really strikes real fear into you?
Monsters, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts ... nobody truly believes in them. Because they are figments of our imagination. Why do we write about them and give them so much influence over that powerful emotion: fear?
Because we can control them.
No matter how magical, mischievous, horrible we make monsters out to be, we still control them. They can't truly affect our lives.
Hunger, poverty, homelessness, debilitating illness, death ... those we can't control. They can happen to each one of us and are much more scary than even Cthulhu could ever be. In the case of death, it's guaranteed it will happen to each one of us.
How do these real-life themes then fit into the horror/scary genre in fiction? Aren't those real-life afflictions something we aim to escape through fiction. Yes. You could argue that it's better to use imagined horrors in fiction. When you think of some of Stephen King's most epic and scary books, such as "The Stand," which combine a virus, resulting homelessness for the survivors, hunger for those who don't know how to forage, and death for 98% of the population, you can see that adding those real-life fear scenarios to a fiction story make it more scary and hit closer to home.
Of course, even "The Stand" doesn't use just basic existential fears. There is an evil magic using the events to cause even greater harm, so there is an element of fiction added in. It's almost as if adding that fictional evil makes the rest of the story more bearable. Because who really wants to picture wading through a city of dead bodies that are decomposing without 1) hope and 2) the fear of something worse.
As you write horror and scary stories, ask yourself how existential are the fears you conjure for your readers? What can you give them to make things so horrible and terrible that the effect on the protagonist's life is almost dulled by it?
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