Understanding True Horror (as Opposed to Horror Porn)
There’s a huge difference between horror and just gore. Horror porn typically focuses on showing people, usually young attractive women, getting tortured and hurt. However true horror isn’t about gore or seeing someone suffering. Instead, true horror focuses on the shock of a sudden realization.
This suddenly realization occurs when the audience and the characters see the world in one way but suddenly ind that it’s something else entirely. Just think of enjoying a bowl of cereal. Your expectation is that it’s an enjoyable meal, but suddenly as you eat all the cereal and start draining the bowl of milk, you realize there’s a dead mouse at the bottom of the bowl.
That’s horror because you suddenly realize all this time you were enjoying eating the cereal, there was always a dead mouse at the bottom of the bowl but you didn’t know it. When you finally learn about it, you realize your earlier feeling of happiness was completely wrong.
That’s true horror when something completely changes. Notice that true horror doesn’t involve torturing attractive women or watching them suffer. It involves taking a simple situation and suddenly reversing its meaning.
“The Sixth Sense” leads us from start to finish into believing that the hero is a psychiatrist trying to help a kid. Only until the end do we realize the psychiatrist has been dead the whole time.
“The Shining” offers horror when Wendy (the wife) thinks Jack (her husband) has been busy typing and working on writing a novel. Jack has a neat pile of papers stacked on his desk so it looks like he’s making progress. When Wendy finally looks at what Jack’s been typing all this time, she’s horrified to see that he’s been doing nothing but typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again in different patterns on the page.
Wendy’s expectation goes from seeing Jack constantly working as a good thing to realizing he’s been losing his mind the whole time. That’s horror and that’s what we need more of.
“The Blair Witch Project” used this instead of gore or violence. Instead, we see three people going into the forest. Slowly we realize the horror as they can’t find their way out and one of their friends goes missing the next morning. What seemed like an innocent journey into the woods turns out to be a horrifying experience of being trapped and hunted down.
If you’re going to write horror, keep this principle in mind. Horror is not gore. Horror is subverting the past with a sudden realization of the truth where the truth is often terrifying in itself. A dead mouse is kind of gross but a dead mouse at the bottom of your cereal bowl is even worse, especially after you’ve already eaten most of the cereal, not knowing a dead mouse had been contaminating your food the whole time.
