How Three Horror Story Staples Can Appear in Every Genre
When a writer approaches the Horror genre, deciding to leap into the deepest pits of despair and crawl out of it dragging a kicking and screaming manuscript, they often use popular movies and television shows as inspiration. They try to add jump scares and visual tropes to the written word. Unfortunately, this often falls flat, leaving them with the question, “What makes Horror fiction?”
According to the Horror Writers Association, Douglas Winter’s 1982 anthology, Prime Evil, defines it as such: “Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion.”
So then, the genre can be surmised into an easy yet not-so-easy definition: Horror is whatever it takes to evoke that feeling—as the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it, “a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.”
What does this leave authors to work with? If jump scares and other Horror movie tropes don’t land the same in fiction, what does?
The answer has been offered in countless Horror novels already, in motifs and themes that have appeared across generations of writers. Horror isn’t unique in its availability of tropes to follow, and readers have already said what they love and expect, just like in other genres. But those tropes aren’t exclusive to Horror, either. Well-known tropes from Horror novels are used, modified, and molded to fit other genres, from Thrillers to Romance.
Horror fiction tropes abound, but you don’t have to write Horror to use them effectively. Read on to learn more about the tropes that any author can use to inject suspense, suspicion, and even fear into their stories.
“The Place Is Abandoned—Let’s Explore!”
Often requiring some clever dissolution of disbelief by the author, the “we should go somewhere we shouldn’t” trope is a staple for crafting stories that ooze dread. We know the characters will inevitably end up encountering something terrible that could have been left well enough alone. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is a classic example.
This idea of doing things that shouldn’t be done isn’t just popular for fiction’s sake; it’s in our human nature, and authors have made plenty of use of it in other genres as well. In the end, the author must break down the walls that would cause a character to turn away from the inherently bad place without a second thought. That sense of “Don’t go there!” is the horror a reader wants to experience as they envision themselves in the story.
“We Should Split Up—We’ll Cover More Ground.”
Definitely cliché-worthy in Horror but in other genres as well, the idea that splitting up is a good idea tops the charts for dumb moves made by flawed characters. Seen from a mile away by the average reader, this trope must be cleverly handled to pull it off, but the result, if done properly, is a perfect amalgamation of two fears that make the story even more interesting: the fear of the unknown, and the fear of being alone.
When characters split up, the story increases in pace, the tensions mount, and the situation tends to worsen. The key here is to set it up early: give the characters a push, external or internal, so they can justify going off alone in their minds. Do this right, and the reader is along for the ride, knowing it’s going straight to hell.
“Who is the monster among us?”
M. Night Shyamalan is known for his popular movies and twist endings, so much so that even the twist endings are becoming a cliché. But his work in film proves that plot twists can throw a viewer—or in books, the reader—off what they thought was solid ground for a predictable ending.
Plot twists themselves appear in every genre, but with “the monster among us,” the scary thing should be hidden in plain view for much of the story. Thriller and Mystery novels do this well, too, with readers knowing the culprit may lurk around any corner—even among those the protagonist trusts most—but Horror authors can use this trope to evoke a sense of intense paranoia or distrust in the characters. Not knowing who is who, or whether somebody can be trusted, isn’t an unusual trope, but it is one that leaves a lot of room for creativity and ratchets the fear of the unknown up to the max.
As popular as it is, this trope may be so predictable that it could use a twist of its own. One suggestion is to humanize the monster, so that the good guys become the monster through their outward behavior. A classic example is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which saw the creature, Frankenstein’s monster, subject to society’s cruel rejection based on appearance.
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Horror is a thriving genre with a rabid fan base looking for their next read, and while you can’t put a jump scare in a book, you can focus on the emotions your stories evoke to keep your readers frantically turning the page. Inevitably, capturing a reader’s attention is done simply by instilling unrelenting suspense and tension into your story—regardless of genre.
David Viergutz
