Bleh, Bleh! -- Writing Scary Things

[AssistantCrone]

A little while ago some of us were talking about the problems with how to write properly threatening vampires. As you know, today's fiction is overrun with vampires and various other monsters, few of which have much impact upon the reader. I'd say that this is both because we're so used to them, and because certain works have given scary creatures a bad name. (Well, boring name).

So, how does one write a monster (or any freaky supernatural situation, really) and make it original and, most importantly, frightening? One bit of good advice I found was to remove the 'cool' aspect. Okay, some people like writing vampires etc. for the glamour factor, but that's not really primal-fear stuff*. I'm all for going back to when they were portrayed as ugly subhuman parasite things and did not sparkle. It can be tragic without having to be romantic.

Other than that, speculate, won't we?


* yes, I suppose some people might really be deathly afraid of glamour, and if you can write that in as a genuinely creepy supernatural power I'll bake you a pie or something.  

[c_nordlander]

A really interesting topic! My two disordered cents:

Vampires (like a lot of other fictional creatures) are such an... archetype. You say "vampire" and Bela Lugosi in an evening suit pops up in the mind, or something pretty darn similar at least. This is both positive and negative if you're trying to attract a reader. On the positive side, the vampire archetype is very powerful; that's why it's become an archetype. It has all the connections with class struggle, sex, disease, Christianity, death and immortality, and so on and so forth for pages, and all the feelings those things arouse. You put the word "vampire" on the back cover blurb of your horror novel, you have a ready-made readership, a lot of which might not bother to pick it up if the creatures in question were called, say, evening suit-wearing bloodsucking humanoid aliens from Stavromula Beta. I'm saying this because I totally sucked up (oh hah hah) anything about vampires when I was 14-15.

On the negative side, archetypes get boring. They become clichés, which means lazy writing, rubberstamping your images from someone else's work instead of drawing them.  In a non-horror example, think about all the modern fantasy novels that contain elves and dwarves straight out of "Lord of the Rings". Even worse (because this is horror, we're trying to scare people here), they become familiar. Familiarity tends to damper horror.

So that's pretty much me rehashing Beb's statement above, only in more words. Now, about the question, and in addition to Beb's suggestion:

Think about it. This is what I would suggest to any writer of non-realistic fiction: it goes well for, say, a fantasy writer who wants to use elves or centaurs or whatever in their story. If you want to write a vampire story, presumably the archetype attracts you, so you're not going to throw it out and invent your vampires from whole cloth, but keep the bits you like and think about their ramifications: what led to them? What do they lead to? Above all, and I would say this goes for any supernatural or fantasy creature that has been used in fiction before, DON'T assume that the reader will just mentally fill in the image with stuff from other books or films. Put your own mark on them. If you want to invent new features that aren't part of the "traditional" vampire mythos, don't feel that anything prevents you from doing so. For example, what if people who get turned into vampires completely forget their old life and have to spend a few years getting their bearings, as if they were new-born when their body "died"? Just something my mind tossed out.

I might be back to this topic later. I haven't really touched on the "make them scary" part yet, but I'd say that originality is a good idea. Something that doesn't fit in a comfortable conceptual mould is always going to be more conducive of horror.