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Alright people, there is a big difference from horror ain't terror. I would give you an excerpt of some crappy "horror" stories I know but just thinking of them makes me want to puke. I'm not saying I'm a expert horror writer, heck, not even close. But at least I can tell the difference.

Terror

Terror describes a feeling. To terrorize is to use extreme fear to intimidate writers.

Horror

Horror, however, also suggests elements of disgust and surprise or shock. Thus the word ‘horror’ describes not only extreme fear but also revulsion and a sense of surprise and the unexpected.

The point of this thread

Plz study your horror writing. If the reader is feeling terror before the horror begins, than your on the right track. Here is a good website for this stuff: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/how-to-write-horror-story-tips/

Thank you and have a great day.

Yeah it's been a pretty obvious thing for awhile now that a lot of people don't really understand horror anymore. Particularly people who make movies. Gore and jump scares aren't really horror at all though, they're tired cliches.

Lol, I'm looking at the first horror writing I did in,like, 4th grade. I guess I'm being hypocritical.

 

Wait. People still get scared by the horror genre? I figured it was just a label to put everything zombie, Cthulhu and psycho killer related.

There's a lot of good creepypastas and stories on the web. Just gotta find them.

Not sure if creepypasta would be the route to go with good examples of horror since a lot of them are terrible shit about haunted spongebob cartoons or Zelda cartridges. (Yes, something like Candle Cove is the exception)

In any case I haven’t found anything scary in the horror genre since the early 80s. The entire genre just stopped being scary before I even got out of grade school, became a simple label for anything "monster related" and I was watching for other reasons.

I can appreciate a good story set in the horror genre, I can appreciate a sizable body count with a lot gore and if you manage to combine the two, that’s even better. But you’re just not really going to make a story or movie where it’s going to scare me. At best I can admit that something stood out enough to be creepy and set a good mood for such things, but that’s about it.

A lot of creepypasta are really good, to be fair.

Been awhile since I’ve gone sifting through them again, so maybe some of the crap stuff has finally been weeded out and better stuff has been added.

Yeah, horror these days mostly depends on cliches and steriotypes.

Immediately reading the link, it seems like they either point out the obvious, or are blatantly wrong. In the five elements, 1, 2, 3 and 5 aren't elements of good horror, but elements required for horror with positive descriptors in front. Element 4 isn't even that true, since thinking of the first two great horror stories I've enjoyed, Stephen King's It and It Follows, neither of them involve big plot twists or huge reveals. 

The first two of the suggestions are too obvious for me to even regard, the third is blatantly false, as Pennywise the Dancing Clown's motive never extended past "Feed", same with countless other great horror antagonists, and many more don't even have their motives clearly defined. The forth seems like good advice, the fifth reasonable until it ends up claiming that "Fear of flying" and "Fear of perilious heights" are "fodder for horror novel writing", and the sixth is... eh. A bunch of pretentious jerking off about the distinction between word definitions which could be infinitely better described as just saying "Use suspsense and the unknown" rather than relying on the actual monster. 

I didn't actually click the links so thanks for the tl:dr

To summarize the bits worth seeing, using the elements of tragedy is quite important in horror, tapping into common human fears, like grief and the fear of losing a loved one in Babadook (great film, I'd recommend it) and Stephen King advised to use suspense to terrify the reader, and if that fails, just show them scary monsters and creepy shit, and if that fails, just gross them out.

#4: Use the core elements of tragedy..

And this is why I love horror games more than any of the other genres.

All the best stories are born from tragedy. Take the Disappearance of Ethan Carter for example, the ending was absolutely heartbreaking.