Looking for scary images, ideas, and scenarios.
September 10, 2015 8:38 AM Subscribe
As an aspiring horror writer, I am constantly in search of inspiration for images and scenarios that terrify. Help me out?
"What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?" -from Arthur Machen's The White People
One of the challenges I keep coming up against as a horror writer is devising new "hooks" for terrifying scenes. I'm trying to build a sort of library of disturbing experiences and images, as the ones I can pull from my own memories are starting to run a little thin. I'd be grateful for any stories, nightmares, unsettling experiences that you can offer. Narratives and links are both most welcome. Many thanks.
"What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?" -from Arthur Machen's The White People
One of the challenges I keep coming up against as a horror writer is devising new "hooks" for terrifying scenes. I'm trying to build a sort of library of disturbing experiences and images, as the ones I can pull from my own memories are starting to run a little thin. I'd be grateful for any stories, nightmares, unsettling experiences that you can offer. Narratives and links are both most welcome. Many thanks.
Well, you could take anything that's comforting or taken for granted and make it awful and weird. Or things that are anxiety producing, decide what's disturbing about them, and ramp that up.
I remember a dream I had as a self-conscious teen, where I tried to pluck a hair out of my leg, and I pulled and pulled and the hair got longer and longer until I pulled out my intestines. My nightmares as a kid involved a lot of body horror, lots of mutilation or burning. Or rejection, where someone who was supposed to know or love me didn't recognize me or treated me with indifference. (Rarely remember dreams these days, and when I do they're pretty abstract or about banal things.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:02 AM on September 10, 2015
I remember a dream I had as a self-conscious teen, where I tried to pluck a hair out of my leg, and I pulled and pulled and the hair got longer and longer until I pulled out my intestines. My nightmares as a kid involved a lot of body horror, lots of mutilation or burning. Or rejection, where someone who was supposed to know or love me didn't recognize me or treated me with indifference. (Rarely remember dreams these days, and when I do they're pretty abstract or about banal things.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:02 AM on September 10, 2015
As an above commenter said, those things that are mundane but which can go weird in a creepy-crawl of lapsed time. For example, your furniture all seems slightly shifted in a room, or your tv keeps turning itself off. Things with logical explanations that can be dismissed by others, like seeing something from the corner of your eye (which could be a visual field issue combined with suggestibility) that other people mock you for being scared of.
posted by syncope at 10:12 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by syncope at 10:12 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Also: deep sea animals.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:16 AM on September 10, 2015
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:16 AM on September 10, 2015
All-time top posts on r/NoSleep (although, as with TVTropes, the quality varies wildly).
posted by inire at 10:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by inire at 10:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
I got like twelve story ideas from this ask.metafilter thread about weird wikipedia. God, I love that thread. Top 3 of all time.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:30 AM on September 10, 2015
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:30 AM on September 10, 2015
Also sometimes I'll just watch horror trailers, even for movies I don't want to see. Every time I watch the Crimson Peak trailer I'm immediately consumed by a desire to write a classic gothic horror story. Though I do also want to watch Crimson Peak.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:32 AM on September 10, 2015
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:32 AM on September 10, 2015
Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish artist who painted a lot of surreal horriffic scenes. He's definately worth image searching for inspiration.
posted by riotnrrd at 12:13 PM on September 10, 2015
posted by riotnrrd at 12:13 PM on September 10, 2015
Response by poster: I'm really appreciating all of the creative suggestions. You're all coming up with a wonderful range of different ways to get inspired!
posted by Fenriss at 12:40 PM on September 10, 2015
posted by Fenriss at 12:40 PM on September 10, 2015
(Warning: potentially disturbing images) The Soul Is Bone? "Educationally bizarre: Current events, medicine, animals, forensics, oddities, teeth, eyes, deformities, funerals, cemeteries, blood, albinism and such ........" Quite a range of imagery, some of it quite beautiful though macabre. Some I find hard to take. I go there with images turned off in my browser so I can pick only the pictures I want to see, based on the description (using the Show Picture extension with Firefox).
posted by hsieu at 4:57 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by hsieu at 4:57 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
My personal primal fears tend to revolve around my own helplessness and inadequacies. I think this is true for a lot of people. My most common nightmare fuel :
1. Having someone else's life rely on my ability to do something I am bad at. (I am disabled, and if I had to run through the forest to get help for you before you bled out, you would die)
2. Watching something horrible happen to someone you love and being unable to to anything about it. (reoccurring nightmares about being locked inside a dark house during a zombie invasion, only to realize I have left my beloved dog outside and can't go rescue him without risking the lives of everyone in the house)
3. The Gibbering Unseen Monstrosity. I am far more terrified by creepy sounds than anything else, especially if it is a distorted or demonic voice, radio transmission, etc. The movie "Prince of Darkness" was not all that scary to me, except that freaky broadcast/dream they kept showing. That STILL keeps me up at night. "Soft White Damn" from the NoSleep Podcast is great example of this.
posted by evilcupcakes at 11:55 AM on September 14, 2015
1. Having someone else's life rely on my ability to do something I am bad at. (I am disabled, and if I had to run through the forest to get help for you before you bled out, you would die)
2. Watching something horrible happen to someone you love and being unable to to anything about it. (reoccurring nightmares about being locked inside a dark house during a zombie invasion, only to realize I have left my beloved dog outside and can't go rescue him without risking the lives of everyone in the house)
3. The Gibbering Unseen Monstrosity. I am far more terrified by creepy sounds than anything else, especially if it is a distorted or demonic voice, radio transmission, etc. The movie "Prince of Darkness" was not all that scary to me, except that freaky broadcast/dream they kept showing. That STILL keeps me up at night. "Soft White Damn" from the NoSleep Podcast is great example of this.
posted by evilcupcakes at 11:55 AM on September 14, 2015
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posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:39 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]