![]() Monsters don’t just attack you they attack you in particularly gruesome ways, as shown in this paragraph from the short story “The Little Green God of Agony” by horror master Stephen King. Monsters Have a Disturbing Capacity for Violence It’s this unpredictability that will keep your readers on the edge of their seats, playing into the power of the imagination. In fact, the less your characters know about what a monster can and can’t do, the better. We’ll discuss setting rules for your monsters and how important it is that you follow those rules, but keep in mind that while you know the rules that govern your monster, your characters don’t. This is a creature, after all, outside our normal experience. But monsters don’t necessarily give out those human signals. We sense when things might get out of control or violent. We can tell via body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice when someone is getting angry or upset. Humans tend to have a pretty good sense of what another human is going to do next. ( 8 journeys and motives behind evildoers, anti-heroes, and antagonists.) But add an unexpected element to a predictable situation and you enhance the potential for fear. that would be pretty scary, right? In real life we know they can’t hurt us, and that makes them predictable, and predictability is the enemy of horror. Monsters Are UnpredictableĬan that lobster take your hand off with one of those claws? Turns out, no, but if it could and you weren’t expecting it. In a broader sense, monsters are scary because. īut please don’t think that triggering your audience’s phobic responses is the only way to make your monsters terrifying. This story became one of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, a vehicle for a young William Shatner. ![]() As it turns out, those are fairly easy fears to apply to a monster or demon, but what about pteromerhanophobia, the fear of flying? Richard Matheson made quite a splash in 1961 with the short story “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which a poor soul suffering from pteromerhanophobia encounters the dreaded gremlin tearing pieces out of the wing of the plane he’s flying in. That means the lowest-level demon comes up from underground and pulls you down and buries you alive, and the “boss” demon is a spider, or something that looks and/or behaves like a spider. To create that sense of progression and escalation of danger, I simply reversed that top ten list so the final, scariest demon embodies the most prevalent phobia. And even if your readers don’t completely collapse at the sight of a spider, they probably share at least a common uneasiness in the presence of one. If these are the ten most common phobias (and I’ve found a few different lists, so your search may yield slightly different results), then there’s a good chance that someone who is reading your book, seeing your movie, or playing your game will have one or more of them to some degree. … Phobias take common fears to the pathological level. Astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning)ġ0. Emetophobia (fear of vomit or vomiting)ĩ. Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces)ħ. Agoraphobia (fear of an inability to escape)ĥ. Social Phobia (fear of a hostile audience)Ĥ.
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