heedra:

listen. its 2:00 am and i have to talk about this. i think that, in horror, particularly in supernatural horror, the biggest, most scary, most dread inducing thing that can happen to a character is not, in fact, death. it is an unspecified, horrific dread fate that exists only in ambiguity. i like to call this fate Death 2. Death 2 is the scariest thing that can happen to a person. even if none of us can outline what it is, we’re all, for the most part, in agreement that it’s out there, and that we’re very afraid of it. nobody knows what it is, it will never be defined, but what is important is that a ghost, or a demon, or a guy who looks at you, what’s important is those things likely have the power to do it to you. the key, the absolute key to keeping supernatural horror effective is to never, ever eliminate the possibility of Death 2 as an outcome. the moment you reveal too much lore about your monster’s intentions or methods, whether it’s by establishing the rules of their haunting too clearly, or giving them the opportunity to clearly communicate their goals (through a seance or ouija board, for example), or merely by raising the curtain a little too much, you have eliminated Death 2. Now the worst that can happen to the characters gets established as being death, or possession, or pain, and that’s just never going to be as scary as whatever Death 2 is. If you wanted to watch a fun horror movie where the tension was in whether or not people were going to get killed, you could watch something like Alien, or Friday the 13th, or Us. If there’s ghosts or demons involved though, and that’s what ends up happening, it’s like, why did I bother coming here, I could have had way more fun watching a slasher romp if I wanted this kind of horror, because a slasher romp knows what it’s doing and how to use narrative tools to make “what if a guy was coming to kill me” an actually effective plot. you have to preserve ambiguity with ghost stories. with entity stories. you gotta. you have to preserve the possibility of Death 2.