Horror is a small word for a big world. There’s science fiction horror, cozy horror, fantasy horror, soft horror – the list goes on. Writers use horror to explore not only the scary and terrifying aspects of our world but the tender, hilarious, and heartbreaking moments, too.
With horror, you can show the world’s injustices to an otherwise unwilling audience and make them feel almost anything you want. But to do that, you can’t just throw some blood across a few lines and invent some monsters so scary they’ll haunt your readers till their last dying breath.
No.
To make your readers feel, you’ll have to make your killer be more than a knife-wielding possessed soul. In fact, some of the best horror stories out there are so heavily steeped in their chosen themes that they can be considered “thematic horror” above all other types.
But how do you write thematic horror in a way that isn’t strictly literary? Or in a style that is literary? Surprisingly enough, the way you approach writing thematic literary or commercial horror is actually the same. Here’s how to go about it.
1 Figure out your themes and thematic statement
If you’re going to write horror that touches heavily on its themes, you will need to understand are the underlining subjects or topics at work within your story, like “school,” “government,” “revenge,” etc. A is the main driving statement behind your work. It can pose a question or directly state an idea that your story will prove in various ways.
