How to Start a Horror Story

How to Write Horror: Starting a Horror Story

Tension and mood are extremely important when it comes to horror fiction writing. As writers we feel a pressure to engage our readers right away, or lose them completely. Readers, for their part, give us a very short grace period, which differs from one individual to another, and during this grace period we need to set up the horror mood and hook them in, before they lose interest and put your story down. 

So it's only natural that, if you're writing a horror story, you may be wondering how to start it off?

It was a dark and stormy night...

The good news is that horror does not particularly differ from any other genre in this regard. 

• Eerie prologue. Drop the reader straight into the creepy part of your story by whetting their appetite at the very start using a prologue. Usually, prologues will include characters who are secondary, or who are never seen again, and are used specifically as examples of what could happen to the main character if they fail. By using a prologue you can easily set up a promise that will hook the reader and make them more willing to give you grace as you build toward the different climaxes in your story.
  
  
• It begins at the end. This is where you take the last scene(s) in your story - preferably a cliffhanger scene - and place that right at the start of your story, and then reel it back to the very beginning in the next chapter and take the story from there. It takes some finessing, but it's an interesting way to then look at your story: present the end, and naturally get your readers to ask "What's going on here? What happened to these people?", which will spur them forward into your story.
  
  
• Build the story up the traditional way. Not a fan of prologues or potentially confusing beginnings? That's alright - you can skip all of that and get straight into building your story. Once upon a time, there was... Only this isn't a fairytale. Far from it. The start of any story is usually full of exposition, since the reader needs information that allows them to understand where they are, what they're reading about, who the characters are, and so on. This usually means introducing and describing settings, characters, and pulling them into the main conflict of the story. 
  
• For example, a teenager getting ready for prom with her friends thinks back to the terrible stalking ordeal she has survived and feels good about moving on with her life - but we know this is a horror story, and things will change as soon as she gets to that prom. (Can you guess what movie that comes from?) 

Your story can still rely on various important elements while in the expository phase. You can opt for a sense of background unease as you go through this part of your story, relying on the mood of your piece to generate tension that will keep your readers engaged. You can rely on how interesting your characters are, and lean into that as a way of entertaining the reader and establishing their characterization. You can have a unique narrator, who engages the reader through their tone. There are, however, certain pitfalls you should be wary of falling into (more on that in another post).

• He's obviously lying! Introduce an obviously unreliable narrator, right from the start. You'll have to be pretty familiar with this narrator and careful in how you want to present them, but the idea is that, right from the start, this narrator lets slip a few things that make them sound unreliable and sketchy. Can we trust the story as they're telling it? (Bonus points for a dual-POV with two unreliable narrators, where the reader has to figure out the story by balancing their POVs out and finding the truth in the middle - but that's less of a story-starter method and more of a cool little narrative idea.) Here's a great but not-so-subtle example from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart":
• True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
  
  
• Hook 'em with a line. Sometimes, all you really need is 1-3 lines to hook the reader in. It doesn't have to be eerie or scary or shocking right off the bat - just intriguing. Write a couple of lines that make readers want to find out more. Consider these first lines from popular horror stories:
• "I was sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me." - "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had." - We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• "Professor Mark Ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his publishers." - "The Man Who Found Out" by Algernon Blackwood
• "Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness." - "The Outsider" by HP Lovecraft
  
  
•  In media res. Start smack-dab in the middle of the story. Something horrible is happening! The story enters various flashbacks, or is told in two timelines, or simply continues from there and the reader is given hints as to what happened to bring the characters into the present situation. To do this, you may need to plot out your story beforehand, choose a "middle-point" that you're happy launching the story from, and go from there.
  
  
• An ominous event. Something happens at the start of the story that may not necessarily be directly relevant or connected to the main conflict the protagonist has to contend with. 
• Ex: Maybe the story is about a character who is hunted by a monster made of fire, and at the start of the story we have them accidentally burn something they're grilling, or accidentally catch something on fire. Alternatively, they could be living in an area where a forest fire is creeping closer and closer to their homes, a looming threat that perhaps the monster is a representation of.
  
  
• A snapshot. Include a newspaper clipping, image, blog article, social media post, forum thread, hand-written note, or any other kind of "snapshot" that can set the mood for your readers and engage their minds. This is somewhat of an epistolary/analog storytelling method, and you don't need to only use it at the beginning - but since we're talking about how to start a horror story...
• Ex: You can include a newspaper clipping from decades before the events of the story which talks briefly about some terrible event which took place - and which becomes relevant to the story you're telling. Maybe there was a horrible accident at a nuclear power plant 100 years ago, and now your character has to navigate through a zone filled with dangerous mutated beasts that are more monster than animal. A newspaper about that accident might be a cool little thing to have at the start of your story.
• Ex: If you have a family picture at the start of your horror story, naturally the reader might think, I wonder who these characters are. If it's a bit of an odd picture, they might start asking questions. Why is that person wearing a mask? Why are they all wearing those strange robes?
  

And there are many more creative and engaging ways to begin a scary story. You can even use more than one of these methods at once. The ways to begin a story are numerous, but all of them, when executed well, have immense potential to hook your reader. But how do you know you're executing the start of your horror story well enough? 

You won't know until you have your story in front of a reader. And not all readers enjoy the same things, so something that hooks or intrigues one reader might not do the same for another reader. So, really, you need to put your story out there in front of multiple readers and receive their feedback. 

This is a shortened version of a lesson provided in my horror writing course. If you find yourself struggling with applying the techniques required to get the effect that you want in your writing, you may be interested in enrolling in my horror writing course, which will be coming out very soon. Subscribe to my newsletter by joining the Google Group linked below, and you'll be notified as soon as it comes out. Subscribers might even get a sweet deal 😉

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• List of Adjectives for Writing Gothic Horror

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