In a post on CrimeReads, Eva Gibson examines horror tropes and how you can use them to satisfy your readers’ cravings for story and subvert their expectations. “Horror in itself is a genre built on tropes, and pop-horror in particular is an especially visual, visceral subgenre, relying heavily on trope usage in a structure and formula fans expect: the familiar; the recognizable; the reliable,” she writes.
Because horror novels can’t rely on television and movie visuals, tropes help deliver the goods, Gibson says. “The techniques of trope usage in horror writing, as opposed to visual media, rely primarily on setting, mood building, plot twists, and tension to produce those promised chills,” she writes. While those tropes help you create your story, you can also deconstruct and twist them to deliver surprises. Some common horror tropes you can reinvent include:
- Stock characters. “Dismantling a common archetype and turning it on its head can push a seemingly simple trope beyond the limits of the expected,” Gibson explains. Your readers may expect your creepy kid or weird janitor to fill a specific roll, but you can turn that expectation around to create layers of meaning or plot twists.
- Fear of the unknown. “Setting the scene and letting the reader’s imagination do the work can serve to conjure up terrors that may or may not be worse than what’s actually happening on page,” Gibson writes. “This trope can be used to set up a false alarm situation, foreshadow a later threat, or misdirect the reader’s attention from the real danger, that may well be right in from of them.”
- Unreliable narrator. “Setting the scene through the eyes of a character who can’t be relied upon to report things as they are throws everything else into question and can be used to set up anything from plot twists, to betrayals, to other effective trope inversions,” Gibson says.
- Bad choices. A character’s bad choices are an easily mocked horror trope, but without them, your story would probably end after a few pages.
- The normal thing that feels off. This occurs during the “moment of reveal—when the driver keeps up a friendly stream of chatter while turning casually in the wrong direction; when you see the doll’s head, which you know was facing the window, is suddenly facing the wall,” Gibson writes.
- The mirror scare. “Medicine cabinets have been reflecting serial killers across various media for literal decades, with largely predictable results,” Gibson notes. “And yet, it works over and over again, in part because It’s such a predictable scare. You know the deal as soon as you see that cabinet; you know something terrible is about to happen, and your body reacts accordingly.”
