In an article for Writer’s Digest, Michael Seidlinger shares ideas for writing horror that feels like it could really happen…and why you should. “As the world around us becomes every bit its own complex, harrowing slice of horror, we need escapism, a more ‘controllable’ horror to escape to, even if it means it’s something that hits close to home,” Seidlinger says. “Now more than ever, we need something we can control, even if it means putting ourselves into the throes of, let’s say … a home invasion.”
Seidlinger examines two novels that use familiar modern settings and interactions to bring the horror close to home: Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. “By bringing in the familiar and offering no-holds-barred and unabashed focus on the themes and issues you desire to explore, horror can be the perfect canvas from which we can face any demon, no matter how real or imagined,” he writes. Rather than be disturbed by horror that leverages social topics, we should embrace it, he adds.
“The terror swells when the unknown is placed side-by-side something palpable and as real as the laptop right in front of you, the phone you’re using to text a friend,” Roycroft writes. “The horror that feels like it could really happen is the most effective of all because, somewhere and somehow, what you’re reading or watching could be happening, right now, as you read this, somewhere, by someone inflicted upon someone else.”
