What Makes A Monster And What Makes A Man

(Editor'due south Note: The following excerpt is composed of selections from the 2d chapter of Writing Monsters, by Philip Athans.)

I'd similar to meet the first person who ever ate a lobster.

Imagine being the first woman or man to pick up that horrible, red-brown spider-thing with terrifying claws and twitching antennae and saying, "Yum!" To me, a lobster is a giant issues with claws—I'd take run screaming from a lobster. But now we know what a lobster is and what it tastes similar and that it isn't really unsafe. The only affair scary about it is the unknowable mystery of its "market toll."

(Defining and developing your anti-hero.)

Nosotros'll desire our monsters to maintain a greater caste of mystery, or at least begin with a greater degree of mystery than that.

Start by asking ...

What Are People Afraid Of?

I asked myself this question while working on a fantasy novel in which I envisioned a world overrun by demons. In an try to build a sense of increasing danger in the book, each new sort of demon my characters run into is more dangerous, more powerful, and more frightening than the last. To do this, I decided to look at my readers' deepest fears and inject those fears into the demons. So off to the Internet I went in search of the top x phobias. This is what I found:

1. Arachnophobia (fear of spiders)
2. Social Phobia (fear of a hostile audience)
three. Pteromerhanophobia (fear of flying)
4. Agoraphobia (fear of an disability to escape)
v. Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces)
vi. Acrophobia (fear of heights)
7. Emetophobia (fear of vomit or airsickness)
8. Carcinophobia (fear of cancer)
ix. Astraphobia (fright of thunder and lightning)
x. Taphophobia (fear of being buried alive)

… Phobias have common fears to the pathological level. If these are the ten nigh common phobias (and I've institute a few different lists, so your search may yield slightly dissimilar results), then there's a good chance that someone who is reading your volume, seeing your movie, or playing your game volition take one or more than of them to some caste. And even if your readers don't completely collapse at the sight of a spider, they probably share at least a common uneasiness in the presence of 1 ... or worse, many spiders!

To create that sense of progression and escalation of danger, I simply reversed that pinnacle 10 list so the final, scariest demon embodies the most prevalent phobia. That means the lowest-level demon comes up from underground and pulls yous downwardly and buries you live, and the "boss" demon is a spider, or something that looks and/or behaves like a spider. As information technology turns out, those are adequately easy fears to apply to a monster or demon, simply what about pteromerhanophobia, the fear of flying? Richard Matheson made quite a splash in 1961 with the short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a poor soul suffering from pteromerhanophobia encounters the dreaded gremlin vehement pieces out of the wing of the airplane he's flight in. This story became one of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, a vehicle for a young William Shatner. […]

But please don't think that triggering your audition's phobic responses is the only way to brand your monsters terrifying. In a broader sense, monsters are scary because ...

Monsters Are Unpredictable

Can that lobster have your hand off with one of those claws? Turns out, no, just if it could and you weren't expecting information technology ... that would exist pretty scary, right? In existent life we know they tin can't hurt united states, and that makes them anticipated, and predictability is the enemy of horror. Only add an unexpected element to a predictable situation and you enhance the potential for fear.

(eight journeys and motives behind evildoers, anti-heroes, and antagonists.)

Humans tend to have a pretty good sense of what another homo is going to do next. We tin tell via torso language, facial expressions, and tone of vocalism when someone is getting angry or upset. We sense when things might become out of control or violent. Merely monsters don't necessarily give out those man signals. This is a creature, after all, exterior our normal experience. Who knows what it'll exercise adjacent?

We'll discuss setting rules for your monsters and how important it is that you follow those rules, but continue in mind that while you know the rules that govern your monster, your characters don't. In fact, the less your characters know well-nigh what a monster can and tin't do, the better. It's this unpredictability that will go on your readers on the edge of their seats, playing into the power of the imagination.

Monsters Have a Disturbing Capacity for Violence

Monsters don't just attack y'all; they assault you lot in particularly gruesome ways, every bit shown in this paragraph from the curt story "The Lilliputian Green God of Agony" by horror master Stephen Male monarch.

Melissa had seen where the thing came from and even in her panic was wise enough to cover her own mouth with both hands. The thing skittered upwards her cervix, over her cheek, and squatted on her left eye. The wind screamed and Melissa screamed with information technology. It was the cry of a adult female drowning in the kind of pain the charts in the hospitals can never depict. The charts get from one to ten; Melissa'south agony was well over one hundred—that of someone being boiled alive. She staggered backwards, clawing at the thing on her eye. It was pulsing faster now, and Kat could hear a low, liquid sound as the thing resumed feeding. It was a slushy sound. (From the anthology The All-time Horror of the Twelvemonth, Volume 4, edited by Ellen Datlow.)

Desire to scare the crap out of someone? Go for the eyes. It'south up to you to ready the caste of "goriness" your story volition contain. Movies similar The Blair Witch Project are terrifying without spilling a drop of blood, while some gimmicky "torture porn" films, like the moving-picture show Hostel, are gross, even disturbing, merely scary?

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I tend to describe "gore" as unmotivated violence—a tearing scene done badly, in which all the reader gets is a sense of the quantity of blood and guts without the emotional and psychological (read: character) connection of well-written violent activeness. … Take a 2d expect at the example [above] from Stephen King. No claret. There is some yucky linguistic communication in in that location ("It was a slushy sound.") only mostly nosotros get Melissa's experience of this cringe-worthy human action of violence and her efforts, nonetheless vain, to make it stop.

Exploring truly disturbing events can be difficult for many authors to work through, in the horror genre in particular. But fantasy and science fiction—really whatsoever genre of fiction—can enquire you to plumb your ain psychological depths. So what scares you? A footling animal that eats your eyes get-go? Is that disturbing enough for the psychological sweetness spot you're trying to hit? […]

Our Imagination Makes Monsters Scarier

Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is more of import than knowledge." And the man imagination is pretty powerful. How many times have you imagined something volition be absolutely terrifying—a roller coaster, a job interview, a scary movie—and when it's over you immediately say, "That wasn't so bad."

And another great quote: "The only thing we have to fearfulness is fear itself." Franklin Roosevelt wasn't talking near Godzilla or Dracula, only he may as well accept been. This plays back to the idea of unpredictability and "otherness."

We have no idea what to expect from this thing and no way to determine its motives, and so we starting time to fill in the blanks with theorize, which tends to make something quite a bit more terrifying than it should be. Our imagination, and thus our fears, get the true monster in this case.

This awarding of our imagination can work in many ways. Every bit stated higher up, we can fright something we don't know, but a lot of monster stories start with monsters that are scary and and then plough out to be nice. The Animal from Beauty and the Beast is an instance from classic fairy tales, and Frankenstein'southward monster is another, a creature who looks terrifying but is layered, emotional, and yearning for agreement ... and later, revenge.

In another style, creatures may seem harmless because they appeal to the softer, friendlier side of our imagination, but become monstrous when their true nature is revealed. Star Trek's tribbles are an excellent example of this. When the crew of the Enterprise first encounters tribbles, their assumptions accept over. They imagine the tribbles to exist cute and harmless just have no specific information about their true nature. The tribbles slowly reveal themselves over the course of the story to be a sort of plague, like a swarm of locusts. Assumption and imagination can exist very dangerous.

Play with the assumptions of your characters in this manner, and you'll be playing with the assumptions of your readers right along with them. Nosotros likewise take a tendency to presume that many of the sentient beings we come across have a sure sense of right and wrong, or at the very least a sense of their function in relation to other beings around them and what they must do to non simply survive but coexist and thrive, but monsters can be particularly scary when they seem to lack these causeless morals. ...

Monsters Are Beyond Our Control

Humans more often than not like to be in charge. We spend a lot of fourth dimension trying to control our weight, our relationships, our personal finances, our schedules, everything. We even try to control others by taking classes to larn how to train our dogs, motivate our employees, and so on. And then what happens when a monster makes its fashion onto our starship and simply won't follow our rules? It eats what and when—and who—information technology wants to consume. It bleeds metallic-dissolving acid all over the place without regard for the hard vacuum of space just a bulkhead away. You lot can't negotiate with a monster. You can't calmly tell a Denebian slime devil, "Okay, await. I'm going to get to the store and purchase y'all a bunch of steak—don't swallow me in the concurrently." That monster does what it does, and it neither seeks nor respects your opinion.

(Creating emotional frustration in your characters.)

Simply put, monsters don't play by our rules—and that scares us.

Monsters Are Terrifying in Appearance

Hither'southward another example from H.P. Lovecraft's archetype short story "Pickman's Model."

It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring crimson eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the caput as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of hunker, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn't fifty-fifty the fiendish subject that made information technology such an immortal fountainhead of all panic—non that, nor the canis familiaris face up with its pointed ears, bittersweet eyes, apartment nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet—none of these, though any i of them might well take driven an excitable human to madness.

Frightening, but here's an interesting have on description: Lovecraft goes to great length to draw a foul-looking creature here, but it is made more ominous by also describing what it's doing (gnawing on "... a thing that had been a man ...") and what it might do adjacent ("... seek a juicier morsel."). And it's important to keep in mind that non all monsters have to appear classically "scary" in order to exist so.

In Miss Peregrine's Abode for Peculiar Children, author Bribe Riggs describes a less traditional but no less unsettling animate being.

Only these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a 7-year-old might be able to wrap his heed around—they were monsters with man faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, then bland you don't recognize them for what they are until it'due south besides late.

This monster has the power to hit closer to home, describing the human potential to become inhuman through political, military, and/or social assimilation. Not as frightening as a "nameless blasphemy with glaring cerise eyes," only equally monstrous on the inside.