Horror

What makes a story scary? What elements contribute to a tone of horror? In horror movies, much of the “scariness” is built up by the music. The music is very vital in creating horror in scary movies; music with a very fast rhythm makes us nervous and anticipates that something is about to happen, where as music with eerie music notes heightens the fear we get from watching the scenes. In horror stories, the author can’t use music to make the story scary, so the author has to rely on his diction and tone. Vivid descriptions of what the characters saw is also important, it helps build a picture in our mind. Another element that makes a horror story scary is suspense. When the characters in the story don’t know why something weird is happening, it creates suspense because we start to wonder about the reason about why those things are happening, too. Our imagination runs wild and we think up a lot of scary reasons. In the story The Feather Pillow we read today, the author described how the wife of a man loses blood in her body mysteriously everyday, and finally dies. During the whole story, the man doesn’t know why his wife is dying, and the way the author wrote the story made us as terrified as the man himself.