598 – Structuring Horror

An exciting new horror story has come out, promising spooky monsters and exciting twists that will surely have a satisfying payoff. This week, we address some tricky questions about common pitfalls in horror. How do you resolve a conflict with an overwhelming force without seeming contrived? How do you keep squishy heroes alive while also keeping them in danger? Should you kill your protagonist halfway through and replace them with some guy? Listen as we try to figure that out. Show Notes Backrooms What Stalks the Deep There Is No Antimemetics Division Weapons Five Stories That Use Novelty to Enhance Horror Six Ways to Keep Characters in the Danger Zone Understanding Conflict & Tension Crafting Satisfying Resolutions How to Create a Mysterious Atmosphere Why Horror Becomes Action and How to Prevent It Eight Ways for Heroes to Defeat Overwhelming Foes Movement: The Story Principle That’s 2,300 Years Old Nine Ways for Your Hero to Earn the Clues They Need Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: It’s time to read and/or watch the latest high novelty horror story everyone’s talking about. The opening is really cool and spooky. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by the back half falling apart. Chris: No, of course. It’s going to be cool and spooky the entire time, with the perfect twist that’s been perfectly foreshadowed. Oren: It’ll be just as good. Chris: It’ll be just as good. Never will we be disappointed ever. Oren: Yeah, so this episode is about how to structure a horror story, and this has been encouraged by the fact that I’ve seen and/or read a number of really promising horror stories that just cannot follow through. And I wanted to talk about it, and then Chris can explain why that doesn’t work and how to do it better, ’cause I don’t know. I just know that it keeps happening. Uh, so there’s a good chance… We got to say this at the top: there’s a good chance there are going to be spoilers for Backrooms, the novella What Stalks the Deep, the novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, and then the movie Weapons. Backrooms is also a movie. Chris: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of this. We’ve seen a lot. Oren: I don’t know if we’ll actually get to all four of those, but those are the things that motivated me to do this podcast, so there’s a good chance we’ll talk about them. Chris: Yeah. So, first question is: All right, why are they falling apart? And I think there is a connection between the fact that these horror stories are really unique and novel and the fact that they are not lasting through to the end. And that’s just the fact that we can’t underestimate how many people out there don’t really understand storytelling very well. And, like, the haunted house, for instance, genre of horror: there are so many of them that people know what to look at, right? And so they know, like, “Oh, here’s the beats,” right? If I’m… And oftentimes even in screenwriting and movies, it is like that. They’re like, “Oh, this happens at this point, this happens at this point.” They just have a template that they’ve copied from other stories that they go off of. Now, just to be clear to any listeners, we have had editing clients who have wanted to do this to help their plotting. They have a model work, and then they try to copy the plot. It actually does not… generally, especially if you’re doing it on your own, does not work as well as you would think, because almost always in these situations, there’s enough differences between one story and the next that when you try to do that, it will mean that the plot no longer works once it’s been transposed into your story. But in the case of haunted house horror, for instance, there’s so many haunted house stories to look at, and they have many of the same constraints, where in particular you need a reason that people don’t leave the house. That’s, like, one of the central challenges of haunted house horror. But you can kind of see how that rhythm goes, and you know what to do there. But I think when people do something that’s less familiar and they have less models, it’s harder for them to figure out what they’re doing. Oren: Yeah. And some of these, when I look at them, it’s a combination of, “Okay, this premise just seems genuinely very challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way,” and then also what just looks like really weird unforced errors. Backrooms is the perfect example because on the one hand, yeah, I have no idea how to resolve a story about thisinterdimensional utility corridor that kills people. That’s really neat and spooky and weird, but I wouldn’t know off the top of my head how a story about that should resolve. But I do know that it probably shouldn’t be by switching main characters halfway through. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Very strange choice. It’s like, hey, and then resulting in this weird thing where we have the haunted spooky utility corridor that brings to life your, you know, psychological issues and literalizes them into monsters, but for some reason that doesn’t happen with the second protagonist, even though we spent a lot of time flashbacking to her horrible psychological problem. That never appears in the haunted utility corridor, and I don’t get it. What, what? What is going on? Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think part of the issue is that movie’s running on analogy logic. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So, like, I’m pretty sure the Backrooms represent his mind specifically, so she’s not going into her own mind. She’s going into his. Oren: Right. But, like, surely she would bring her own stuff in there with her, right? I would think. I don’t know… Maybe not. Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. But it’s funny ’cause what you just said of switching main characters midway happens in two of these stories. It also happens in There Is No Antimemetics Division. Oren: Yeah, why? Chris: Why? I mean, again, that’s just a very basic thing that, if you’re… most storytellers know not to do, right? Again, somebody can always make the choice. Yeah, I understand this is going to have big consequences for audience engagement, but I’m doing it anyway, and that’s fine. At least in Backrooms, the therapist character is introduced pretty early as a character, so it’s not like some rando has just taken over the story. Oren: Yeah. I mean the husband in ’-memetics Division is also technically introduced early, but he’s less important, right? The therapist has at least been sort of part of the plot till this point because she’s been talking to the first main character about his issues, whereas the husband is only, like, very tangentially related to what’s going on. Chris: Yeah, I will also add that the therapist is a knowledgeable professional related to the area because the Backrooms are symbolic of the mind, right? And so that makes sense for her to be the hero. But the husband is, like, the non-professional who just happens to have some natural aptitude for seeing things that you can’t normally remember, and then he’s just, you know, a mediocre guy who skates on that. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Um, so anyway, not having a clear model, doing something unique does make it harder for writers, but to be clear, there isn’t actually anything super unique about horror structure, right? That’s not true for some other genres like romance, where there is unique things about how they work based on the engagement mechanisms they use. But horror is just running on tension. The only thing is that if you want it to feel like horror and not like action, you need the right atmosphere. And so that can add some additional restrictions, but we are just looking at normal tension structure here. I think the big issue is the fact that it happens at a small scale and we have a deadly menace, and we have a squishy person, and so it’s hard to figure out why it isn’t over. ‘Cause we want an underpowered protagonist because that disempowerment is part of how you build that horror atmosphere. Um, if you have, like, a muscled person with a machine gun that’s marching to the monster, it’s not… now it’s action; it’s not horror anymore really. Oren: Right, which is why it’s like, okay, so in the Backrooms, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been trying to figure out, like, what would a resolution to the Backrooms be? Because it probably can’t be, “And then we find the Backrooms’ secret weakness and destroy it, and now there’s no more haunted utility corridor.” Chris: I mean, you could, though. It could, though. There are, like in the Poltergeist, it’s not exactly like that because the girl’s been taken to another dimension, but it is like, “Hey, we used this One Weird Trick to get rid of the poltergeist.” So you could absolutely have, “We found some secret mechanism to get rid of the Backrooms,” right? if the movie was set up that way. But it’s going to end either when the monster is defeated or, you know, our protagonists are killed. And we want lots of spooks, which means encounters with the scary monster, and our protagonist is extremely squishy. So there’s… it’s just difficult to figure out, “Okay, how do we keep this going?” Especially since we want those thrills. And I think for There Is No Antimemetics Division, I think part of the issue there with the second half just falling very flat is it just escalated quicker than it needed to. But, like, obviously the… qntm, the author, was really focused on making it exciting. And at some point in time, if you want to keep the story going, you can’t necessarily keep escalating that fast. Oren: That’s true. Chris: But, like, there’s also, besides just, like, “Okay, why does one side not just kill the other?” there’s also definitely in Backrooms an issue related to movement. So: movement is the idea, like the feeling that you get that a story is progressing towards the finish line. And in order to get that feeling of progress, generally, there needs to be some sense of where you are going to. And if the storyteller doesn’t know where the story is supposed to go, I think it’s hard to create movement. So, like, what happens in Backrooms is, like, the protagonist just runs around in all of these rooms, and there’s all of these spooky, scary, unsettling things in these rooms, but they don’t add up to anything. Nothing builds on nothing else. You could take any room out of the sequence and the plot would stay intact. So as it keeps going, even though I started out being very engaged by this movie, it was increasingly like, “Man, this movie feels so long,” because nothing is adding up. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere because it doesn’t really have a proper resolution, right? And we could look at, “Okay, what are the arcs that are supposed to be here?” Because, again, there’s a couple of reasons why horrors don’t end instantly. And one is they have arcs besides just, like, “Do I kill the monster or does the monster kill me?” that spend the time and fill out that space. So a big part of horror is mystery. And you might’ve noticed in the Backrooms, we never solve any of the mysteries. It feels like, I mean, we do get kind of a monster, we find out what the monster is, but it doesn’t feel like we’re finding out how the place works. Oren: Yeah, I mean, I have to admit I don’t want to know. It’s hard for me to imagine an explanation that wouldn’t just make it seem kind of silly or be kind of perfunctory, like, you know, “Ah, yeah, it’s a haunted utility corridor that brings to life your psychological insecurities.” It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I mean, I kind of guessed that from watching the movie ’cause that is what it does.” So, like, I guess we could add some kind of causal explanation, but it’s just hard for me to imagine that that would be anything other than disappointing. Chris: Yeah. I mean, let’s use another horror as an example: Cabin in the Woods. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So: Cabin in the Woods, we have this company that is setting up this horrific cabin weekend, this evil company. We don’t know why the company’s doing what it’s doing, but we can already see it there. It’s not actually as mysterious to us as it would be to the characters. We see the characters make progress in trying to figure out what’s going on, right? Like they try various places to get away and find out there’s artificial technological barriers in the way, which gives them more information. And finally they find out that there is some technical mechanism that unleashed these zombies on them. And then they work their way back to the company headquarters, and then the actual horror kind of continues at the company headquarters, and we can see that that kind of allows them to make progress. Now, the actual Elder Gods, the Older Ones that the company is trying to appease, that kind of remains mysterious, right? So we have a mysterious level there. But we can see that they’re, like, doing something, right? So in a haunted house, usually we are covering what is the history of this ghost oftentimes or figuring out how the house works in some way. And we can still have it be kind of magical and mysterious, but there has to be something for the characters to work towards as they’re running from this monster. Oren: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it’s just hard to imagine what that would be in the Backrooms, just ’cause the spooky aspect of the Backrooms is so visual and, like, so based on things like set design and cinematography and music choice that I’ve been trying to think, like, “What did I want this plot to be?” And I have no idea. Chris: Well, I mean, I think the premise… I mean, they set up a whole premise where there’s a therapist and a guy in therapy, and it feels like they weren’t willing to be anything other than very obtuse about that, right? You know, we had a villain that is basically part of, you know, one of the protagonists’ sense of self. But, like, we don’t know anything about, like, what do those rooms mean to his psyche, and I think we could still have it be magical and that it represents his psyche, but also in some way understand his psyche, like, you know, you would have the therapist come in and be like, “Okay, the key to getting out is that we need to find his childhood self and make that self feel safe again,” right? Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right? So you would have the therapist, you know, they would figure out something about maybe him and what’s going on with his psyche while they’re running around from the monster so they can do something that builds on itself. And then they would have to identify an objective that the audience can understand despite the fact that the Backrooms itself works in mysterious ways. But that objective tells us about, like, “Okay, so that child we saw crying in the other room, we have to go retrieve that child, right? And then we have to make that child feel better and safe despite all of the horrors.” Right? So we can kind of see what they have to do and see how, as they learn more about his psyche, that’s the kind of, you know… And so they had some of that in there, but it felt like they just wanted to be very cryptic and didn’t want to actually tell a story about these characters. Even though those characters both had emotional problems, it just didn’t feel like we really wanted to be explicit about what those emotional problems were or give them meaningful progress. Oren: I would probably not have spent so much time establishing the psychologist’s traumatic backstory if the only outcome of that was going to be that it was related to the piece of concrete she used to hit the monster with. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Oren: Probably not worth that investment. Chris: Right. But, like, in a different… in the story if that was actually, like, followed up in some way we could’ve… then maybe that would’ve been meaningful. It might’ve been hard to delve into two characters, like, deep emotional backstories and weave them into a plot, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But yeah, I mean, I think with Backrooms it’s a matter of like, “Okay, we didn’t actually know…” Well, the arcs there are pretty simple, right? We have a guy who is… he has emotional problems, and the resolution, you know, is that, spoilers… he does not solve his emotional problems, right? That is a resolution. The problem with the other character, the therapist, is: What is her arc exactly? Oren: Yeah. Chris: I guess she’s sad about this backstory. Is she still, you know, grieving? What does she need? Oren: Yeah, nothing about that changed, right? Like, she’s in the same place emotionally she was before she went into the Backrooms. But she now knows that there’s a weird government agency tracking the Backrooms, I guess. You know, another thing I would probably not have included. Chris: Yeah, but the conclusion of the man’s arc is very perfunctory, right? It feels very rushed. Like, as we noted, you know, he’s attacked, and then we just flip to another character. Then, when we see him again, it’s like he’s completely changed and we didn’t see. Oren: Yeah, he’s a different person now. Chris: So it’s like he failed off screen, right? And we needed to see that to fill in the movie. To make it meaningful, we needed to see that, and it just wasn’t given to us, right? Oren: It’s probably pretty hard to convincingly have him go from flawed but normal guy to “I’m going to do like the Joker tea party scene where I cut people-shaped things open and put stuff from that onto food plates.” ‘Cause there’s not really a reason for a person to do that. That just doesn’t make any sense. So we just have him be off screen for a while, and we can trust that whatever happened to him made him into the sort of person who would do that. Chris: Mm-hmm, yeah. So, like in horror for instance, we have time figuring out how the horror works. Like, sometimes people have relationship problems, right? And so people work on their relationship while they deal with the horror. Sometimes they investigate the mysteries, like what is this monster, how was it created? Or, you know, have to reckon with the fact that the supernatural is real, for instance. And those things fill out the story, take time, and, you know, give them something to do, because they can’t be running from the monster usually the entire time, right? We need to fill the story out a little bit. And so for that, horrors usually have a pretty slow escalation where there’s lots of build-up time in the beginning. You know, like in a haunted house, the family moves in, and there’s usually some, like, fake-outs. Like, we think that something is going to be scary at first and then it’s not. We have one kid jump out at another kid and laugh, right? Oren: Yeah. Chris: So that we get, like, our little spooks in because it’s horror and we feel tense, but there’s not… actually the monster’s not here yet because we can’t spend the whole movie with the monster chasing the protagonist. And so that build-up builds atmosphere, you know, allows us to kind of build up a sense of mystery, allows us to build anticipation about the threat, right? Make it feel creepy, and that increases… that anticipation increases tension later when the monster finally shows up. And then just, like, takes time, whereas, like, Antimemetics, one of the things that’s so great about its first half is it really hits the ground running. Oren: Yeah. I mean, my instinct, Antimemetics is easier to fix from my perspective because what I would probably recommend doing if the author had hired me for a dev edit is I would, instead of having the big bad take over the world at the halfway point, which feels like, “How could we possibly win at this point?”, like everyone’s turned into monsters or whatever, and then the way that they do win is extremely vague, don’t worry about it. What I would just have them do is have the midpoint be that the agency is destroyed, but the bad guy is still contained, like, within the agency building or something, right? And then have the protagonist not die because, again, we like this protagonist. She’s great. Don’t replace her with her husband. And then have her be on the outside, and now things are way harder because they have to figure out a way to stop this thing without the agency’s resources. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I also think we could have just waited longer until having this happen, right? I think that, when we establish what’s happening in Antimemetics Division, where employees are disappearing, it just goes much faster than I think it needed to go. Now, if it happened for too long and qntm didn’t have anything to do there, it’s possible that it would be a little bit too dragged out, right? We didn’t have anything to do in that space. But I just think that we could take longer to get to the point where the organization is destroyed, right? And, again, horror often relies on a slower build-up so it’s not over immediately. So yeah, that’s definitely one thing. Like Weapons. Okay, Weapons is really interesting because this has the opposite, where it is slow, but for the wrong reasons. Oren: Yeah. Yeah, with Weapons, it’s less, I guess, that the back half falls off, and more that we start off with this interesting premise and this teacher who is suspected of being involved with her class’s mysterious disappearance. So she has, like, both the spooky disappearance and the human problem of people thinking she did it. And then we switch over to the parents of one of the kids, and he suspects her. It’s like, “Okay, this makes sense.” And then we switch over to the teacher’s cop ex-boyfriend, which is like, “Wait, whoa, okay, we probably don’t need this guy’s perspective.” And then we switch over to a random criminal that the cop ex-boyfriend arrests. It’s like, “Okay, is, like, her former roommate going to show up at some point? Why… why these guys?” Chris: Right, and each person is again, going through… They happen at approximately the same time. Maybe they work forward in time a little bit, right? So it’s like we’re repeating the same time and each person has to kind of rediscover the situation. So there’s very little forward movement. But again, it feels like, “Oh, we didn’t have enough actual content to fill the space, so now we’re just going to repeat it a bunch of times.” It feels like the same issue, but, like, with a different bad solution. Oren: Right, and instead of having the characters figure out what’s going on, we just reveal it at one point in, like, an infodump. Uh, it’s like, “Yep, that’s, uh, it’s a witch. A witch did it. Good job.” Chris: We’ve seen a lot of that lately, where storytellers add flashbacks or switch POVs instead of just letting the protagonist uncover something. And I suspect it’s just because they feel like it’s challenging. They don’t know how to let the protagonist find out all these things. And also, I will say that it can be hard to dump a whole bunch of information at once if the protagonist is clue-finding. So maybe they just think it’s easier. But yeah, it’s like you could have spent that time with the protagonist actually solving a mystery and earning information instead of just, like, switching viewpoint and giving it to people. Oren: Yeah, just the fact that we have to watch the cop and the criminal guy figure out a lot of the same stuff that we already had the teacher and the dad figure out is just mind-numbing. Like, no, I don’t care about either of these two, and I’m not learning anything new anyway. Chris: But yeah, this little introduction allows you to make things spooky. Also, it’s often used to develop characters a bunch, right? Like in The Shining, Stephen King spends a whole bunch of time setting up the family and what their deal is and their problems, which of course matters a lot later when, you know, Jack becomes part of the evil hotel, basically. But that’s kind of how it’s used, and we get that slow build-up. Um, and then yeah, we need something that characters can work towards so that the story actually builds off of itself and has proper movement. Oren: Yeah. And the last one that I mentioned that has a weird one, that has potential spoilers is for the novella What Stalks the Deep. And that one is interesting because its problem seems to be the halfway point twist, where we had thought that there was a monster stalking the land and the mines, and then we… Twist! No, it’s not a monster. It’s just an unusual life form. Uh, it’s not evil. And, like, that’s a perfectly fine twist to have, but what it ends up meaning is that the first half of the story doesn’t really tell us any of the information we need to know. And so then, when we find out what’s actually going on, we require this huge infodump to explain the new premise now. And oh boy, is that boring. Chris: Yeah, I mean, my biggest issue that I had with that is that, because the actual monster was similar, was the same type of creature as this person they meet that turns out to be not threatening, we completely demystify the monster. And oftentimes, if you want your horror monster to be scary, it does need to be mysterious. It’s just far less scary if you dispel the mystery around it. And so just having like, “Hey, I’m a special strange creature from the deeps. You know, I’m your buddy.” It’s like, okay, well, now the actual monster is not scary anymore. Oren: Right. Now we know exactly what the actual monster is. And there’s also like a while where we’re waiting for the actual monster to show back up, because we weren’t investigating it. We had just like heard foreshadowing that it existed, right? It’s also a problem where we are now treating both the monster and this new guy, who they thought was evil but turns out is just a strange life form, as characters with motivations that are understandable. But, because we barely know them, they just kind of have to tell us their motivation. Like at one point, the bad guy straight up just says, “Uh, I will not return to the hole.” And it’s like, “Okay, I mean, I know that’s your motivation ’cause you said it out loud, but man, it would’ve been cool if I had been able to infer some of that from your actions.” Chris: Yeah. Um, the other thing structurally with this one is we have a creepy old mine shaft, and that’s great. The mine shaft is great. But we have a situation: it’s like people have a campsite outside the haunted house, and they’re safe if they’re in their campsite. So they, like, periodically go into the haunted house, and we have scary encounters there, but then they just retreat to their campsite, and there’s like… Once they’re in their campsite, there’s no tension because there’s no time limit, right? or urgency. But they’re like, “Okay, we would like to get these answers from the haunted house, but we don’t have to get them… You know, it probably won’t actually make any difference if we get them today or tomorrow,” right? Oren: Yeah, the lack of urgency is a problem, for sure. Chris: So they’re just, like, casually camping around outside the house, and occasionally they go in. That’s what this mine shaft is like. And so, again, you know, you need that high-level structure, that big-picture structure and not just, like, exciting individual moments. Again, Kingfisher, her books often just aren’t very tense. But the first one in that series, What Moves the Dead, that one is much more tense. That’s definitely the best one so far, and sadly, I think the reason why she made a change in this one is because that one has, you know, an organism that just turns out to be evil. And she might have been like, “Oh, we shouldn’t treat other beings that we haven’t met before as though they’re just, like, monsters to be killed, so I’m going to make it better in this next one.” It’s like, okay, but now it’s not scary. Oren: And here’s the thing: I can totally imagine ways to fix this one because what we would want is… so we would need some urgency, right? Like, we need some urgency in exploring the mine, and because both the actual evil thing and the guy who turns out to not be evil are shapeshifters and can look like anything, just have them be people that we meet. And then we can build some attachment to them or learn about them that way before we make the big reveal, right? That just seems obvious. Chris: Yeah, it’s true. We can have a normal person and then realize that person is strange later after we’ve been spooked out by the monster for a while. That’s a good solution. It’s nice. But again, overall, the thing about horror again is it uses the same structural principles. Usually it has, like, a mystery element to it, so it’s like a story with a mystery subplot, right? You want your protagonist to be disempowered, and you want them to be reactive at first, generally. So it’s just easier to create that horror atmosphere if the monster comes after them and they’re not, like, again, getting out all their guns and chasing down the monster. Um, slow build-up with spooks and then, you know, add some other arcs that they can work on while they’re doing that. But its structure is pretty similar to other stories. It’s just about trying to, again, keep that escalation from happening too soon and not having the monster kill the protagonist or the protagonist kill the monster immediately, and having somewhere to go with it. Oren: Yeah. All right, well, with that, I think this is a good point to call an end to our spooooky podcast. Chris: What if this podcast were to disappear mysteriously? Does that not spook you? Is that prospect not scary? Well, maybe you could strike back against this menace by supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.