We don’t have to understand why art works to enjoy that it works, but as craftspeople it can be helpful to consider how stories function. Most writers enjoy words, so our natural tendency if a story feels wrong is to fiddle with the prose. Sometimes, however, the reason a story isn’t working isn’t because the verbs are not verby enough. It’s because the story is the wrong shape for its purpose.

By “purpose” I don’t mean the persuasive story, like a morality tale. I also don’t mean a story whose job is to sell something else, like game tie-in fiction. I mean the purpose a reader has when choosing the story, which is usually to get a certain feeling. For example, in a Regency romance the reader wants the warm-fuzzy love story feeling, and also the pretty-setting-feeling of fancy dresses, carriages, and men with lovely manners. So what feeling do people seek when they read horror?

Well, obviously, they want to feel scared. That’s strange, because in real life people hate to be frightened. But fear isn’t the only emotion people seek to experience in fiction while avoiding it in real life. There’s also sorrow—witness the multi-century popularity of tragedies like Romeo and Juliet. The phrase “a good cry” gives us a clue what people are after: they’re having feelings on purpose, in a safe and controlled way, in order to reach catharsis and feel better. When we understand fright as a way to reach catharsis, we gain some storytelling tools.

First, to eventually reach catharsis we must create tension. Everything might seem fine at the beginning, but there’s an undercurrent of dread. The family moves into the beautiful old house, but there’s a weird stain on the back porch. The quaint small town has a few disturbing quirks. Why will nobody talk about what happened last summer? The reader’s expectation begins to rise.

Second, in order to not wear out our reader, we have to vary the tension in a calculated way. Unrelenting escalation ironically gets boring, because humans get used to prolonged sensations. Therefore, we create peaks and valleys of spooky stuff to keep the reader from habituating. This is often done by injecting humor for the “valleys”, a way to let off some steam without letting the reader off the hook. As we draw closer to the climax, this peak/valley rhythm gets faster.

The classic movie Halloween is a great example: Carpenter opens with a bang and a knife attack. Then we have a long interval before we see any more violence, just a teenager going about her day in a sleepy 70s town. We know there’s a knife-wielding maniac in the bushes, but all she catches for a long time is glimpses of a guy in a mask, until night falls. Then we are in peak/valley territory, and the violence and tension both ramp up until the end sequence, when the killer is never off the screen.

Third, we have to pay off the tension. We’ve been building dread all this time, bleeding off bits of tension with jokes, teasing the reader’s imagination. When the murderer finally bursts into sight, the fight between him and our literal or metaphorical Final Girl has to be satisfying. She has to be in actual danger, and he has to be actually dangerous. This is the moment to pull out all the stops. The valleys in the peak/valley dynamic (temporarily, see next point) go away, and the audience is in full adrenaline flood, devouring pages to see what happens.

Fourth, we have to resolve the tension. You might be writing a story where the Final Girl loses and gets dragged into the swamp. That’s fine, as long as we see it happen. More commonly, we have one last play on the peak/valley structure. To use Carpenter again, we have the girl, battered but alive, with the killer dead on the floor behind her. And then—he sits up. Some of the audience was just beginning to relax along with the girl. But the wise audience, the ones who’ve seen a movie like this before, have been in an absolute ferment waiting for that monster to move. This makes the final resolution, where the monster is either defeated once and for all or the human is dragged to their death, an exquisite release of accumulated tension: catharsis.

Why do humans like to scare themselves? We aren’t well adapted to modern life. Biologically, we’re built to react to threats by fighting them or running away, and to either succeed (and feel a release of fear—catharsis) or fail (and get eaten by bears). What we’re not built for is dread. It feels bad, it does bad things to our body chemistry, and it makes it hard to think straight. Even worse, we can’t do much about the things we dread. After all, this is 2025. The number of bears I fight on a day-to-day basis is basically zero.

But if we read horror and have feelings on purpose, some dread we accumulate in our day to day lives can be purged. A good scare, a good laugh, and a good cry, then, turn out to be different flavors of the same purpose.

Enough theory: let’s consider how this knowledge—story purpose, peak/valley, a good scare—can be useful in the work of writing dark fiction.

Understanding how tension works can help us diagnose problems. Perhaps you’ve got a tale you worked hard to make as exciting as possible, but it feels monotone. Well, now you know you need to inject at least a few moments of levity or rest for your characters in order to make that tension sizzle. Or perhaps you sense there’s something wrong with your ending, and now you realize you tied everything up off-screen instead of letting the audience see the monster sit up. While there’s few actual rules in writing, story structure can be an excellent tool. Anyone can do anything they want with art, but unless you know how a working guitar looks, it can be difficult to realize you’re trying to play one with a missing string.

Finally, understanding the purposes of horror can help us avoid the trap of seeing the reader as an adversary, a dolt who refuses to pick up what we’re laying down. It’s possible to make art just for yourself, but most writers want to reach other people. It’s encouraging to realize others are also reaching for us.

After all, the reader only has so many hours to spend. They could be napping, or washing dishes, or playing video games, but they chose to pick up your story. They want you to succeed—they want to be entertained and love your work. Life is hard. They want to be scared. They think you can do it.

So go scare ‘em.