A slight break because I wanted to actually include something worthwhile here.

Okay, a few words about horror. More for my reference than anyone else's, but some of you might find something of merit among my prattling.

What makes a story horrific? I've been wrestling with this question while working on The Tyrant's Festival and found I had twice as many problems as someone writing a horror story; not only did I have to find ways of scaring the characters, but also their players into the bargain. Two fairly disparate sets of personalities, the first of which might not scare easily.

The first lesson I learned in earlier drafts of my adventure was pretty crucial: monsters are not scary. Just making something 'undead' doesn't make it scary. Making it capable of killing in great numbers doesn't make something scary -- especially when its ability to kill can easily be expressed in a series of statistics and numbers.

For this reason it's quite easy to read The Call of Cthulhu without feeling so much of a shiver. An enormous squidge-beast rises up and wreaks havoc? So what? Most of us have seen King Kong and at least one Godzilla movie. The threat of humanity being wiped out? Many of us have lived with that for years, thanks to the bomb. It's not the Great Old Ones themselves that are scary -- it's the idea they represent: namely that human sentiment is ultimately meaningless. Feel what you like, do what you like, cling to whatever morality or lack thereof you like -- at the end of the day, we're all meat. Nihilism on a cosmic scale.

Strange, really, how often that idea's skipped over in favour of just listing a load of mythos names, parotting a bit of HPL-style Cthulhu-fhtagn gibberish and having cultists stab a virgin. Have to thank Augie Derleth and Brian Lumley and their successors for that, I fear.

Similarly, weirdness for its own sake isn't necessarily all that frightening either. Presenting characters with something completely beyond their experience and saying 'it's scary just because it's unknown' is as big a cop-out as HPL's overuse of the term 'indescribable'. You have to describe the experience, and give the audience a way to relate to it. Give them a handle on the experience or it'll be impossible for them to be properly scared by it.

In a way, this ties into the importance of character. The usual way is to develop a sympathetic character; play on the audience's sympathies and then dispatch the character in a horrible way (oh, the angst of it all...) Just look at Lucy in Dracula for an example of that -- she's beautiful, vivacious, much admired. We get to know her quite well especially as over the course of a few visits Dracula robs her of her blood, ultimately killing her and resurrecting her as a vampire. Scary? Almost certainly. But why? It's not because there is a vampire involved. It's not even because of what a vampire does or can do. It's because of what a vampire does to a specific person whom, over the course of a few pages, we've got to know quite well.

I think the one common thread I've seen in all the horror I've read is the idea of threat on a human, personal level. Things happen to specific characters, or to certain human ideals. The human body or soul, or even both, ends up destroyed or degraded. The writer, if he or she does his or her job properly, gives us a decent grip on the situation, imbues it with a sense of stark, chilling reality, and leaves the reader with the need to follow the story, just to see how unpleasant things can get, and what fate befalls those involved...

Basically, if you want to scare them, give 'em a reason to be scared. Get 'em involved. Don't just ramble incoherently about some insects coming out of nowhere because that just ain't enough.

Admittedly I rambled a bit there, but I hope I managed to keep some sort of argument going.