In another recent Halloween-themed post here, I discussed the psychology behind the nature of ghost stories and, to a degree, horror stories more generally. In response to a comment about what I thought were among the best “scary stories” and films, I thought about another post from years ago recommending psychologically-driven horrors. However, that also got me thinking about the nature of being scared, successful scary story-telling, and potential interest in an adapted list of recommendations.
The length of a tale has always struck me as playing a large role in its “scariness,” not only because of reasons associated with attention but also because of exposition. For example, a novel or a feature-length film is typically predictable in terms of narrative structure. The opening section sets the scene, develops characters, and does all that “busy work” before the scares finally enter our focus. Then, by the end, story-tellers need to clean up the tale into a nice, neat little package to conclude the story, even if they sometimes make room for one last scare. The difficulty here is that, in an extended tale, like a novel or a feature film, there are perhaps too many opportunities to explain away the horror. What makes for many good scares is the ambiguity, uncertainty, and mystery surrounding them. For me, when the scary stuff is explained, the unease goes away.
In short stories and films, such exposition is not expected. The narrative structure is less predictable. The auteur only has so much time to achieve their purpose. Thus, I often find short narrative forms much scarier, hence the focus of this list is on short-horror tales.
The other caveat to this list is the relative recency of the tales. Horror succeeds in cases where it is relatable, where the audience can place themselves in the shoes of the stories’ characters. Many older tales may not have the impact on younger generations that they did on generations past, simply because of this relatability. For this reason, I’m excluding stories like the often-cited Turn of the Screw (1898), The Monkey’s Paw (1902), and The Cask of Amontillado (1846).
6. The “Girl and Her Dog” Chain Letter
If you’re of a certain age, you remember chain letters, be it either in their physical form or their electronic counterpart, which took emails by storm in the late 1990s. The emails were often accompanied by scary stories that served as examples of what would happen to you if you didn’t mass send the “letter” to a certain amount of people in a certain amount of time. Most of them were on the silly side, but one always frightened me. In this particular example, a teenage girl is home alone with her dog. She’s freaked out a bit by various things (depending on the version you hear) but locks up the house and eventually goes to bed. Hijinx then ensue. Sure, you’ve probably heard this one many times before, but what got me about it was that it could very reasonably happen. Moreover, the scare is multi-layered: there’s animal cruelty; highlights of the real vulnerability of people as they sleep, even if it’s in what they deem to be a safe place of comfort; it echoes fetishistic perversion and sexualized criminality; and perhaps the most striking, to me anyway, was the subtle nod to chance being the ultimate player in this terrifying game. What would have happened if…?
5. “Harold” is a short story, most famously appearing in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (SSTD) series by Alvin Schwartz, about two brothers who build a scarecrow for their farm – the titular Harold – who they engage on a regular basis, sometimes in a playful manner, sometimes much less pleasantly. Over time, Harold exhibits signs of life. Hijinx ensue. The tale is not fantastical — it portrays real life on a farm. The set-up is short and puts you there with the brothers. Then, the surrealism hits and that’s what’s scary. We think we know how we’d react in their situation, if it was us in their place; but then we know we’re reading a horror story. For them, it’s real-life. They’re just “seeing and hearing things.” Nothing is really happening with Harold; that is, until the surrealism turns into horror.
4. “The Dream” is another short story from SSTD (NB: I’m potentially biased here [as you’ll see again by another entry], having recently purchased the series, out of nostalgia, in the build-up to Halloween [i.e. availability heuristic]. Consistent with the title, a young woman dreams of a new place she’s potentially moving into, wherein she receives a warning from a ghastly woman to get out because there’s evil there. The Dream is a particularly scary tale (alongside its corresponding artwork) because of its ambiguity. The woman in her dream is terrifying; yet, her warning seems to be an effort to help. Is there something else our dreamer should fear? With that, we’re not told the nature of the danger, just that it’s there. But how much can you invest in a dream? Alternatively, imagine if your dreams actually granted you some power?
3. “The Chair” (short film; dir. Curry Barker, 2023) takes only 20 minutes of your time and will hit you with multiple pangs of terror within that short space of time. With that, it feels much shorter because you are glued to the screen throughout by the unnerving atmosphere it creates from the very first scene. It’s mundane and boring, but terrifying at the same time over its opening minutes. With that, it’s not the type of tale that rewards you with a payoff at the end. In fact, I’d argue that the end is pretty pedestrian for this genre; but what gets you is all the curveballs throughout. It’s a dizzying, ambiguous narrative that only gives you a line or two of meaningful dialogue to help unlock the allegory that might well be the core of the story’s message.
2. “The Trouble” is the final entry from SSTD here and is the one that caused me a weeks’ worth of sleepless nights in my childhood. It’s based on actual reports in newspapers and magazines of isolated poltergeist activity, presented in a relatively “objective” manner, broken down according to diary excerpts over the course of a month, as opposed to stylized fiction. It’s not scary in the traditional sense: no monsters, ghosts, or killers to be engaged or visualized; rather, the simple reports of odd things happening that shouldn’t be, and without explanation, in an otherwise very normal setting. The author does not create the terror for the reader; the reader does it themselves, through imagining what is behind all this. It’s a ghost story; but, at the same time, an unsolved mystery (i.e. in the context of its telling).
1. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is barely a horror story, in the traditional sense. Instead, Flannery O’Connor’s (1953) work here is genuine literature, representing a famous piece that falls under Southern Gothic. It’s the best short story I’ve ever read and it’s included here, because it’s horrifying – mankind, sometimes, can be far worse than any ghost, monster, or demon. We travel the story with this family of characters as if we’re there, particularly the grandmother; and, when the focus definitively shifts to her “situation,” we are with her in every terrified word she mutters. For me, the true scare comes with the recognition that there’s “absolutely nothing we can do about it,” apart from hope for the best; yet, we try, even through we know it’s pointless. This is a must read.
