Invisibility without ambiguity

So, I'm banging away on this horror novel now.

I love a good, scary story, but those are getting hard to find. One reason is the authors of these things feel the need to remove all of the mystery, the unknown, about their killer/monster/whatever. Once you know everything about the thing, even it is a truly awesome thing, we begin losing our fear of it.

Take the alien from my favorite film, Alien. What the hell is this thing? was my initial reaction to it. What does it do to the people it grabs? In the director's cut a little more of that gets answered but there is an air of a horrifying mystery that remains.

Contrast that to the later films, where, while still the scariest creature in cinematic history, it's not nearly as scary as it was in the original. Why? Because we know too much about it. In the last one it's even sort of played for laughs a couple of times--not a good sign for a horror movie franchise.

That's why I never dug the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, by the way--Freddy talks way too much. I'd find myself wishing he'd go ahead and kill me so I wouldn't have to listen to him any more.

Still, you have to show people something. The trick is to show people just enough and let their imaginations fill in the rest. Give their minds something to hook into and they'll create a monster that's much more terrifying than anything you could spend pages of text or several feet of film showing.

That's the art, the tricky part of what I'm trying to do. How much should I reveal?

I understand the temption--you work hard to create your villian/monster/whatever. You want to show it off. Resisting that temptation is difficult, but it's something you have to do.

On the other hand, there has to be some consistency--the problem when you opt not to show your creature too much is to make it where it doesn't have follow any sort of rules or stay within some clearly defined limits. That's dramatically unsatisfying, as well. You don't have to explain the rules but you do have to have them, and your creature has to abide by them. Even if nobody articulates it, your reader will sense that the creature has some sort of rules or limits it has to respect. That is much more satisfying.

Another thing is creating characters who are interesting, that people can identify with. A lot of horror stories are just morality plays, where characters are one-dimensional and meet a gruesome death because they violated the morality of the society where they exist. It's kind of hard to give a crap what happens to these people. If you don't care what happens to the characters, you won't care to actually read the book or watch the movie.

So, you want characters that your audience will like, for whatever reason. They don't want anything bad to happen to them. Of course, something bad is going to happen to them, at least some of them, or it'd be one helluva boring story. Read any book by Stephen King, who is a master of this, and examine how you feel about his characters. Chances are good you'll be able to identify with at least a few of them. Watch Rob Zombie's remakes of the Halloween movies, too--several characters in those are people I'd hang around with.

Sorry. I realize I'm preaching here, but I love a good horror story and it seems a lot of authors and filmmakers are ignoring what makes the genre so interesting to me. How long has it been since you've been scared reading a novel, or watching a film? I bet it's been a while.