Does any one have any sources for where you can get ideas or structures for generating tension / horror ?

I am not so bad at this when it comes to poetry but I have hard time hitting the button when it come to building something up to a climax as it where.

thanks

balli

Have a look on the Net for Horror e-zines such as 'Thirteen' magazine, would be my suggestion. Or watch some Alfred Hitchcock films, he is an absolute master at building tension

There are a number of ways you can build tension but one of the most common is through describing the Main Characters reaction.

I am sure there is some experience you really dread, such as having an injection for example. Well describe how you felt the last time you had that experience. Particular the approach to that moment of dread EEEEEK!

Hope that helps

Best

John

Just thought I'd mention something about Hitchcock. He preferred suspense over tension in his films. In the book-length Truffaut interviews, he states: "There is no terror in a bang, only the anticipation of it."

He further demonstrated an example. Hitchcock and Truffaut sat talking at a table. There's nothing suspenseful about that. But say a package is under the table that they're not aware of. The audience is aware of it. They see it, and they know that there's a bomb inside that will go off in three minutes. There you have three minutes of tension because you know something is going to happen. The suspense comes from the lengths you go to draw that tension out - step by step.

Ste

In the chapter 'Suspense', David Lodge in The Art of Fiction says:

...narrative... holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers. The questions are broadly of two kinds, having to do with causality (e.g. whodunnit?) and temporality (e.g. what will happen next?)... [thriller] narratives are designed to put the hero or heroine repeatedely into situations of extreme jeopardy, thus exciting in the reader emotions of sympathetic fear and anxiety as to the outcome.

Ste's quite right about tension: it's the product of the suspense you've built into the plot, but also of the characters: the suspense can be built as powerfully from waiting to see how different people will react to the bomb (realise? not realise? be paralysed with fear? be heroic?) as from waiting for the bang.

Later on, in 'Mystery', Lodge discusses the difference between

...an effect of suspense ("what will happen?") [and] one of enigma or mystery ("how did she do it?"). These two questions are the mainsprings of narrative interest and as old as storytelling itself... A solved mystery is ultimately reassuring to readers... modern literary novelists... wary of neat solutions and happy endings, have tended to invest their mysteries with an aura of ambiguity and to leave them unresolved.

Even once the bomb's gone off, if we don't know how it got there (or better still, if we know something about how, but not enough to be sure it won't happen again) then the tension is only relaxed partly and for a moment, before it starts to build again...

Thinking about horror it seems to me that to be more than mere gruesomeness or big frightening bangs, it needs to be structured with suspense (what's coming round that corner?, or will they get out alive?) but also with mystery, because (as Hitchcock understood) the truly horrifying things are horrifying because we don't understand them and feel the solid ground of our human common sense and logic quaking under our feet. A straighforwardly ghastly battlefield scene isn't horrific, however appalling: it's the mad inversion of logic and ordinary human motivations that makes Apocalypse Now such an astonishing film. On the other hand, you can build suspense and horror in a story where no-one so much as cuts a finger. I missed Rear Window when it was last on, dammit!

Emma

Emma, it was on ITV3 last night. You didn't miss much: adverts, news, entertainment updates in between the film - completely shattered the atmosphere and pace.

Ste

I know, I've virtually given up on commercial TV, but then I'm a luddite, and only have the 4 channels, because 5 is unwatchable, and I refuse to pay to have a roof aerial installed to improve the picture or get Freeview.

Emma

Emma, coaxial aerials are not worth a penny, and the quality is invariably relative to the weather. Freeview is pretty cool though, but completely unnecessary, as it's all mind-numbing rubbish.

Ste