How to Craft an Immersive Horror Soundscape in Your Prose

Write a Freaky Flash Every Week in October with the Scary Story Sprint!

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

This lesson is part of the Freaky Flash collection with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya — check out all the workshops HERE and take part in our scary story sprint!

Hi Scary Story Sprinters! Welcome back to Week Two of writing four horror flash pieces in a month!

How did last week’s exercise go for you? What did you discover or unlock as you went and how can you bring that into this next piece?

Today we’re going to talk about a very important element in horror: sound.

Have you ever watched one of those videos that either takes the sound out of a horror movie or swaps the sound for something else in order to completely change the tone and genre?

My wife, who is also a writer, often uses the viral re-cut trailer of The Shining to demonstrate the power of context and the subtle shifts between categories like horror and humor:

In a similar way but in the other direction, my friend once re-cut the Carol trailer to seem like a horror movie.

Sound is crucial in horror films. The best ones have a dynamic approach to sound. You can’t really scare when the sound is at the same volume all the time. Only so many screams are going to land if your scream queens don’t also have quieter moments. Silence is often even more effective in horror than loud sounds. When things go quiet, the viewer knows something could jump out at any point. The viewer feels pulled to both lean in and also brace backward.

But okay, we’re prose writers and we don’t have the benefit of literal audio being a part of our work (unless we’re working on hybrid audio narratives). So how can we create a compelling horror soundscape on the page?