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How to write thematic horror

A guide to successfully weaving themes into your spine-chilling fiction.

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Create character symbols

One of the most creative writing tricks to make horror stories a bit more thematic is to make the characters represent symbols beyond their personality that connect to the story’s beating heart. Let’s say you’ve got a horror story set on an interstellar cruise ship. There’s a new alien life form ripping through the crew and passengers. You can energize your story and the actions your characters take by connecting your characters to symbols. 

Your main character isn’t just a single dad looking for a way to take his kids’ minds off the recent death of his partner. No. Lean into a common trope of the dastardly consistently out of luck father. In your thematic horror story, your single dad represents a black hole. 

The children? Make them planets, moons, quasars, or symbols more terrestrial. Once you’ve decided your characters are stand-ins for these symbols, be creative about how their actions and relationships can best showcase this. Your black hole father can always be at the center of destruction, for example. 

Focus on specificity. Pinpoint how these characters can represent these symbols and how they relate to the story’s themes. Push past cliché portrayals by using the symbols you choose for each character to connect to all aspects of their personality and actions.  

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Consider the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre film released by Netflix. Instead of simply rehashing the old films, the creators worked to bring out the story’s inherent themes of gentrification, racism, and the impacts of violence on a person. Instead of simply being a chainsaw-​swinging killer, the titular character has more depth and acts in ways that are at times surprising, disgusting, and spine-tingling.

Exercise

Write out your list of characters and the roles they play throughout your story alongside the themes your story is working with. Play with turning your characters into symbols connected to your plot.

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