Ever have this problem? You want to write a story in you favorite genre but you don’t want it to sound like every other story. Despite the number of haunted house movies I’ve watched and all the ghost stories I’ve read, I’m having a hard time writing this new short story. The haunted house trope is tough.
The plot is basically:
- People move into big house or people spend night in “haunted place”
- Strange things happen
- People ignore
- Stranger things happen
- People believe
- They can’t leave house because they have no place to go or spirit/demon won’t let them leave
- People find a way to remove spirit/demon from house or they die. In the case of people being trapped in a haunted place, I don’t think I’ve seen a movie where the people made it out alive.
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| Gulliver’s Kingdom, Japan. |
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| Hotel del Salto in Colombia |
That hotel fascinates me. I modeled a building in my story after it.
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| Capuchin friars |
I visited this crypt when I was in Rome. I was fine until I saw this sign.
This sign in front of a crypt filled with actual human bones… creepiest. thing. ever.
That is atmospheric horror 101. The sentence:
What you are now, we used to be; what we are now you will be
is not that scary on its own. The human bone crypt, on its own, wasn’t scary- at least not to someone who watches a lot of horror movies. Pair the crypt with that sign and we have some willies.
