Fifty More Horror Clichés That Should Be Left to Spoil

#25: Avoid Drawing Influence From Your Own Fears

To celebrate the halfway point of this lovely editorial, I am going to explain why the heck a fan girlish, cat loving twenty-one year old girl like me loves the horror genre so much.  I want to tell you guys this personal bit of trivia about myself to explain why a overwhelmingly dominant assumption about horror is a complete cliché and damaging to the creative process.  That overwhelmingly dominant assumption is that horror is purely created to be escapism from real life, thus authors should stray away from inserting their own personal fears and inner demons into the narrative.  I hope with this little bit of trivia about myself that you understand why you should insert any personal phobias or inner demons you are struggling with into whatever horror story you end up being inspired to write.

  So, now here is a little trivia about me that most of you would probably not expect.  When it comes to my personality outside of Watt Pad, I am an insecure, doubtful twenty-one year old.  I am extremely sensitive to anything, be it something small such as forgetting where my phone is on the couch or something gigantic like crying over The Lion King.  This insecurity and doubtfulness comes from a mixture of experiences in both school and sometimes in my personal life.  I will not get too much into the details for the sake of privacy, but basically my current personality outside of Watt Pad is sourced from a fusion of personal pressure to always achieve big things and make my family proud despite the autism I was born with.  I want to make the people who made my life as great as it is today proud, and though they praise me time and time again for my accomplishments, I still feel like I have not done enough.  It is self-criticism at its highest peak, something I battle constantly with even when I have no reason to.

  A great outlet for my feelings of self doubt are released through the horror genre and all the crazy stories that revolve around it.  When I am reading a suspenseful novel like You, or a great horror movie such as Babadook, it allows me to escape into a different world where I can feel brave and secure of myself for witnessing each chaotic storyline.  Horror to me is a great elixir for personal pressure on myself, where through simple scares I can feel a lot better about myself.  That is why Halloween is my personal favorite holiday and why I chose to cover the horror genre after fantasy in my cliché crushing editorial series.

  Alongside loving the media horror has to offer, it allows me to at times through my own writings to face my own personal demons head on.  A great example is a character I created for Gate Keeper, a book I am currently slowly working on that can be found on my account to read.  This character is the titular Gate Keeper herself; the demonic Skeleton Queen.  I created her in the narrative to confront my fear of being trapped inside a cycle where I fail to truly achieve anything.  Stopping the main character of the narrative in their tracks from escaping Hell, she is my personal therapeutic confrontation for failure, a demon that has eaten me alive since the very beginnings of my life.  Every time I write about her in particular, I feel less like a failure, confronting a fear in my life that probably a whole chunk of you can relate to.

  It is through this personal experience of mine that I can conclude that creating a monster out of your own fears can be extremely great therapy, while acting as a great creative outlet audiences reading the material can enjoy.  By creating a metaphorical representation of your personal demons, you can get one step closer to getting over that fear entirely.  This method is a personal touch to the horror narrative in question that makes the story even more special to craft.

  Before you think I am the only one who has created this seemingly strange method of healing myself from my demons, I can safely say I am not alone in this mindset.  It turns out a majority of horror genre authors use the same method as me.  In fact, it would be hard to find even one narrative out there where the author's personal fears were not expressed artistically in some way.  A great example of a horror writer using this technique is the creator of the Alien movie franchise, Ridley Scott, who came up with the first movie's plot after a particularly bad bout of food poisoning.  Through this food poisoning, he came up with a vision of the iconic image of a Xenomorph popping out of a human's chest, the basis for the story's main suspense.  He used a traumatic experience to craft an excellent tale about survival against the odds, which serves as just another great example of an author inserting fears into the narrative to confront them head on.

  Crafting stories from the personal source of your fears can make for therapeutic material for you while crafting a suspenseful adventure for the audience.  When crafted to perfection, it can be a sword that can pierce through even the strongest of  personal turmoil.  It is a secret tool that I only wish more inspiring horror writers knew about so their material could turn out not only original as heck, but as a personal healing journey for themselves.