Oh, humble horror tropes. When we think of horror, we have a preconceived idea of what we mean. Thunder and lightning over a spiky castle nestled in the mountains. A young woman running from something through an overgrown forest. That feeling you get when you remember you can’t remember what it is you forgot.
But the point is, I’ve come across the same old methods of making us sit back and wondering why we have goosebumps. (And no, I’m not talking about the use of music in a film’s soundtrack.)
While there’s a whole load of information out there about how to make a decent horror story (examples of decent horror stories are in this article), I’m sticking with my top five tropes of horror.
But first, let’s refresh our memories of what a trope is. According to TVTropes.com, a trope is:
A recurring convention in fiction, and the subject of a moderately obscure encyclopaedia website.
And now, let’s dive into horrific tropes of the genre.
My Horror Tropes #1: Body Horror
This is a popular horror trope with those B-rate horror films designed more for shock factor than anything else. But it does pop up in films with fantastical transformations like werewolves, zombies, and vampires, where the transformation is painful and drawn-out.
With body horror tropes, the point isn’t exposed organs or forced transformations. This is hinging on the primal fear we have of deformity, parasites, contamination, the ravages of disease, and the aftermath of bodily injury.
Body horror is about the long, drawn-out process of turning into a twisted and deformed monster (zombies, werewolves). It’s the chest-burster scene from Alien. It’s a cosmic horror which has recognisable body parts in a random configuration.
Hollywood likes to use this as a backstory for the Bad Guy’s sidekick for why they’re no longer as human as they once might have been (hello, Renfield). Though, it’s often the result of medical experimentation, which shows how evil the scientists are. Or it’s sympathetic to the victim and calls into question how we measure humanity.
The difference between how we portray body horror is in how we see Victor Frankenstein and his Monster. Is Frankenstein an evil mad scientist determined to play god (Hollywood), or a genius who regrets everything and fears what he’s done (the book)? Is the monster more human than his maker like in the book, or just a mindless zombie as shown in Hollywood films?
Trope #2: Fridge Horror
This is, quite possibly, one of my favourite tropes. All these tropes are my favourites, but fridge horror is right up there.
Simply put, fridge horror is: “the realization of horrific implications after viewing a work.”
This is when you watch series two episode five of Interview With the Vampire and realise, half an hour afterwards, that Daniel Molloy was miraculously lucky he didn’t contract HIV in the seventies. (He cruised the gay clubs for drugs and sold sex to pay for the drugs. And then he met Louis.)
There’s also a lot of fridge horror in children’s TV, like where the parents are during all the adventures or how they get away with so much mayhem. (I’m looking at you, Nickelodeon.)
Sometimes a write knows what they’re doing, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they do it to themselves when they realise just what it was they wrote.
You’ve got to think a little too hard about this or that plot point a little too hard. And suddenly you realize that everyone was trapped in stasis forever. Or the lovable child will grow up in a world where everyone around her is dead.
Anyway, fridge horror has to marinate for the implications of the horror to truly sink in. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you put in your fridge (that’s the trope “It Came From the Fridge”).
Horror Tropes #3: Found Footage
The found footage horror trope came to the mainstream in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project, but it dates to the days of the book Dracula as a scrapbook of “found” diary entries and letters Mina compiles in-universe to help the heroes defeat Dracula.
Essentially, the found footage film is shot to resemble actual camera footage recovered from an event. There’s a lot of leeway in whether the “amateur filmmakers” would have something of terrible quality when this is, in fact, a professional production company behind the thing.
This trope is great for low-budgets, and usually seen in the horror industry. The first Paranormal Activity in 2007 cost $15,000 to produce, Oren Peli filmed it over a week. Peli also wrote and directed the film.
The rise in availability of digital cameras does mean that anyone can be a director these days. This probably explains why these films are great for productions on a budget. The 2012 film Chronicle had a budget of $15 million. According to Studio Binder, this is a mid-level production budget (~$5-$50 million).
What I like about found footage is the ability you have as a writer to tell a story on different levels. Are you cataloguing evidence for the in-story heroes like in Dracula? Is this a chronical of the dangers of the monster like the deceased Dr Westlake’s journal entries in The Deep? Or is the story itself “the true story of what happened to those kids who vanished”, like The Blair Witch Project?
The possibilities are endlessly epic.
Trope #4: Gothic Horror
Anne Rice made the gothic horror trope famous when she wrote Interview With the Vampire in 1976. Like many stories in the genre, Rice’s Vampire Chronicles focus on the thrill and fear of the unknown and give importance on atmosphere and symbolism. These vampires ponder life’s meaning because they live forever.
Though the Gothic horror trope dates to the 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, famous examples include:
- Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein,
- Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher,
- Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre,
- Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights,
- Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula,
- Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
- Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Grey,
- Gaston Leroux’s 1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera.
- And, of course, Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. (See my review of her novel The Vampire Armand here.)
For non- literary examples, we have the 2015 film Crimson Peak, the 2022 TV show Interview With the Vampire, the 1988 musical Phantom of the Opera, and the 2021 video game Resident Evil: Village.
What these all have in common is a loss of identity. The stories focus on anxieties about boundaries, whether moral, social, natural, or metaphysical. And nothing is quite what it seems, so the hero commits questionable acts to reestablish and to reinforce them. Which leads to consequences.
TVTropes has a great article here on what makes a gothic horror story. It also features the “necessary gothic horror tropes” they all have in common.
My Horror Tropes #5: Survival Horror
While this trope is geared more towards video games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Pathologic 2, and Resident Evil, I’d say it can also apply to films.
Jurassic Park, Alien, and Predator also feature an overwhelmed protagonist(s), an oppressive atmosphere, and a need for careful management of resources. Oh, and you can’t just leave the horror behind, either. Something keeps you attached to both the location and the monster.
There are two types of horror genres: (1) visceral, with the horror comes from the threat of being eaten or otherwise painfully murdered; and (2) cerebral, with a focus on feelings of isolation and paranoia.
Survival horror doesn’t rely on one over the other, but in varying degrees through the course of the media. In Resident Evil: Village, for example, when there’s blood it splatters, but much of the horror comes from your paranoia over where the damn zombies are lurking as you stumble through the village. Five Nights at Freddy’s, on the other hand, has you die a jumpscare death after you’ve exhausted yourself panicking over keeping that flashlight working.
When you encounter a survival horror trope, don’t get eaten.
Conclusion
Horror tropes are useful tools in helping us provide consumers what they expect when they pick up a book or a film or a video game. You just have to present it in the manner they’re accustomed to.
(Never give Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to a regency romance fan. Even if it displays elements of body horror, fridge horror, and potentially survival and gothic horror.)
