Horror and Thriller

Horror and thriller stories often get lumped together - and there is some overlap between them. However, the two are actually pretty distinct genres with very different audience reactions in mind. Some stories might be both, but they are far from being interchangeable terms. 

Horror

The goal of a horror story is to be unsettling. Primarily, this takes the form of stories designed to frighten the audience but powerful feelings of shock and disgust can also qualify. That is why the genre isn’t called terror.

People read horror for a lot of different reasons. Experiencing strong feelings of fear, repulsion and anxiety causes the body to release stress hormones like adrenaline. It’s exhilarating. Then, when those hormones start to wear off, a person is generally left with a feeling of relief or even accomplishment from making it through the experience. It’s effectively a high followed by a potent feeling of relaxation. So, despite the negative connotations of horror content and feelings like fear, it’s an exciting and eventually relaxing experience for a lot of people. It’s not so different to why people ride roller coasters. 

Horror is also a chance for self-exploration. It provides a safe environment for an audience to explore their fears, boundaries and even traumas. Compared to a lot of other genres, it can be a deeply personal experience for people. Especially when you get into the more psychological side.

Given what people are generally trying to get out of reading a horror story then, that means the objective of the writer is effectively to be emotionally compromising. The aim is to play upon people’s fears and anxieties to elicit those responses. 

Horror stories are generally associated with the supernatural - ghosts, ghouls and demons abound in the genre. However, a lot of horror is more grounded and deals with more realistic elements such as animal or human threats, environmental dangers or even psychosis. Situations in horror stories will typically be life-threatening and those that aren’t will usually involve some other life-changing danger. Regardless of which form it takes, the story is going to target something primal - physical dangers, sense of self, the fear of the unknown - to create unease.

Because of this horror stories can be both very draining experiences and very satisfying ones. I’ve written more about how to write effective horror here. However, a lot of that article is actually also relevant to what comes next.

Thriller

Every thriller story has the same aim: making you hungry to turn the page. Thrillers are stories that are designed to be exciting, to make you eager to see what comes next.

The main tool in the writer’s kit for crafting a thriller is suspense. Suspense is a sense of excitement or anxiety about what may or may not happen. It’s a tool that is very useful for horror as well, but that is the entire point of a thriller.

Suspense is generated through two components: the guarantee and the mystery. This was famously explained masterfully by Alfred Hitchcock. Two people are in a room when suddenly a bomb goes off under one of their chairs. That is a moment of shock - maybe even fear, but it isn’t suspenseful. Suspense is telling your audience there is a bomb under a chair that will explode in ten minutes and then continuing to have characters interact despite this - whether they know it is there or not. You are guaranteeing that an event will happen, but leaving room for the audience to question how this will impact the two in the room. Will they defuse the bomb? Will they escape? Will they be injured or killed? The detonation is the guarantee. The outcome is a mystery. The result of this combination is suspense, your audience on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens next. 

A thriller thrives on that feeling of desperately wanting to know what that mystery will resolve as. When writing a thriller your goal is to constantly be generating that feeling of suspense that will keep your audience turning the page. Each individual chapter should follow this formula, as should the overarching narrative of your story. 

Conclusion

At the start of this article, I said that horror and thriller stories are often lumped together. I expect if it wasn’t already easy to see why, it might be now. Horror and thriller stories make use of a lot of the same methodologies, techniques and ideas. There is genuinely a lot of overlap between the two. 

As with most stories, both ultimately seek to create powerful emotional responses in the audience. What separates the two is the response they seek to create. These genres are defined not by their similarities but by what they aim to achieve.

Horror is about terror, unease or even disgust while a thriller is all about anticipation and excitement.

You can see more examples of both horror and thriller stories by checking out my short stories, premium content or books.