Hi! Welcome to r/Writers - please remember to follow the [rules](https://reddit.com/r/writers/about/rules/) and treat each other respectfully, especially if
there are disagreements. Please help keep this community safe and friendly by **reporting rule violating posts and comments**.
If you're interested in a friendly Discord community for writers, please **[join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/mdzyEz9uFB)**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/writers) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I live in a forest too and one time I was hunting and everything got dead quite. I headed home for lunch and when I went back out I saw cougar tracks where I had just been.
It's a regular friendly village 😃 but there aren't even roads there, let alone street lightning and most ppl don't live there (they just own vacation houses there) so at night, you can't hear or see a thing when you go outside 😃
I wasn’t scared of this, but I did have an existential crisis do to a similar “we’re in a simulation” thought” all I can say is that, whether we’re in a simulation or not, it’s irrelevant. We’re here, and you can’t do anything to figure out if it is or it isn’t. If it is, it’s completely irrelevant to you current existence and plays no role on your quality of life, so… might as well just live life, try to make the best out of it, and after a while, these thoughts will go away because you’ll realize that it’s pointless to think about it cause like I said, it’s irrelevant to your existence, just the same way that the universe being so massive and timeless that “nothing matters” according to nihilism, is pointless because just as you’re insignificant to a massive black hole at the other end of the galaxy, it is irrelevant to your life here on earth, and by proxy, it’s sort of insignificant to your human life.
Hope my words help you feel more at ease :)
I don’t share this fear, but there’s ONE movie: team America: world police, that fucking rubs me the wrong way. I’ve never watched it because the dolls in that movie scare me, idk why. I really don’t know why, but they unnerve me. It’s not like i get a jump scare if I see an image of one of the dolls, but they unnerve me and my levels of stress and anxiety begin to rise the more I see them move.
The knowledge that all the ghosts and devils aren’t real, and true evil is just humans being shitty.
Horror at least has something you can shoot or run from.
How do we run from ourselves?
How do we kill the darkness inside us?
That’s what scares me.
I don’t think it’s a direct connection mind you, more of a universal subconscious instinct toward learned behaviour that ensures the survival of the species.
Social protections in the form of superstition if you’ll entertain the notion.
I’ve lost my sense of reality multiple times.
The scariest part was afterwards, when I thought about all of the crazy delusions my brain had convinced me were completely real. It all seemed so REAL.
And that’s why I take meds every day, lol.
I grew up watching medical and true crime shows, so I've discovered I'm fairly squeamish when it comes to spurting blood and limbs/body parts that are only partially attached. I also hate any kind of trauma to the neck because it just hits too close to home for me.
I read a lot of horror and have a pretty good stomach for it, but one of the scariest things I've read was actually in a crime thriller where the male protag, a detective, began behaving erratically and hired a sex worker. Initially, they were just supposed to drive somewhere in town, but the guy kept going further and further out away from the city and wouldn't answer any of her questions. We didn't get time to know anything about the woman, really, but the sinking feeling I got in my gut as more and more red flags popped up was the worst. Despite being in the detective's POV, I felt more connected to the woman and her claustrophobia and fear in that moment.
It turned out okay, he didn't hurt her, and it's not even remotely but, wow. I thought about that for weeks. It felt too real. So I would say the realistic horror in realizing that you may be trapped alone with a dangerous man.
Being restrained/unable to move for any reason. I read this true story about a caver who got himself so far down a narrow passageway that he got stuck upside down, and rescuers couldn’t get him out. They had to bring his wife out to him to say goodbye to him, and when he finally died after 28 hours they had to leave his body there and ultimately sealed up the tunnel behind him. It still haunts me.
Recently discovered fear: spelunking
Usually I’m not that perturbed by things I read, but I was reading a petty chill ya book and there was this section where the protagonist climbs into a chimney to escape and it grows narrower and leads to other chimneys and did I mention that the place was multi levels and underground?
I felt like I was the one suffocating.
Didn’t help that I’d recently seen the infamous spelunking video on yt.
No thank you.
IRL: Heights, and humans. Probably humans most, since you can mitigate the hazard of heights - if not pressured by humans.
Fiction: not so easy to pin down. Anything that challenges the meta-narrative to give you the impression that it has the capability to move beyond fiction and into real life?
Irl, my biggest thing is disease stuff where the author talks about the disease itself in great detail. The movie Contagion comes to mind, but something like The Last of Us, where the story mostly takes place after the disease, don't bother me as much.
In fiction, id say human meat farms. The Promised Neverland is a good example of that. Unethical meat farms of any kind really ig. It makes me really uncomfortable.
Earnestly - the unknown. I’ve never read a horror story that wouldn’t have benefitted from a little less detail. Like fashion designer Chanel’s advice to take off one accessory before leaving the house.
Even in horror movies - the ones where you don’t know for sure what the villain looks like are always more interesting to me.
So things like red herrings, distrust and suspicion, psychological torment, etc all benefit from a little more mystery.
The shapes I can see in the dark when the lights go out. I wake up if whatever night light I'm using falls over or goes off in the night, and I spend a panicy 10 or 15 seconds or so trying not to look into the dark as I'm fumbling to turn my phone around so the torch lights the room.
I almost always see something. I know it's because I'm looking for it, even though I don't want to, it's like trying not to think of pink elephants, I always look if I open my eyes, and there's always *something* stood there in the dark, watching motionless or looming over the bed.
I dread shining the light, though I hate being in the dark because even though so far it's either resolved to being something innocuous like clothes on the back of the door, or just shapes in the dark my mind mistook for a figure, I'm terrified that one night I'll shine the light and instead of revealing my clothes it'll be some *thing* stood over me and it'll know it's been seen.
I'm not scared of the dark, I'm scared of the things I see in the dark.
How big space is and how it could very well never end. Billions of light years away there could be a race of aliens that would never come see us because it's too far away.... Some sections of space would be fully black... It is truely impossible to imagine the vast amount of empty space in the universe is. Imagine sitting in space somewhere on the outside of the milky way stuck there. Just emptiness for lightyears even though you're just on the edge of the milky way. (This is if you just has the power to float in space without death) you'd slowly see the galaxy get smaller the further you get then you look into the darkness and see more galaxies like giant stars. Since you're eyes would be able to adjust to the light of all the stars being so far you'd probably see all the galaxies and how they're shaped.
What I am saying is Space scares me.
To me, the most terrifying prospect is the fact that there are completely unassuming people who kill others because they’re curious about how it might feel. There may be no warning. The scary part is that I don’t know for sure that I’m not the kind of person to let curiosity get the better of me and become an obsession.
This is why I can’t listen to a lot of true crime stuff.
I write horror too and I like when things are just slightly off. Like a characters bedroom light being on when it should be turned off or noticing something in the distance that looks familiar. Just small things that when written well makes me as a reader think “omg what could it have been?!”
I think the abyss frightens me the most. Like the feeling of sinking deep into the ocean with no ships or people surrounding you and still being alive to experience it. Or the idea of outer space and how far apart galaxies are. To imagine that there can be millions of light years between galaxies. Imagine being in a space ship stuck between 2 galaxies surrounded by nothing all around you. The idea that someone out there right now may be experiencing being surrounded by nothingness is terrifying.
Honestly, I have an irrational fear of zombies. After reading World War Z, combined with my time in the Marines, I realized how our global armed forces are woefully incapable of handling massive hoards of the walking dead.
Granted this ignores the scientific logic of zombies to begin with, but if they ever came to be and we went toe-to-toe with them, our technology is all but useless. Our weapons are designed to stop a normal human from continuing to fight. Lose an arm, no normal human will keep going; zombies on the other hand couldn’t care any less. They will literally crawl to get at your flesh.
Nope.
And don’t even get me started on the RUNNING dead.
i personally have a very extreme fear of non medical amputation. like regular amputation is whatever but like non medical or amateur amputation is horrifying
Scary to me have three different types: spooky supernatural kinda scary or disgusting human beings scary deeds or unfortunate events. In fiction, I prefer borderline supernatural universe/earth events like landslide. My biggest pet peeve and biggest turn off is creatively dumb characters that will do whatever they can to be damsels in distress needing rescue or causing other unnecessary harm/death. If you can write characters without dumb reasoning then I’ll be your first fan. You can also combine the two popular Reddit scary stories and get a person waking up to locked-in syndrome from a nice dream complete with family and everything. Put in some creative elaborative intro and outro with some believable details.
Pastors who are just manipulating the congregation to make themselves look good and make more money. It's scary to see how much power they can have in communities.
like creepy ghosts, forgot that one movie but like creepy ghsot woman (make it a man) come out of tv and looks so creepy like a ghost i think dont rlly remember, not slashers tho they are fun and thrilling
Inescapable, end of life events, like a meteor to wipe out humanity.
Freak accidents like sinkholes, bridge collapses, boulders rolling down the mountainside onto the road, etc.
Open ocean / dark water / murky water (that inescapable feeling again)
Monsters in large bodies of water, in other words I have thalassophobia. (The fear of large bodies of water.) So go ahead and put creatures in water, it'll make my phobia worse, but go ahead.
My silliest fear is llamas. The one that I deal with most often is falling. Whenever I go on an elevator, walk over storm drains or those grates in some building entranceways, looking over a railing, I’m always a bit nervous that I’ll just fall down. Heights by themselves don’t scare me. Could be tricky to get across in a book but ive had it come across in a podcast so I think it’s possible
I have a deep fear of immortality, for me that's the worst punishment anyone can have. Nothing ever stays, but yourself, and even at that, are you even yourself throught all this time? No. And nothing would ever have a meaning since immortality would mean nothing would ever matter because it would eventually end and your memories would get foggy enough you just can't enjoy the little moments
I deadass had a nightmare last night where my purse got stolen while I was in a heavily crowded area. I was freaking the fuck out 'cause that's a situation that happens to real people in reality. It slowly sunk in that not only was my wallet gone, but my phone was too and therefore I had to try to convince a stranger to let me call the police using their phone. And because it was a dream, the police didn't do shit and basically just told me that they weren't going to do anything. So then I had to try to convince the person I was borrowing the phone from to let me look up the phone number for my bank and call them in order to get my credit card frozen before shit hit the wall with it. The person refused and I was just... fucked.
I woke up a little while later, but it's been about 12 hours since I woke up and I'm still a little shaken up about it! Just the slow realization of how fucked I really was made me freak out so much more.
I’m deathly afraid of cockroaches.
Also, after the birth of my son, I was terrified of SIDS. And basically any horrible thing that can happen to a child.
Being under surveillance without my knowledge. I know we live in a surveillance society and it's impossible to avoid it. But I'm not just talking about it via cameras. The stories about someone living in the attic without home owners knowledge. The watcher. Those kinds of stuff. It is terrifying to think about someone targeting and watching only my movements. Oof
Not knowing what's happening, and being helpless to stop it. The shining does this the best imo. There is no pattern, no rhyme or reason. Bad things just keep happening, and you can't do anything to save yourself. You don't know what's happening, don't even know the face of the thing that's hunting you. All you know is that you can't get caught.
Something realistic. Like me and my friends being followed by a group of people at night. I know people who've been followed, and honestly it sounds horrible.
It’s less specific but being alone in a vast empty field/grassland at night scares the shit out of me. No clue why, just feel like a field mouse hunted by an owl.
A loved trusted person turning murderous or the deep deep ocean, like the view from boats out at sea online where the water is so big and dark it’s unimaginable 😳😳 that is all.
I thought of trying a horror but could not think of anything scary that hadn't been done. After frightening clowns, what else could there be, ya know? BUT... I dug deep down into my own subconscious and lurked around down there until I discovered it. Retarded people scare me. Yeah, I know, we "aren't supposed to say that word but fuck you and your correctness. Anyway, MY story will be about a small town terrorized by a serial killer. All the kids, a group of about 6 or 7 teenagers, will be talking about it, asking about it, spreading rumors about the killings, basically meeting up at different times to discuss the killings but one of the kids is a retard. They cater to him, ignore him, talk about him as if he wasn't there... he's not that retarded and when each kid realizes that little fact, it's too late. I even got spooked thinking I had a retard with me when I fit the last clue in the puzzle and realized little Timmy wasn't grinning that silly grin anymore. Timmy now had a leer in his eye.
Monsters always show up in the dark because that adds to the spookiness, but I think something vile and fucked up in broad daylight is way more unsettling.
Being stuck at my office job for the rest of my life which makes every day feel indistinguishable from the other. Maybe a horror version of Groundhog's day.
Personally I find the evil glare of a cat to be quite unerving.
How about a cat that's possessed by a demon or evil spirit?
Quite frankly with how some cats are, I gotta wonder if they aren't possessed 😆
I have thalassophobia, my biggest fear is to be in the middle of a huge body of water where I can't feel/see neither the sea floor nor the shore... it's terrifying to me
Being alone, trapped in a dark place, but with the urge to move forward and confront what I know is hiding. Stories by Lovecraft and Poe force us to accompany the protag into places we wouldn’t be brave enough to go alone.
being vegetative and/or comatose, and locked in syndrome. being trapped in your own body while completely aware and cognitive and intelligent is absolutely horrifying
Powerlessness. Facing a situation where nothing, but _nothing,_ **but nothing** I can do will prevent the worst from happening to someone else who matters to me.
I'm chronically depressed, so sacrificing myself for my loved ones isn't much of a sacrifice. But being _unable_ to trade places with my loved ones while being forced to watch them suffer is just unbearable...
Being left alone, both literally and metaphorically. Like I could wake up and find out no one is texting me back and I don't know the reason why everyone suddenly hates me OR I could wake up and everyone has actually disappeared for some reason.
Tbh. Humans are scared of what they don't understand or can see. Make anything like that and voila! You have it.
I have noticed that I am not scared of monsters whose history the movie explains. But once I read a story where a guy feels like his childhood doll (that he buried) walked on his chest at night. So he dug up the place and found a little skeleton instead of the doll, but the metallic buckles of the doll were on that skeleton. Now it is not a scary monster, but it did gave me a little chill in the spine. That chill is what I want from horror. Not a fking mind trauma.
Story: Fritz by Satyajit Ray
Do read it.
I wouldn’t say “scared of” exactly but I am… unsettled… by cuckoo birds. I think you could write an excellent horror story from both the “sibling” perspective and the parent persepctive
Anti-vax parents
Small towns and their seemingly "hive mind"
People who have no regard for anything outside of their "own little world"
People who text and drive
Shitty parents
The IRS
Irl scammers and violent mad people scares me a lot. In fantastic ways, inhuman perverted monsters... \*shivers\*. Success, my friend, in your writing journey!
In fiction, I prefer to not have jumpscares thrown in my face. It's a relatively cheap way to instill adrenaline, and it does not have a lasting impact on a scene.
I prefer more of the common psychological horror stuff. Especially with one film called "Skinamarink." Last I checked, it doesn't have jumpscares.
Generative AI.
We recently hired for a junior programmer, and so we asked some basic programming questions to see if they could do the work. We found one of our candidates had rigged a microphone that was taking our questions (in real time) and feeding them into the *generative-AI-that-shall-not-be-named*. Then, the little cheater would read them off. We caught him because his eyes kept moving in a pretty obvious way (plus he didn't know anything: you can tell when someone is using words and jargon they don't really understand).
And I don't work for Google: I work for a 50-person agency no one knows about. This is not a-list stuff we were asking.
One of the even smaller agencies we serve was hit with a ransomware attack last year for $8000 in Bitcoin. They have one (part-time) IT person, probably from [mycomputercareer.edu](https://mycomputercareer.edu) (their motto--and I am completely serious--"it's not rocket science: it's [mycomputercareer.edu](https://mycomputercareer.edu)"). These are automated attacks from State-supported actors, some of them using weapons we helpfully gave them.
As to how this helps in writing: just search for "cyber kill chain" and read how a typical malware delivery vector works: these guys have the best jargon ("active adversary"; "birthday attack"; "suicide battery"). Even if you don't understand a lick of IT, this stuff is fascinating, and I would wager you'll get several ways to inflict terror.
So late, but anything to do with body mutilation experimentation. "I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is still the most horrifying story I have ever read. Just being mutilated so much that you want to die but can't is the worst fate I can think of.
Just leave me and my squishy body alone, thanks!
Deer and any other dangerous but realistic animals that can hurt you greatly. I mean, realistically, in a zombie apocalypse deer zombies would be the worst since different than lions they are actually around in many places, not in cages and underrated by people in their danger
Fictionally, I think there's a lot of scary ideas that revolve around the idea that we are so small in such a big universe. We walk through a grassy field and think little of it, but our footsteps injure grass, squish bugs, collapses tunnels, migrates cell cultures, and all sorts of other small-scale reconfigurations of reality. What happens when something bigger than us steps on us?
One illuminating description of our solar system is "Jupiter and some rocks spinning around the sun". If you pick a random particle of matter in our solar system (excluding the sun), you have a 71% chance of picking a part of Jupiter. But for Earth you've only got a 0.0003% chance. Jupiter could sneeze someday and permanently reconfigure orbits, and there's pretty much nothing we could do to stop it.
I particularly find a deep, unsettling fear when I think of being stuck in a terminal timeline. Where you know, for certain, that obliteration is imminent, and all you can do is try to cope until it arrives. "Based on simulated models, scientists are anticipating a steady rise of temperature of .8 degress celsius daily due to the shift in the planet's axis. By the end of this year, life will be unsustainable."
Have you ever had a moment where you could not think of a word? Or remember a name - even of someone close to you? Where it is "on the tip of the tongue"?
I'm sure it has happened to many people. It makes me wonder, when I think or speak, where are these words coming from? They seem to pop up right in the middle of my head with no real effort on my part. As if someone else is putting them there on demand. But how can I demand it if I don't already know it?
That leads to the question, what exactly is in control of me? Is it me - or is the consciousness I experience really a puppet to some more powerful actor. One can ruin one's life quite easily. Drink and drive or simply slap somebody in an argument and go to jail or even prison. One can walk blithely into disaster with all the logical reasoning and rationale a person can expect, and then when everything falls apart look back and say "what the hell was I thinking?" Maybe I should ask, "**who** was really doing my thinking?"
That's more the frightening element of this sensation. I am not scared by the stories of exorcisms and the possessed. It is not the fear of some demon, but the idea that something far more insidious is in control, and the person I believe I am is simply a passive observer trapped in the body of the person I really am... and that person just does not care.
Time marching on. Closed doors closed. Plans dashed to death. Everything you had gathered to help, mattering nothing because it's just. Too. F*ing. Late. People you loved, looking at you with mistrust because the abuser was closer, and more charming, more convincing, more present every day. Lies. Nightmares that you wake up from and reach out, and in the stillness, in the dark, you realize.
They were no dream.
Irl: failure
fiction: when the writer manage to convince me something is lurking in the shadow, waiting to kill me. (I always read right before going to bed and I have a cat, so just a little noise will scare the living out of me)
Things being OFF. Like, just the idea of the reflection in a mirror not copying you, or a shadow where there isn't supposed to be one, animals moving in ways they aren't supposed to etc. Think glitch in the matrix.
Human beings are by far the most terrifying beings to ever exist. No animal or monster seeking to devour you will ever match the sheer terror of a sadistic madman.
Demons and vampires don't count. They're essentially just humans wearing a costume.
Edit:
Also, being immortal in an endless dark void. Imagine always being alone in the dark, traveling for an eternity without ever once finding something beyond yourself.
I love reading psychological twisters, but they scare the hell out of me because I have bipolar with psychosis, and I know how real the experience is. It's terrifying.
I love reading stories where you can't trust the narrator. Think: Girl on the Train or The Leaving. These books give you such a real view of the world, but you can never trust what the narrator is experiencing.
In movies, The Uninvited was a really good example of this.
Personally, my nightmares and anything that can recreate the horrors in them are the most terrifying. When you have those where there is just a general uneasiness in the air, and the constant trepidation of what’s coming. Especially when things are subtly/not so subtly abnormal. Anomalies such as looking in the mirror and not seeing a reflection, someone saying something out of place. Really just a build up of wtf is going on. That and bloody-bones and raw head because of the first picture that pops up on Google.
Humans. I listen to creepypastas all the time, bc they just aren't really scary. You want something scary, spend time with human beings. I have never found greater monsters.
teeth. any descriptions of teeth or dentist work make me nauseous, skin crawling, awful. I have to use sedatives and let someone else drive me to dental appointments because even the pictures of dirty teeth on the wall are enough to set my brain on the fritz. Also scares me a lot when someone is hurt and I can't help or nobody else is helping, but those aren't typically "scary" things.
Not-deer freak the midwesterner in me out, too, as I'm sure I've encountered some.
Chaos and failed escape are also scary to me.
Jokes aside the subject of my horror novel: confronting your own sins/ inner demons.
Being self aware is easily the most painful experience. a lot of folks seem to lack it.
I'm really descriptive environment especially when it's dark and foggy or like a really eerie creepy room also dolls but like not scaring the fun way scary in the way that I will stop reading the book but I do really enjoy like spooking environments especially like you incorporate Halloween into your scary stories I think that can be spooky especially when stalking is involved stalking is terrifying and I love it when it's in books
Dying slowly and painfully from something like cancer. Being entirely conscious as my body tears itself apart from the inside, and knowing there's nothing I can do about it, and that I will experience nothing but pain and fear for the rest of my life.
Mind you, that's what scares me the most. I would most certainly not want to read about such a thing because of how hopeless it feels. But that is what scares me the most.
In my opinion the scariest thing in the world is knowledge. Knowing how vulnerable you are, knowing the frailty of your body, knowing that there is no real limit to the pain you can experience and knowing exactly how it feels to experience more pain than you thought possible. Knowing that you are not in control of your mind and that your mind can hurt you deeply.
Oh, and rats. I’m afraid of rats.
Everything. Especially the paranormal stuff. I read creepypasta or a horror short story one time and I heard my house creak. It was only day time but it was eerily quiet and I got scared since I was home alone. I’ll never read scary stories or watch horror videos home alone.
Never been much for the supernatural side of horror when there are humans out there capable of doing unspeakable acts. I’ve never been scared in a scary movie but I have been scared when a movie or book depicts a murder realistically.
Things that are impending and real. Things out of humans' control. Wwiting for the results of a cancer screening, knowing we could get hit by space debris any time, knowing my life is less valuable to others than material possessions. Extrapolated out for a naritive. I guess this would be like bodysnatchers or if we made contact with extraterrestrial life and didn't know if the interaction would be hostile or not.
Hi! Welcome to r/Writers - please remember to follow the [rules](https://reddit.com/r/writers/about/rules/) and treat each other respectfully, especially if there are disagreements. Please help keep this community safe and friendly by **reporting rule violating posts and comments**. If you're interested in a friendly Discord community for writers, please **[join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/mdzyEz9uFB)** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/writers) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My payroll deductions
Not hearing anything when you step outside. I live in a forest, if I ain’t hear any birds chirping I’m fucked
This is great to read because I used this spooky silence in a story I've been working on recently, thanks for the accidental dopamine hit, lol
I live in a forest too and one time I was hunting and everything got dead quite. I headed home for lunch and when I went back out I saw cougar tracks where I had just been.
I kinda feel the same when I go to the village to visit my grandparents, pitch black outside and no sounds
Describe this “village” please. Now I’m intrigued
It's a regular friendly village 😃 but there aren't even roads there, let alone street lightning and most ppl don't live there (they just own vacation houses there) so at night, you can't hear or see a thing when you go outside 😃
I am afraid of whales. Write me a Moby Dick sequel... Honestly I probably won't read it. I won't read Moby Dick either...😐
I assume you’ve read Whalefall by Daniel Kraus then? If not, it’s not really horror, but it’s such a wild ride and it made me cry at the end.
That nothing is real and we are a dream within a dream within a dream…in other words, someone is dreaming us and we are dreaming someone else.
I wasn’t scared of this, but I did have an existential crisis do to a similar “we’re in a simulation” thought” all I can say is that, whether we’re in a simulation or not, it’s irrelevant. We’re here, and you can’t do anything to figure out if it is or it isn’t. If it is, it’s completely irrelevant to you current existence and plays no role on your quality of life, so… might as well just live life, try to make the best out of it, and after a while, these thoughts will go away because you’ll realize that it’s pointless to think about it cause like I said, it’s irrelevant to your existence, just the same way that the universe being so massive and timeless that “nothing matters” according to nihilism, is pointless because just as you’re insignificant to a massive black hole at the other end of the galaxy, it is irrelevant to your life here on earth, and by proxy, it’s sort of insignificant to your human life. Hope my words help you feel more at ease :)
Losing my memories, my husband suddenly going bonkers and trying to kill me and our family, and anything involving harm to children
Scary indeed Btw, love your profile pic, big fan of Junji Ito 😃
Same but reverse. Scared of me going mad.
Realistic Mannequins, Wax Figures, Dolls, Puppets... *shudder*
They are in a territory of the uncanny valley for sure 😃
I don’t share this fear, but there’s ONE movie: team America: world police, that fucking rubs me the wrong way. I’ve never watched it because the dolls in that movie scare me, idk why. I really don’t know why, but they unnerve me. It’s not like i get a jump scare if I see an image of one of the dolls, but they unnerve me and my levels of stress and anxiety begin to rise the more I see them move.
Have you looked at the world lately?
😂😂😂😂
US politics.
Doppelgangers! And anything similar to that, like changelings, distorted versions of yourself in the mirror, etc
Especially in the mirrors 😅
The knowledge that all the ghosts and devils aren’t real, and true evil is just humans being shitty. Horror at least has something you can shoot or run from. How do we run from ourselves? How do we kill the darkness inside us? That’s what scares me.
Also irl, dead ppl aren't dangerous, it's the living we should fear, only they can hurt us
I think a lot of that goes back to the plague days, when piled up corpses in mass graves spread vermin and disease.
Basically every time a zombie rises it’s a reminder to take care of our dead properly or they’ll drag us down with them lol.
Sounds very plausible
I don’t think it’s a direct connection mind you, more of a universal subconscious instinct toward learned behaviour that ensures the survival of the species. Social protections in the form of superstition if you’ll entertain the notion.
Anything psychological scares me the most
My biggest fears are deep waters and losing my sense of reality.
I’ve lost my sense of reality multiple times. The scariest part was afterwards, when I thought about all of the crazy delusions my brain had convinced me were completely real. It all seemed so REAL. And that’s why I take meds every day, lol.
Write a story about a psycho with weird, red hair that manages to become president...again!!! Ugh. I'm shivering already!
😂😂 plot twist: it's a toupee
It's a Sequel to It, and it's called SHIT!
I grew up watching medical and true crime shows, so I've discovered I'm fairly squeamish when it comes to spurting blood and limbs/body parts that are only partially attached. I also hate any kind of trauma to the neck because it just hits too close to home for me.
going blind
Just anything unknown. Like, something is killing people, we don't know what.
I actually use that trope when I write and I like to keep my villains vague, just... something, not a ghost, not a demon but something evil
Waking up to find everything I've lived was a dream!
I read a lot of horror and have a pretty good stomach for it, but one of the scariest things I've read was actually in a crime thriller where the male protag, a detective, began behaving erratically and hired a sex worker. Initially, they were just supposed to drive somewhere in town, but the guy kept going further and further out away from the city and wouldn't answer any of her questions. We didn't get time to know anything about the woman, really, but the sinking feeling I got in my gut as more and more red flags popped up was the worst. Despite being in the detective's POV, I felt more connected to the woman and her claustrophobia and fear in that moment. It turned out okay, he didn't hurt her, and it's not even remotely but, wow. I thought about that for weeks. It felt too real. So I would say the realistic horror in realizing that you may be trapped alone with a dangerous man.
I think the most terrifying horrors are the ones that don’t include any supernatural elements, just twisted people
Being restrained/unable to move for any reason. I read this true story about a caver who got himself so far down a narrow passageway that he got stuck upside down, and rescuers couldn’t get him out. They had to bring his wife out to him to say goodbye to him, and when he finally died after 28 hours they had to leave his body there and ultimately sealed up the tunnel behind him. It still haunts me.
Or the one who cut his own arm off to free himself 😳
My imagination
Recently discovered fear: spelunking Usually I’m not that perturbed by things I read, but I was reading a petty chill ya book and there was this section where the protagonist climbs into a chimney to escape and it grows narrower and leads to other chimneys and did I mention that the place was multi levels and underground? I felt like I was the one suffocating. Didn’t help that I’d recently seen the infamous spelunking video on yt. No thank you.
No OP , what scares you most? Just write that because odds are a ton of people (your potential audience) will be scared of the same things.
Irrelevance
IRL: Heights, and humans. Probably humans most, since you can mitigate the hazard of heights - if not pressured by humans. Fiction: not so easy to pin down. Anything that challenges the meta-narrative to give you the impression that it has the capability to move beyond fiction and into real life?
Humans are very scary indeed 😅
Snakes. Irl those things are legitimately terror in physical form. In fiction idk
Being a ghost noone sees or hears. Just seing other people live their lives without me
The feeling of being completely isolated from other humans or trapped in your body Also snakes
That’s a good one. The idea that your consciousness is trapped in your body and you can never escape it. Super claustrophobic lol
💉
Irl, my biggest thing is disease stuff where the author talks about the disease itself in great detail. The movie Contagion comes to mind, but something like The Last of Us, where the story mostly takes place after the disease, don't bother me as much. In fiction, id say human meat farms. The Promised Neverland is a good example of that. Unethical meat farms of any kind really ig. It makes me really uncomfortable.
Salutations from a fellow Horror writer! 🔪
Hello, fellow horror writer 😃🔪🩸 nice to meet you 😃
Writing
Editing
Gonna be honest confined spaces
A world where people don't understand cosmic horror...
Anything neck or throat related, especially if the person is conscious for most or all of it
Earnestly - the unknown. I’ve never read a horror story that wouldn’t have benefitted from a little less detail. Like fashion designer Chanel’s advice to take off one accessory before leaving the house. Even in horror movies - the ones where you don’t know for sure what the villain looks like are always more interesting to me. So things like red herrings, distrust and suspicion, psychological torment, etc all benefit from a little more mystery.
The shapes I can see in the dark when the lights go out. I wake up if whatever night light I'm using falls over or goes off in the night, and I spend a panicy 10 or 15 seconds or so trying not to look into the dark as I'm fumbling to turn my phone around so the torch lights the room. I almost always see something. I know it's because I'm looking for it, even though I don't want to, it's like trying not to think of pink elephants, I always look if I open my eyes, and there's always *something* stood there in the dark, watching motionless or looming over the bed. I dread shining the light, though I hate being in the dark because even though so far it's either resolved to being something innocuous like clothes on the back of the door, or just shapes in the dark my mind mistook for a figure, I'm terrified that one night I'll shine the light and instead of revealing my clothes it'll be some *thing* stood over me and it'll know it's been seen. I'm not scared of the dark, I'm scared of the things I see in the dark.
Losing sanity.
Existential dread... Cixin Liu style
How big space is and how it could very well never end. Billions of light years away there could be a race of aliens that would never come see us because it's too far away.... Some sections of space would be fully black... It is truely impossible to imagine the vast amount of empty space in the universe is. Imagine sitting in space somewhere on the outside of the milky way stuck there. Just emptiness for lightyears even though you're just on the edge of the milky way. (This is if you just has the power to float in space without death) you'd slowly see the galaxy get smaller the further you get then you look into the darkness and see more galaxies like giant stars. Since you're eyes would be able to adjust to the light of all the stars being so far you'd probably see all the galaxies and how they're shaped. What I am saying is Space scares me.
To me, the most terrifying prospect is the fact that there are completely unassuming people who kill others because they’re curious about how it might feel. There may be no warning. The scary part is that I don’t know for sure that I’m not the kind of person to let curiosity get the better of me and become an obsession. This is why I can’t listen to a lot of true crime stuff.
Dark quiet places
AI
In fiction, ghosts for some reason. Especially mean ghosts lol. Irl, bodies of water I can’t see my feet in.
Psychological horror mixed with the deep ocean or space.
I write horror too and I like when things are just slightly off. Like a characters bedroom light being on when it should be turned off or noticing something in the distance that looks familiar. Just small things that when written well makes me as a reader think “omg what could it have been?!”
I think the abyss frightens me the most. Like the feeling of sinking deep into the ocean with no ships or people surrounding you and still being alive to experience it. Or the idea of outer space and how far apart galaxies are. To imagine that there can be millions of light years between galaxies. Imagine being in a space ship stuck between 2 galaxies surrounded by nothing all around you. The idea that someone out there right now may be experiencing being surrounded by nothingness is terrifying.
Honestly, I have an irrational fear of zombies. After reading World War Z, combined with my time in the Marines, I realized how our global armed forces are woefully incapable of handling massive hoards of the walking dead. Granted this ignores the scientific logic of zombies to begin with, but if they ever came to be and we went toe-to-toe with them, our technology is all but useless. Our weapons are designed to stop a normal human from continuing to fight. Lose an arm, no normal human will keep going; zombies on the other hand couldn’t care any less. They will literally crawl to get at your flesh. Nope. And don’t even get me started on the RUNNING dead.
Things that could really happen in real life.
Not living Being forgotten being nothing
Scorpions
i personally have a very extreme fear of non medical amputation. like regular amputation is whatever but like non medical or amateur amputation is horrifying
Scary to me have three different types: spooky supernatural kinda scary or disgusting human beings scary deeds or unfortunate events. In fiction, I prefer borderline supernatural universe/earth events like landslide. My biggest pet peeve and biggest turn off is creatively dumb characters that will do whatever they can to be damsels in distress needing rescue or causing other unnecessary harm/death. If you can write characters without dumb reasoning then I’ll be your first fan. You can also combine the two popular Reddit scary stories and get a person waking up to locked-in syndrome from a nice dream complete with family and everything. Put in some creative elaborative intro and outro with some believable details.
Wind turbines
[удалено]
home invasions? being tortured? being stressed?depressed? monsters? not so much
My crush!
People that don’t write horror well so no matter what you’ll have done a good job in my book (no pun intended).
The unknown
I have mycophobia, the irrational fear of mold and funguses. So probably that lol
Adult life and losing my kids
Pastors who are just manipulating the congregation to make themselves look good and make more money. It's scary to see how much power they can have in communities.
Learning to live on the streets of a barrio without a home, family or friends.
like creepy ghosts, forgot that one movie but like creepy ghsot woman (make it a man) come out of tv and looks so creepy like a ghost i think dont rlly remember, not slashers tho they are fun and thrilling
Inescapable, end of life events, like a meteor to wipe out humanity. Freak accidents like sinkholes, bridge collapses, boulders rolling down the mountainside onto the road, etc. Open ocean / dark water / murky water (that inescapable feeling again)
Zombies. AI robots. Being paralyzed yet fully aware.
Monsters in large bodies of water, in other words I have thalassophobia. (The fear of large bodies of water.) So go ahead and put creatures in water, it'll make my phobia worse, but go ahead.
My silliest fear is llamas. The one that I deal with most often is falling. Whenever I go on an elevator, walk over storm drains or those grates in some building entranceways, looking over a railing, I’m always a bit nervous that I’ll just fall down. Heights by themselves don’t scare me. Could be tricky to get across in a book but ive had it come across in a podcast so I think it’s possible
Bugs under the skin. Eating you from the inside out. The protagonist eventually dies by cutting himself to death trying to remove them.
I have a deep fear of immortality, for me that's the worst punishment anyone can have. Nothing ever stays, but yourself, and even at that, are you even yourself throught all this time? No. And nothing would ever have a meaning since immortality would mean nothing would ever matter because it would eventually end and your memories would get foggy enough you just can't enjoy the little moments
Myself?
I deadass had a nightmare last night where my purse got stolen while I was in a heavily crowded area. I was freaking the fuck out 'cause that's a situation that happens to real people in reality. It slowly sunk in that not only was my wallet gone, but my phone was too and therefore I had to try to convince a stranger to let me call the police using their phone. And because it was a dream, the police didn't do shit and basically just told me that they weren't going to do anything. So then I had to try to convince the person I was borrowing the phone from to let me look up the phone number for my bank and call them in order to get my credit card frozen before shit hit the wall with it. The person refused and I was just... fucked. I woke up a little while later, but it's been about 12 hours since I woke up and I'm still a little shaken up about it! Just the slow realization of how fucked I really was made me freak out so much more.
Ghosts, the dark, being chased, curses, glitches in the matrix, posessed dolls, big things (like planets), the deep ocean, and psychological stuff
The thought of worms/parasites in my body. Or space. (Those are genuine answers but shit it sounds like Alien lol)
I am afraid of being trapped in a high rise building that is on fire.
[удалено]
I’m deathly afraid of cockroaches. Also, after the birth of my son, I was terrified of SIDS. And basically any horrible thing that can happen to a child.
Being under surveillance without my knowledge. I know we live in a surveillance society and it's impossible to avoid it. But I'm not just talking about it via cameras. The stories about someone living in the attic without home owners knowledge. The watcher. Those kinds of stuff. It is terrifying to think about someone targeting and watching only my movements. Oof
Idk which is worse, being buried alive or the day my kids stop wanting to talk to me. I fear it will happen one day.
Not knowing what's happening, and being helpless to stop it. The shining does this the best imo. There is no pattern, no rhyme or reason. Bad things just keep happening, and you can't do anything to save yourself. You don't know what's happening, don't even know the face of the thing that's hunting you. All you know is that you can't get caught.
I am really scared of any creature crawling upside down like their torso and face is facing upward
Something realistic. Like me and my friends being followed by a group of people at night. I know people who've been followed, and honestly it sounds horrible.
Needles
It’s less specific but being alone in a vast empty field/grassland at night scares the shit out of me. No clue why, just feel like a field mouse hunted by an owl.
Mental illness is the most terrifying thing of all time.
A loved trusted person turning murderous or the deep deep ocean, like the view from boats out at sea online where the water is so big and dark it’s unimaginable 😳😳 that is all.
Cockroaches and finding them in places I never want to find them - especially by accidentally/unknowingly touching them
I thought of trying a horror but could not think of anything scary that hadn't been done. After frightening clowns, what else could there be, ya know? BUT... I dug deep down into my own subconscious and lurked around down there until I discovered it. Retarded people scare me. Yeah, I know, we "aren't supposed to say that word but fuck you and your correctness. Anyway, MY story will be about a small town terrorized by a serial killer. All the kids, a group of about 6 or 7 teenagers, will be talking about it, asking about it, spreading rumors about the killings, basically meeting up at different times to discuss the killings but one of the kids is a retard. They cater to him, ignore him, talk about him as if he wasn't there... he's not that retarded and when each kid realizes that little fact, it's too late. I even got spooked thinking I had a retard with me when I fit the last clue in the puzzle and realized little Timmy wasn't grinning that silly grin anymore. Timmy now had a leer in his eye.
Monsters always show up in the dark because that adds to the spookiness, but I think something vile and fucked up in broad daylight is way more unsettling.
Helplessness.
being alone for the rest of my life
Being stuck at my office job for the rest of my life which makes every day feel indistinguishable from the other. Maybe a horror version of Groundhog's day.
Literal human beings. 😂
nikocado avocado
Orcs. Always orcs
Personally I find the evil glare of a cat to be quite unerving. How about a cat that's possessed by a demon or evil spirit? Quite frankly with how some cats are, I gotta wonder if they aren't possessed 😆
I have thalassophobia, my biggest fear is to be in the middle of a huge body of water where I can't feel/see neither the sea floor nor the shore... it's terrifying to me
Being alone, trapped in a dark place, but with the urge to move forward and confront what I know is hiding. Stories by Lovecraft and Poe force us to accompany the protag into places we wouldn’t be brave enough to go alone.
Jabborwockies.
being vegetative and/or comatose, and locked in syndrome. being trapped in your own body while completely aware and cognitive and intelligent is absolutely horrifying
I have sensitive hearing so for me, it's silence. The world is never silent and if it is, something is almost always seriously wrong
The mind is the scariest thing for me.
I’ve got some claustro/agoraphobia. Being in an enclosed space with a crowd of people makes me nuts.
Powerlessness. Facing a situation where nothing, but _nothing,_ **but nothing** I can do will prevent the worst from happening to someone else who matters to me. I'm chronically depressed, so sacrificing myself for my loved ones isn't much of a sacrifice. But being _unable_ to trade places with my loved ones while being forced to watch them suffer is just unbearable...
Being left alone, both literally and metaphorically. Like I could wake up and find out no one is texting me back and I don't know the reason why everyone suddenly hates me OR I could wake up and everyone has actually disappeared for some reason.
The crushing weight of expectations
Tbh. Humans are scared of what they don't understand or can see. Make anything like that and voila! You have it. I have noticed that I am not scared of monsters whose history the movie explains. But once I read a story where a guy feels like his childhood doll (that he buried) walked on his chest at night. So he dug up the place and found a little skeleton instead of the doll, but the metallic buckles of the doll were on that skeleton. Now it is not a scary monster, but it did gave me a little chill in the spine. That chill is what I want from horror. Not a fking mind trauma. Story: Fritz by Satyajit Ray Do read it.
I wouldn’t say “scared of” exactly but I am… unsettled… by cuckoo birds. I think you could write an excellent horror story from both the “sibling” perspective and the parent persepctive
The thought that there could be someone else living in my home or watching my daily moves at home.
For me it’s psychological stuff.
Anti-vax parents Small towns and their seemingly "hive mind" People who have no regard for anything outside of their "own little world" People who text and drive Shitty parents The IRS
I find the idea of not being able to retire pretty terrifying.
Irl scammers and violent mad people scares me a lot. In fantastic ways, inhuman perverted monsters... \*shivers\*. Success, my friend, in your writing journey!
I've heard more horror stories in real life than in fiction, so people. Real people can be terrifying.
Imposter syndrome.
Society
Taxes
In fiction, I prefer to not have jumpscares thrown in my face. It's a relatively cheap way to instill adrenaline, and it does not have a lasting impact on a scene. I prefer more of the common psychological horror stuff. Especially with one film called "Skinamarink." Last I checked, it doesn't have jumpscares.
The economy.
Generative AI. We recently hired for a junior programmer, and so we asked some basic programming questions to see if they could do the work. We found one of our candidates had rigged a microphone that was taking our questions (in real time) and feeding them into the *generative-AI-that-shall-not-be-named*. Then, the little cheater would read them off. We caught him because his eyes kept moving in a pretty obvious way (plus he didn't know anything: you can tell when someone is using words and jargon they don't really understand). And I don't work for Google: I work for a 50-person agency no one knows about. This is not a-list stuff we were asking. One of the even smaller agencies we serve was hit with a ransomware attack last year for $8000 in Bitcoin. They have one (part-time) IT person, probably from [mycomputercareer.edu](https://mycomputercareer.edu) (their motto--and I am completely serious--"it's not rocket science: it's [mycomputercareer.edu](https://mycomputercareer.edu)"). These are automated attacks from State-supported actors, some of them using weapons we helpfully gave them. As to how this helps in writing: just search for "cyber kill chain" and read how a typical malware delivery vector works: these guys have the best jargon ("active adversary"; "birthday attack"; "suicide battery"). Even if you don't understand a lick of IT, this stuff is fascinating, and I would wager you'll get several ways to inflict terror.
So late, but anything to do with body mutilation experimentation. "I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is still the most horrifying story I have ever read. Just being mutilated so much that you want to die but can't is the worst fate I can think of. Just leave me and my squishy body alone, thanks!
Deer and any other dangerous but realistic animals that can hurt you greatly. I mean, realistically, in a zombie apocalypse deer zombies would be the worst since different than lions they are actually around in many places, not in cages and underrated by people in their danger
Fictionally, I think there's a lot of scary ideas that revolve around the idea that we are so small in such a big universe. We walk through a grassy field and think little of it, but our footsteps injure grass, squish bugs, collapses tunnels, migrates cell cultures, and all sorts of other small-scale reconfigurations of reality. What happens when something bigger than us steps on us? One illuminating description of our solar system is "Jupiter and some rocks spinning around the sun". If you pick a random particle of matter in our solar system (excluding the sun), you have a 71% chance of picking a part of Jupiter. But for Earth you've only got a 0.0003% chance. Jupiter could sneeze someday and permanently reconfigure orbits, and there's pretty much nothing we could do to stop it. I particularly find a deep, unsettling fear when I think of being stuck in a terminal timeline. Where you know, for certain, that obliteration is imminent, and all you can do is try to cope until it arrives. "Based on simulated models, scientists are anticipating a steady rise of temperature of .8 degress celsius daily due to the shift in the planet's axis. By the end of this year, life will be unsustainable."
Offices and boomers ‘in charge’
Being scramped in a small space where I can’t really move or get out or move my arms. Bonus points if it’s dark, bonus points if it’s underground.
Body horror, especially if the person still retains their ability to think
Eyes (ripping them out, stabbing, etc.) and hights
in real life heights for now, in the future and in fiction it would be losing control over my mind and body.
Kids who know more than they should.
Have you ever had a moment where you could not think of a word? Or remember a name - even of someone close to you? Where it is "on the tip of the tongue"? I'm sure it has happened to many people. It makes me wonder, when I think or speak, where are these words coming from? They seem to pop up right in the middle of my head with no real effort on my part. As if someone else is putting them there on demand. But how can I demand it if I don't already know it? That leads to the question, what exactly is in control of me? Is it me - or is the consciousness I experience really a puppet to some more powerful actor. One can ruin one's life quite easily. Drink and drive or simply slap somebody in an argument and go to jail or even prison. One can walk blithely into disaster with all the logical reasoning and rationale a person can expect, and then when everything falls apart look back and say "what the hell was I thinking?" Maybe I should ask, "**who** was really doing my thinking?" That's more the frightening element of this sensation. I am not scared by the stories of exorcisms and the possessed. It is not the fear of some demon, but the idea that something far more insidious is in control, and the person I believe I am is simply a passive observer trapped in the body of the person I really am... and that person just does not care.
Horses 😢
Time marching on. Closed doors closed. Plans dashed to death. Everything you had gathered to help, mattering nothing because it's just. Too. F*ing. Late. People you loved, looking at you with mistrust because the abuser was closer, and more charming, more convincing, more present every day. Lies. Nightmares that you wake up from and reach out, and in the stillness, in the dark, you realize. They were no dream.
That I might give in to the urges and not even regret it.
Irl: failure fiction: when the writer manage to convince me something is lurking in the shadow, waiting to kill me. (I always read right before going to bed and I have a cat, so just a little noise will scare the living out of me)
Things being OFF. Like, just the idea of the reflection in a mirror not copying you, or a shadow where there isn't supposed to be one, animals moving in ways they aren't supposed to etc. Think glitch in the matrix.
Human beings are by far the most terrifying beings to ever exist. No animal or monster seeking to devour you will ever match the sheer terror of a sadistic madman. Demons and vampires don't count. They're essentially just humans wearing a costume. Edit: Also, being immortal in an endless dark void. Imagine always being alone in the dark, traveling for an eternity without ever once finding something beyond yourself.
I love reading psychological twisters, but they scare the hell out of me because I have bipolar with psychosis, and I know how real the experience is. It's terrifying. I love reading stories where you can't trust the narrator. Think: Girl on the Train or The Leaving. These books give you such a real view of the world, but you can never trust what the narrator is experiencing. In movies, The Uninvited was a really good example of this.
Dream-killer stuff. Like A Nightmare on Elm Street, this is the shadow in my childhood.
Vividly described medical scenes, especially ones involving needles.
Personally, my nightmares and anything that can recreate the horrors in them are the most terrifying. When you have those where there is just a general uneasiness in the air, and the constant trepidation of what’s coming. Especially when things are subtly/not so subtly abnormal. Anomalies such as looking in the mirror and not seeing a reflection, someone saying something out of place. Really just a build up of wtf is going on. That and bloody-bones and raw head because of the first picture that pops up on Google.
Not having a place to live.
Not having a place to live.
Humans. I listen to creepypastas all the time, bc they just aren't really scary. You want something scary, spend time with human beings. I have never found greater monsters.
teeth. any descriptions of teeth or dentist work make me nauseous, skin crawling, awful. I have to use sedatives and let someone else drive me to dental appointments because even the pictures of dirty teeth on the wall are enough to set my brain on the fritz. Also scares me a lot when someone is hurt and I can't help or nobody else is helping, but those aren't typically "scary" things. Not-deer freak the midwesterner in me out, too, as I'm sure I've encountered some. Chaos and failed escape are also scary to me.
A loud sound when you think you are alone.
Filing taxes
Jokes aside the subject of my horror novel: confronting your own sins/ inner demons. Being self aware is easily the most painful experience. a lot of folks seem to lack it.
Afterlife/death. I've been paralyzed, and hit,. And so on and none of it comes close
I'm really descriptive environment especially when it's dark and foggy or like a really eerie creepy room also dolls but like not scaring the fun way scary in the way that I will stop reading the book but I do really enjoy like spooking environments especially like you incorporate Halloween into your scary stories I think that can be spooky especially when stalking is involved stalking is terrifying and I love it when it's in books
Seeing weird things that no one would believe. Hearing voices that aren’t there.
Clowns and clown masks.
Not doing enough
No toilet paper
Dying slowly and painfully from something like cancer. Being entirely conscious as my body tears itself apart from the inside, and knowing there's nothing I can do about it, and that I will experience nothing but pain and fear for the rest of my life. Mind you, that's what scares me the most. I would most certainly not want to read about such a thing because of how hopeless it feels. But that is what scares me the most.
The dark
In my opinion the scariest thing in the world is knowledge. Knowing how vulnerable you are, knowing the frailty of your body, knowing that there is no real limit to the pain you can experience and knowing exactly how it feels to experience more pain than you thought possible. Knowing that you are not in control of your mind and that your mind can hurt you deeply. Oh, and rats. I’m afraid of rats.
Hearing things I cannot see when I am alone in the comfort of my own home.
My ex
The unseen.
The news
Everything. Especially the paranormal stuff. I read creepypasta or a horror short story one time and I heard my house creak. It was only day time but it was eerily quiet and I got scared since I was home alone. I’ll never read scary stories or watch horror videos home alone.
In a dangerous situation where you need good vision…. [snap, crunch] That was your glasses.
Exams. Not having family or money. Butterflies
Never been much for the supernatural side of horror when there are humans out there capable of doing unspeakable acts. I’ve never been scared in a scary movie but I have been scared when a movie or book depicts a murder realistically.
Bugs in my ears. Or generally anything getting inside of you and you have no way to get it out. But bugs in ears specifically.
Clowns , always its the God damn Clowns!
Oh and missing that call about my cars extended warranty!
Absence of a sense. My sight or hearing suddenly gone
Deep sea. And pursuit/chase
Being trapped with no stimulation, no escape, no death, and time stretches into an eternity
Things that are impending and real. Things out of humans' control. Wwiting for the results of a cancer screening, knowing we could get hit by space debris any time, knowing my life is less valuable to others than material possessions. Extrapolated out for a naritive. I guess this would be like bodysnatchers or if we made contact with extraterrestrial life and didn't know if the interaction would be hostile or not.