What do we pour so stories are scary? Readers are bored so they need something more. Something abstract yet something so real. Something unusual, more like obscene. What do we want? Blood and gore. We want opened chest and spilled guts mess. We crave for those just by impulse. This is where vivid imagery comes in. The details of such disgusting scenes excite us.
There is something interesting about us. We want to know, and crave to know. The absence of knowledge or the introduction of incomprehensible objects tend to arouse fear, tension and hatred. In literature, the art in manipulating this fear is known as suspense. Suspense make people suspect, and speculate what's going to happen. The insecurity of this kind is the fear we see in literature.
Humans are different from wild animals for many reasons. Among them, there is imagination that entertains us, educates us, and fill our life with more meaningful abstractions. Imagination works really well when constrained, but when its unleashed, it goes wild. To base imagination out of something we do not know entirely can be catastrophic to our mental peace. Fear of the unknown projects what we are scared the most. Such speculation is how horror movies, stories, music work.
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