Stephen King’s hierarchy of scares remains the best explanation of how horror movies work

You can tell a lot about a horror movie by how it tries to scare you. Does it slowly build fear and tension, only to expel it all in a climactic release? Does it dwell on horrific acts of violence or scenes of gore, in hopes of making you cringe with feeling at the thought of experiencing such pain yourself? Does it explore bizarre imagery, or some supernatural concept? Or does it rely on simple surprise, loud noises and unexpected appearances intended to cause you to jump out of your seat?

What, exactly, makes a movie scary or silly is different for everyone. But the best dissection of the various types of scares and how they work probably comes from the horror genre’s most successful modern practitioner, Stephen King. In Danse Macabre, his 1980 treatise on horror film and fiction, he outlined three essential types of terror and how they work. His categorization remains the best way to understand how horror stories work — and why some types of fictional scares have a more lasting impact than others.

Scares exist on a spectrum

The Gross Out

Horror

Terror

To King, these represent not only different types of scares, but a kind of craftsman’s hierarchy, with terror at the top.

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion…” he writes in the book, “and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” Terror, in other words, is what he aspires to, but he’ll go the gross-out route if that’s all he can manage.

Terror exploits the way the human mind works

The reason that terror stands at the top of the scare-charts is that, when expertly applied, it offers something more than just a momentary jolt, or gag-reflex revulsion. That’s because terror turns your mind against yourself: It implants a terrible and troubling idea, and then nudges you toward dwelling on all of its horrific implications, turning them over and over in your mind. Terror is first and foremost psychological, a way of exploiting the way the human mind works.

Alien, a monster movie dressed up as science-fiction, works in part because of how little you see of the actual creature: The monster you imagine is always more frightening than the man in the rubber suit. (The same goes for Jaws.) The original Nightmare on Elm Street works from a similar sort of conceptual premise, the idea that you are vulnerable as soon as you fall asleep. It takes an ordinary part of everyday life and imbues it with new danger.

There’s no single right way to scare someone — and what scares one won’t always scare another — but the particular type of scare a horror movie chooses, and the effectiveness with which it’s delivered, reveals something about its ambitions and sense of purpose.

Although many horror films seek only to create momentary fear, the very best of the bunch — those that successfully manage to create King’s concept of terror — break through the barriers of our rational minds, burrowing into our psyches in ways that can terrify us for the rest of our lives, as The Exorcist did and still does for me.

Keep King’s hierarchy in mind the next time you watch a movie, and especially the next time you sit down to write horror.  Gross us out, try something horrific like a jump scare, but if you have the chance, always go for terror. You’ll know it when you write it, and so will your readers and viewers.  In horror, scaring the bejezus out of us is what it’s all about.

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-E

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