User blog comment:Nanepul/irrational fears./@comment-1988716-20141008234724/@comment-1988716-20141009194200

Basing characters off of characters and basing characters off of phobias are two very different things. Characters are naturally a part of storytelling anyway, so pulling influence from them for the sake of telling a better story is understandable. Hell, pulling elements from phobias for the sake of telling a better story is also understandable.

Bear in mind here that I'm marking a distinction between a phobia and the thing Fears are currently trying to be based on. Fears are based on actual threats, things that it makes sense to be scared of-- because that is easier to justify to the audience and easier to get the audience to relate to. Ergo, more compelling. I'm scared of abuse, but I don't have a phobia of it. I'm scared of depersonalization but I don't have a phobia of that either. Phobias are all about aversion, they're things you instinctively keep away from for some irrational reason. You can fear something and not run away from it (and that tends to be the most interesting and engaging moment).

The problem with a Fear of failure is it is way too vague. Every Fear is the Fear of failure. Every single one of them. Without an exception.

Most creepypasta aren't really that compelling, but I get your point. But this sounds to me like a misconception. We may be called the Fear Mythos but that's because the monsters are called Fears and we write about the monsters (the Slender Man Mythos doesn't dedicate itself just to writing about men who happen to be slender, and the Lovecraft mythos doesn't dedicate itself to writing about the craft of love). Some of our most popular and influential stories aren't horror, some of them are flat-out comedy, we even have a porno somewhere. We're not a horror mythos. We are a mythology that most people tend to write horror for.

The key to scaring people well is related to the key to making them laugh or cry or get excited: Good writing. People should be putting the writing first and the horror second. Not everyone finds something scary, but everyone finds a good story compelling. And if it's compelling enough, we can even understand why a protagonist might be scared of something irrational like a phobia, but that doesn't mean we ourselves will take on that phobia. In other words, it won't be the phobia that's scaring people, it'll be the more rational fears underneath the phobia that we can relate to.

Five Nights at Freddy's doesn't make me scared of animatronics, it makes me scared of suspenseful situations, and of being trapped in a situation I can't get out of (which is itself a bit of a trigger for me anyway) with very dangerous people (also a trigger!).

I do like Where The Bad Kids Go, but stories about creepy children's stories aren't scary just because they're about creepy children's stories. They're scary because they portray, in rather jarring terms, the loss of innocence in a context where we expect lots of it. It's a breaking of expectation, and plus it taps into the rather adult fear of wanting to protect these rather defenseless and unassuming kids when they're being taken advantage of (the Pied Piper is a creepy story for the exact same reasons).

I am not scared of video games in the slightest and I honestly find sonic.exe, BEN drowned, and Lavender Town to be some of the most arbitrary and narmy content the internet has to offer. People probably fear them for reasons similar to the above-- they take something we grew up with, something we associate with simpler times, and corrupt them. It's a breaking of expectations.

People mistake form for function a lot. It is definitely the case with horror. So I really think people should stop trying to write scary things and start just trying to write things that compel them. The audience will follow. It's the inevitable truth of storytelling.