Many of you probably don’t know this about me, but before I became a professional editor and while I was finishing up my English Literature degree, I had a part‑time job as an escape room gamemaster. I not only love storytelling but also roleplaying and puzzles, so that job gave me a lot of nerdy happiness.

One of the rooms I ran was a scary‑themed room, so the job also taught me a lot about how to effectively scare people. In honour of Halloween, I’ll take what I learned about scaring people from my brief time as a gamemaster and apply those insights to writing scary scenes. I’ve already written about how to create suspense in fiction here. While suspense is intimately tied to scares, this post is going to focus on writing specific scenes that make your reader’s heart race.

But First: What Is an Escape Room Gamemaster?

For those of you who don’t know and are a little confused right now, escape rooms are interactive in‑person puzzle games. The game makers build a physical room and fill it with secret doors, immersive props, and lot and lots of puzzles. Then groups come in, are given a mystery to solve in the room, and have an hour to “escape,” solve the puzzles, and find their way out. (I say “escape” in quotes because that’s part of the role‑playing – for safety and comfort reasons, you’re never actually trapped in the room.)

When I say that I was a gamemaster, it means that I ran the room. I would lead groups in, teach them how the room works, and then watch them solve the room through security cameras. I know that last part sounds creepy, but watching the groups allowed me to communicate with them through a microphone. I could then give them hints, answer their questions, and generally keep them from destroying the room as they search for clues.

But let’s get back to the topic of this post. One of the rooms I gamemastered was a scary room where I would don props, scream, activate smoke machines, trigger strobe lights, and creep up on people in the dark to scare them. I won’t lie, I got really good at my scares by the end of my time there. In this post, I’ll share some of my insights from the job and apply them to writing scary scenes that get your readers’ hearts racing.

Tip #1: The Scare Is in the Buildup, Not in the Reveal

A good scare is surprisingly similar to a good joke. Both scares and jokes are content that elicit an instinctual emotional response from the audience. The main difference between horror and comedy is the type of emotion you’re trying to elicit.

While the content of a scare or joke is important, the content is not as important as the delivery. Someone reading off jokes from a list won’t make you laugh as much as someone who knows how to pace the jokes and really preform the bit. Scares are quite similar.

All scares start with anticipation, just like a joke’s buildup. Then all scares end with a climactic moment where the monster rears its face and the audience finally jumps. (Unless, of course, it’s a jump scare, a type of scare where the object of fear appears out of nowhere, usually accompanied by a loud noise. Jump scares are hard to replicate in fiction – reading the words “sudden scream” just doesn’t conjure the same instinctual response as hearing the sudden scream yourself – so we’ll leave the discussion of jump scares there for now.)

After the scare’s buildup, the scare’s climax makes the audience jump like a joke’s punchline makes them laugh. I haven’t found a good term for a scare’s punchline. From now on I’ll call it the scare’s payoff, because that fear‑inducing climax is the payoff to the scene’s building suspense. I know it’s not the most intuitive term, but hopefully it’s sufficient for our discussion here.

Just like a joke, a writing good scary scene is all about getting the timing between the buildup and the payoff just right. But how do you actually achieve that perfect timing in fiction?

Tip #2: Predictability Kills Suspense

The first part of getting that timing right is to never give two scares the same shape. Seeing patterns soothe us. They make the world feel predictable and safe. When readers know how a scare is going to end before the buildup stage is over, you’ve killed the scare. A predictable scene is an emotionally neutral scene, at least when it comes to fear.

When I was an escape room gamemaster, I had to vary the types and timing of scares to keep each scare, well, scary. If I had just banged pots together every ten minutes to scare groups, that noise would only be scary the first or second time. As soon as I would establish a pattern, the fear would be gone. Like a bad joke, my scares would stop landing. That’s why I had lot of different types of scares up my sleeve. I slammed doors and whispered in people’s ears. I sang a creepy lullaby and suddenly appeared in unexpected places. That variance of scares kept the players on their toes and made each scare work.

Applying this Concept to Fiction

In your fiction, you’ll need to also vary your types of scares to keep your readers on their toes. If your story has more than one scary moment, keep the timing between each buildup and payoff varied. Readers will then struggle to find a pattern between scares. That lack of predictability will heighten their building anxiety during the anticipation stage.

Also, make sure each scare’s situation, flavour of buildup, and flavour of payoff is different. Anticipation usually starts with a cue that something’s not right. The protagonist hears someone following him, but when he turns around, no one’s there. Or a character who lives alone comes home to find a piece of furniture moved. Or a sound wakes the protagonist in the night.

As the character responds, the suspense will build in tandem with the growing mystery and the growing cues of threat. A shadow shifts in an ally. Moving the errant chair reveals a streak of fresh blood. A sticky sweet smell fills the bedroom.

Then the payoff happens. A faceless man jumps from the ally and tries to grab the protagonist. The trail of blood leads to a cupboard where an unharmed yet bloody child is hiding and crying. The family dog jumps onto the bed with his face covered in molasses.

Keep each scare’s components varied and unpredictable. Vary the situations. Vary the types of cues that indicate threat. Vary how well those cues of threat match the truth revealed in the scare’s payoff. Don’t have one scare formula that you use over and over again. Get creative with each scary scene and vary the structure to keep your readers uneasy and uncertain until the payoff.

Tip #3: Less Is Often More

Okay, I used dramatic horror situations in the last section’s examples, but that was just for illustrative purposes. When it comes to scares, less is often more. Remember how the execution of a scare is more important than the scare’s actual content? Well, many new creators will use the most extreme and dramatic situations possible to try and create a scary scene.

I’ve seen escape rooms like this, and I’ve seen stories like this. Gore by itself is not scary. A monster by itself is not scary. A serial killer by itself is not scary. How you build the scene and how the characters interact with the object of fear are what make a scene scary.

If you use too many explicitly disturbing and extreme situations, props, or characters, it can actually damage your story. First, if there’s too much extreme content, readers become emotionally numb to it. That numbness will undermine your ability to actually surprize and scare them. Second, it’s easy for extremely gory or horrific situations to come across as unrealistic or unrelated.

Unless you’re writing in the horror genre specifically, don’t add in extremely horrific situations only for the sake of eliciting a scare. Make sure that the situation is relevant to the plot and makes sense in the world that you’re building.

Tip #4: The Known Unknown Is Scarier than Any Monster, so Only Reveal How the Object of Fear Works Once the Scares Are Done

We’re not deeply scared of monsters that we understand. We’re scared of monsters that we know exist but are elusive, mysterious, and unpredictable. We’re most scared of the unknown because the threats we don’t understand are the most dangerous threats of all. We’re not afraid of the dark. We’re afraid of threats we can’t see. We know how bears and sharks and wolves work and how to survive encounters with them. Those encounters are still dangerous, but we know how to respond to them. That knowledge turns those monsters into merely dangerous animals.

To make a truly terrifying monster, be it human or beast, you need to shroud it in darkness. Keep its full nature a mystery until the scare’s payoff and reveal. If that monster is meant to create fear throughout the story, then keep its full nature a mystery until the story’s climax and resolution.

Learning from Stranger Things

Take the Netflix show Stranger Things as an example. I don’t know about you, but when I watched the show, I found the first season far scarier than the sequels. Did the first season have scarier content? When I watched the first season the second time (because the story is that good), I also found it much less scary.

I realized that, if anything, the following seasons have more gore than the first. What had changed was that I now knew how the Upside Down and its monsters worked. In the first season, we don’t even properly see what the monster looks like until the last two episodes. That mystery heightened each scare’s intensity.

Once that knowledge is out there, it’s impossible to get the full effect of the unknown back. The Stranger Things writers kept introducing new, mysterious monsters in the following seasons. But the fact that we knew how the Upside Down worked, how its monsters generally function, and how our heroes can defeat them took an edge out of the scares. The following seasons still had phenomenal storytelling and plenty of scares. There was just a little oomph missing because the audience knew how the world works.

That’s why it’s so important to not reveal too much about your monsters too soon. It’s impossible to maintain that mystery forever, especially in long series. Still, hold on to your monsters’ mysteries as long as possible so you don’t loose the unknown’s fear‑inducing effect prematurely.

I hope these tips help you craft your scary scenes in fiction. If you have any questions or tips of your own, feel free to share them below. Happy Halloween everyone!