Sounds like a joke, right? It is a classic joke set-up. It uses three of the most popular horror tropes of all time: the stinky corpse that feeds on brains, the dehydrated bloodsucker, and the bipedal canine. It is not a joke: the title of this article is a warning to all horror writers: Beware the horror trope!
Tropes can be a good thing. They are good for establishing an idea. Thanks to pop culture, everyone knows what a vampire, a zombie, and a werewolf look like and how they behave. But for a writer, if not handled with caution, they will drive a stake through the heart of your writing.
Why should a reader keep reading if they know everything about your monster? What are they going to take away from your story? Can they find a better, more well-known story by a famous author instead? A common monster is hardly going to be terrifying, so what is in it for them?
I am not saying do not use tropes. You can use them, if your maggot-ridden heart desires, but you have a lot of work ahead of you. If you are going to use tropes, your writing needs to be spectacular.
If you do not use tropes, you can start to experiment with horror in all its exciting forms. You can surprise your readers with unconventional monsters and scare them with fresh and exciting ideas. Or (and this is a lot of fun) you can subvert the trope. Question the trope. Experiment with how the trope would function in different contexts. You should question both yours, and the readers understanding of the stereotypical horror.
I recently finished reading a story about a vampire’s dentist. It was either the dentist and his family are killed, or he assists the vampire with regular root canals to keep his blood-suckers in tip top condition. Oh, and it is not blood the vampire craves, but cerebrospinal fluid. Blood was something that sounded good to Hollywood. No, vampires actually need cerebrospinal fluid to rehydrate their dried-out brains. The story arises from teh author exploring the monsters’ vulnerabilities in a contemporary situation.
Daniel W Broallt’s Zombie Whorehouse is a story about an undercover journalist investigating zombie sex trafficking. We live in a world where sex trafficking is rife. Would not a zombie pandemic serve up the perfect opportunity for fresh prostitutes? It would all depend on the virus and its transmission. Would the ages of the zombies matter? Would it be suffering if they are already dead? What if zombie sex became so popular that healthy women were being infected to create more undead prostitutes? Zombie whorehouse creeps me out every time I read it, not for the zombies, but for the people that profit off of them.
I am fascinated by the idea of cannibals and cannibal serial killers. I did not want to write about this, though, because what could I add to the genre? The father of cannibal serial killers is Hannibal’s Thomas Harris. Instead, I asked myself “What if a cannibal did not need to eat someone, but needed to be eaten? Honestly, how much harder would that be for the monster? And what would happen after their consumption?” It started out as a joke, and from it I was able to develop my short, award-winning horror story, Flesh of My Flesh.
A writer should be aware of tropes and beware the trope. Remember, employing tropes are easy; writing high-quality horror stories is not. Use tropes and your writing needs to be phenomenal. Even if you are the best horror writer since King and Barker, can you guarantee that your writing is exploring the ideas underpinning horror itself to their full extent? Whereas if you can explore tropes, and suggest different ways to think about them, you and your readers are going to have a lot more fun.
As a writer, you should always question tropes and try and uncover a new approach in your writing. Ask yourself what would happen if a zombie, a vampire and a werewolf entered a bar…
- About the Author
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Ben Matthews is a physiotherapist and horror author. His work has been published in print in IFWG Publishing’s Killer Creatures Horror Stories with Bite, and Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, for which he won the Aurealis Award for Best Short Horror Story, 2024.
His work has also been published online at Tales from the Crosstimbers, Whisperhouse Press, and The NoSleep Podcast.
He lives in Western Australia with his amazing wife, who thinks horror stories are silly, and his young daughter. When he is not working or crawling around on the floor pretending to be a gorilla, he’s reading or drawing. You can follow him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bjcmatthews or check out his website: https://bjcmatthews.wixsite.com/ben-matthews-author