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The Scariest Scene You'll Ever Write Won't Have a Single Drop of Blood
by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
Here is a scene: A woman walks into her kitchen at two in the morning. A creature stands by the refrigerator. It has too many arms and a mouth full of needle teeth. Blood pools on the linoleum. She screams.
You felt nothing. Maybe a flicker of recognition, the way you might glance at a car accident on the highway without slowing down. The creature, the blood, the scream: all of it arrived too fast, too completely, for your nervous system to do anything except categorize it and move on. Horror, you thought. Got it.
Now try this: A woman walks into her kitchen at two in the morning. The refrigerator is open. The milk is on the counter, cap off. She lives alone.
That second version has no monster, no blood, no scream. It also has something the first version lacks entirely: dread. Your mind is already filling in what might have opened that refrigerator, what might still be in the house, what that woman should do next. The horror is not on the page. It's inside you, building pressure in the space between what you know and what you fear.
This is quiet horror, and it is among the most difficult effects a fiction writer can achieve. It requires you to trust your reader completely, to leave the most frightening element of your story unwritten, and to make that absence do the heavy lifting. The writers who do it well (Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, Mariana Enriquez) produce fiction that follows you around for days. Not because of what they showed you, but because of what they didn't.
What Your Reader's Brain Does With an Empty Room
The psychology behind quiet horror is not complicated, but it is counterintuitive. When you describe a monster in full detail, you give your reader's brain a problem it can solve. Here is a threat. Here are its dimensions. The amygdala fires, the cortisol spikes, and then the rational brain takes over. This is fiction. That creature is not real. I am safe on my couch. The whole transaction takes about two seconds.
When you withhold the monster, the brain can't complete that transaction. It keeps searching for the threat, keeps generating possibilities, and each possibility it generates is more personal, more precisely calibrated to that individual reader's fears, than anything you could have invented. Shirley Jackson understood this principle better than perhaps anyone. In The Haunting of Hill House, the most terrifying sequence involves Eleanor holding a hand in the dark, only to realize later that no one was beside her. Jackson gives us no description of what held Eleanor's hand. She gives us Eleanor's reaction, and then she gives us silence.
That silence is where quiet horror lives. It is not the absence of craft. It is the most deliberate application of it.
The Difference Between Restraint and Vagueness
A common mistake with quiet horror is confusing withholding with not knowing. If you, the writer, don't know what's in the dark, your reader will sense that uncertainty and lose faith. The paradox of the genre is this: you must know every detail of the threat you're choosing not to show. You must understand its texture, its logic, its precise relationship to your protagonist's psychology. You withhold not because you can't describe it, but because you've decided the reader's imagination will do better work than your prose.
Carmen Maria Machado demonstrates this in "The Husband Stitch," the opening story of Her Body and Other Parties. The narrator wears a green ribbon around her neck. We are told, plainly, not to untie it. Machado knows exactly what happens when the ribbon comes off. She knows it from the first sentence. The entire story orbits this knowledge, pulls tension from it, and the horror accumulates precisely because Machado controls the reveal with surgical patience. By the time the ribbon is untied, we have spent so long dreading the moment that the actual event lands with the force of something inevitable and still somehow unbearable.
You need that level of authority over your material. The thing you're not showing must be the thing you understand most completely.
Exercise: Write a one-paragraph description of a monster, creature, or threatening presence. Be as specific as you can: how it moves, what it sounds like, what it wants. Then put that paragraph in a drawer. Now write a scene in which a character encounters this presence, but use only the character's physical and emotional reactions. The character can notice displaced objects, temperature changes, sounds. They cannot see the thing directly. Compare the two. Which version unsettles you more?
A Scene in Two Drafts
Let's make this concrete. Below is a draft of a scene written in the mode of explicit horror, followed by a revision that applies quiet horror principles. The content is the same. A person returns to a childhood home. Something is wrong. The craft is completely different.
Draft One: The Explicit Version
Marcus pushed open the front door and immediately smelled decay. The hallway was dark, and something wet dripped from the ceiling. He heard a low growl from the basement. The walls were covered in claw marks, deep gouges in the plaster, and a trail of dark blood led down the basement stairs. He grabbed a knife from the kitchen and crept toward the door, his heart slamming against his ribs. Whatever was down there was big. He could hear it breathing.
That draft does several things competently. The sensory details are concrete. The tension escalates. The pacing moves. But notice what it asks of the reader: almost nothing. Every element of the threat is identified, catalogued, handed over. Decay. Claw marks. Blood. Growl. Big creature. Breathing. The reader receives this information and processes it, and the scene has roughly the emotional impact of reading a grocery list of scary things.
Draft Two: The Quiet Version
Marcus pushed open the front door and stopped. The hallway smelled the way it had when he was nine, the summer his mother kept every window shut. Same smell. That was the thing. Not rot or mildew but the specific humid sweetness of that July, when she'd started sleeping in the kitchen and he'd learned not to ask why. The coat rack by the door had been moved about three inches to the left. He could see the dents in the carpet where it used to stand. He tried to remember the last time he'd been here. November. The coat rack had been in the right place in November. He stood in the doorway for a long time, not stepping in, not stepping back, aware of a feeling he could not name, which was the feeling of knowing something before your mind has agreed to tell you what it is.
No blood. No creature. No growl. And yet: the coat rack has been moved three inches. Someone or something has been in this house. The smell connects to a childhood memory that clearly contains its own buried trauma, which the narrative withholds. Marcus is aware of an understanding forming below the surface of his conscious mind. All of this asks the reader to participate, to generate theories, to sit inside the discomfort of not knowing.
The revision makes five specific craft moves that are worth isolating.
First, it replaces generic threat indicators with a single, specific, dissonant detail. The three-inch displacement of the coat rack is more disturbing than the claw marks because it resists explanation. Claw marks suggest a monster, which the brain can categorize. A coat rack that has moved slightly suggests something worse: that reality itself has shifted in a way that cannot be accounted for.
Second, it layers the present threat over an old wound. The smell connects to a childhood experience that was itself frightening, and the connection amplifies both. This is how memory actually works in moments of fear; the brain retrieves its closest analogue, and the two experiences contaminate each other.
Third, it slows time. The first draft moves at the pace of an action sequence. The second draft moves at the pace of dread, which is the pace of someone who does not yet want to understand what they are seeing.
Fourth, it gives the character a body. Marcus stands in the doorway, not stepping in, not stepping back. That physical indecision tells us more about his emotional state than any description of a slamming heart.
Fifth, the final sentence names the feeling without resolving it. He knows something. He doesn't yet know what. Neither do we. And the scene ends in that gap.
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Explore Horror Without Blood →Four Techniques That Build Dread Without Violence
The before/after comparison above isolates specific moves, but quiet horror has a broader toolkit. The writers who work in this mode return to a handful of techniques, adapting them to wildly different stories but relying on the same underlying principles.
The Wrong Detail
Kelly Link is a master of this. In her fiction, the world looks almost normal. Almost. The details are 95% familiar, and the remaining 5% is where the horror enters. In "The Summer People," a caretaker tends to a house occupied by beings who are never fully explained. The wrongness arrives not through dramatic revelation but through accumulation: objects that shouldn't be there, rules that don't quite make sense, a feeling that the domestic surface is stretched over something else entirely. The reader's brain keeps trying to normalize the scene, and the story keeps refusing to let it.
To use the wrong detail in your own work, establish normalcy first. Give the reader enough reality to feel grounded. Then introduce one element that doesn't belong, and don't explain it. Don't signal its importance with dramatic framing. Let it sit quietly among the other details, as though it were ordinary. The reader's subconscious will snag on it even if their conscious mind tries to move past.
The Character Who Doesn't React
We talked earlier about using your protagonist's reaction as the reader's guide into fear. There is a darker variation: a character who should react to something horrible and doesn't. This technique works because it suggests that the character has already been changed by whatever they've encountered. Their calm in the face of wrongness is itself the wrongness.
Mariana Enriquez uses this in several stories in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Her characters encounter the grotesque with a kind of flat affect, a weariness that implies they have seen things like this before, that this is simply what the world is like. For the reader, the horror doubles: the event itself is frightening, and the character's non-reaction suggests a world in which such events are routine enough to be absorbed without shock.
The Slow Contamination
Rather than introducing a threat from outside, some of the most effective quiet horror grows from within. A relationship that was healthy begins to curdle. A familiar place starts to feel foreign. The character's perception shifts so gradually that they (and the reader) can't identify the moment things went wrong.
This is the engine of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The story opens in pleasant domesticity: warm sun, flowers blooming, children gathering stones. Nothing in the first three-quarters of the story reads as horror. The community's ritual emerges so naturally from the fabric of small-town life that the violence at the end feels both shocking and, terrifyingly, inevitable. Jackson contaminates the ordinary with the monstrous so slowly that by the time the reader understands what's happening, they have already been complicit in it.
The Unanswered Question
Every horror story poses a question. In explicit horror, the question gets answered: What is the monster? How do we kill it? In quiet horror, the question stays open. The most disturbing thing about the story is not what happened but what was never explained.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator becomes obsessed with a pattern in the wallpaper of her room. She believes a woman is trapped behind the pattern. The story never confirms whether this is hallucination or reality, and that ambiguity is the source of its power. If the woman behind the wallpaper is real, the story is supernatural horror. If she isn't, the story is a portrait of a mind collapsing under confinement. Both readings are terrifying. Neither cancels the other. The story holds them both without resolving, and the reader is left carrying that irresolution.
When you write quiet horror, identify the central question of your story and ask yourself: does this question need to be answered? If the answer is yes, you may be writing a different kind of story. If the answer is no, if the question itself is the point, you are working in the tradition of the genre's most unsettling practitioners.
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Browse Fiction Workshops →Revision as Excavation: Stripping a Scene Down to Its Dread
If you already have a draft of a horror story that relies too heavily on explicit scares, you don't need to start over. You need to excavate. The quiet version is often already inside the loud one. Here is a revision process that can help you find it.
Start by identifying every moment in your draft where you describe the source of fear directly. The monster, the body, the act of violence. Highlight each one. Now ask, for each highlighted passage: what would my point-of-view character notice before this moment? What physical changes would they feel in their body? What details in the environment would register as wrong, even before they understood why? Write those moments instead. Let the aftermath be visible. Let the event itself recede.
Next, look at your character's emotional responses. If you've written "fear" or "terror" or "dread" as direct emotions, cut them. Replace each instance with a physical action or an involuntary body response. A character who "felt dread" gives the reader nothing. A character who finds herself locking the car doors before she has consciously processed what she saw in the rearview mirror gives the reader everything.
Then examine your pacing. Explicit horror tends to accelerate. Things happen fast. Quiet horror decelerates. The most frightening moments are the ones where time seems to stretch, where the character (and the reader) are forced to sit with the wrongness rather than be carried past it by plot momentum. Look for the moments in your draft where you rushed, and ask whether slowing down would create more dread than speeding up.
Finally, read your ending. Does it explain? Does it resolve? Does it answer the central question? Consider what would happen if you ended the story one scene earlier, or one paragraph earlier, or even one sentence earlier. Often the most terrifying version of a quiet horror story is the one that ends just before the character (and reader) would have received the information they most desperately want.
Revision Diagnostic: Take a completed story or scene and apply each of the four steps above. For each direct description of threat you remove, write two sentences of indirect evidence. For each named emotion you cut, write one involuntary physical response. Track the word count. Quiet horror drafts are often shorter than their explicit counterparts, and that compression is part of what makes them work.
What Quiet Horror Teaches You About All Fiction
Even if you never write another horror story after your first, the skills that quiet horror demands will make you a better writer in every genre. The principle of withholding, of trusting the reader to meet you halfway, applies to literary fiction, to memoir, to love stories, to anything that depends on emotional resonance rather than plot mechanics.
Think about the way a grief scene works. The version where a character sobs and screams and pounds the floor often lands flat. The version where a character carefully washes the dishes at two in the morning, aware that the house is too quiet and unable to stop themselves from setting out two plates instead of one: that version breaks hearts. Same principle. The explicit version does the reader's emotional work for them. The restrained version makes the reader do it themselves, and what the reader generates is always, always more powerful than what you could have written.
Quiet horror, at its core, is about controlling information. What does the reader know, when do they know it, and what are you asking them to generate in the spaces between what you've told them? Every strong story, regardless of genre, is asking those same questions. Horror just makes the stakes of the answer visceral enough that you can feel the craft working on your nervous system in real time.
If you want to test this: take any scene from any genre you're working in, find the moment where you told the reader the most, and ask yourself what would happen if you told them less. The answer is almost always: something more interesting.
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