This week: Horror Ideas Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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Most fears are basic: fear of the dark, fear of going down in the basement, fear of weird sounds, fear that somebody is waiting for you in your closet. Those kinds of things stay with you no matter what age.”
—R.L. Stine
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
“I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget-no—murder before chapter five.'”
—Shirley Jackson
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
—H. P. Lovecraft
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
—Stephen King
I think that’s part of the horror writer’s job: to create unsettling juxtapositions. You find something that seems harmless and innocent, and pair it with aspects that are disturbing.”
—Joe Hill
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Most writers are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas from?" A majority of the time, writers find it difficult to answer that question.
We draw our ideas from a multitude of sources — news headlines, novels, television shows, movies, our own lives, fears, phobias, and so on. They can come from a scene or moment in a film that wasn't fully explored. They can come from a single visual that entices the creative mind — a seed that continues to grow and grow until the writer is forced to put it to paper or screen.
In the spirit of helping writers find those seeds for horror, I have conceived some terrifying story prompts that you can use as inspiration for your next horror story.
They may inspire screenplays, novels, short stories, or even smaller moments that you can include in what horror stories you are already writing or what you will create in your upcoming projects.
But beware! If you scare easily — and have active imaginations like most writers do — turn up the lights and proceed with caution...
1. A girl goes missing in the woods, and her parents find only a decrepit and scary doll left behind. They soon learn that the doll is actually their daughter. And she's alive.
2. New residents of an old neighborhood are invited by their friendly neighbors to a Halloween party. The neighbors are vampires.
3. A family dog runs away from home. He returns a year later to the delight of his family. But there's something different about him. Something demonic.
4. A girl goes missing. Fifteen years later, her parents get a call from her older self. But they listen in fear because they killed their daughter that night years ago.
5. A man reads a novel, soon realizing that the story is his very own — and according to the book, a killer is looming
6. A scientist clones his family that died in an airplane crash — but soon learns the repercussions of playing God.
7. A man wakes up bound to an electric chair.
8. A man wakes up in a coffin next to a freshly dead body.
9. A woman wakes up to find her family gone and her doors and windows boarded up, with no way to escape.
10. A man afraid of snakes is shipwrecked on an island covered with them.
Sleep well.
W.D.Wilcox
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Scary Stories
Excerpt: “You’re so pale. Ugly and pale. You know that, right?”
Excerpt: Spellbound, I tried to tear my eyes away from the water. It had a syrupy flow to it, thick and heavy like black honey. The water dragged at my thoughts and my memories, trying to drown me in its inky depths.
Excerpt: Haunting, melodic notes waft through the night, a serenade for the dead.
Excerpt: Ted shoved the sliver into his already moving jaws, ignoring the way his cracked, gnarled knuckles scraped against his parched lips, and savoured the delicious taste of corpse flesh on his dry, dead tongue as he chewed, freeing delectable juices and lapping up freshly squeezed lifeblood.
Excerpt: The malignant force was beyond her comprehension and spiritual capacity, she thought with exasperation, frustration, and a little bit of impatience.
Excerpt: For the finale, she flipped off the swing, floating to the ground, and ran out of the arena. I raced out of my seat, intent on finding the woman who had been haunting my dreams since I met her.
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Horror/Scary: July 02, 2025 Issue [#13208]
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