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In Western horror, there’s a theme that’s pretty backed-in: natural vs. supernatural. For literally thousands of years, there was one sure-fire way to get a start from your audience, and that was to upset their perception of the natural world. If you think to the things that have really scared us over the centuries: ghosts, monsters, demons, children, they’re all manifestations of some disruption in the natural world, in other words, they’re supernatural. Our idea of what’s “scary” has shifted over the years, from generation to generation and from style to style, but at the core, horror has almost always been about an upsetting of how we understand the world to function.

Take ghosts, for instance. Dead is supposed to be dead. Gone. Kaput. Dead people aren’t supposed to be interacting with the living. But look at any variety of ghost stories, and they all reflect this anxiety we have about the idea of dead people coming back.

La Lorena from Latin American folklore, for instance, tells of the spirit of a woman doomed to forever wash the clothes of her own children. A Christmas Carol starts with the revelation that Jacob Marley is doomed to forever wander the earth. The Amityville haunted house tells of a family chanced out of their home in the middle of the night by horrific spirits, forever imprisoned within the house. Similarly, you have The Shining.

This hotel is so saturated with evil that if you die there, you’re trapped, contributing to the suffering of others. Death is supposed to be the ultimate conclusion. Ghosts upend that natural process.

Monsters are an undoing of the natural balance of the world. Just look at the classic Universal monsters and the stories that inspired them.

Dracula is an Eastern European nobleman who feeds off people’s blood so that he can live forever. Victor Frankenstein wants to usurp women’s exclusive power to create life (yes, that’s really what the book’s about).

The Wolf Man suffers a terrible curse that painfully rearranges his body and forces him to hunt and kill other humans. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is a strange anthropomorphic creature that lives both underwater and upon land. Godzilla, King Kong, Bigfoot… all of these are examples of something that doesn’t fit within the natural world. This is scary to us: things we can’t classify, or that disrupt our understanding of “how things are.”

Demons. Yeah, they’re scary. Hell is scary. Interestingly, though, the frightening quality of demons and demonic stories isn’t actually (always) connected to our idea of a realm of unending (and deserved) punishment. Demon-based stories are most often about powerlessness. The Exorcist shows us a young girl who cannot resist a demonic possession.

The only way to stop the demon, to save the girl is (spoiler alert) for a priest to kill himself (yeah, yeah, I know the movies retconned this. Originally, though, he threw himself out the window to his death). The Omen (the first one) is technically about the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world, but the original movie is actually about people dying all around this little kid.

The real fear in that story is not the little boy (although kids are f-ing creepy), but rather that you can be killed by seemingly-random accidents. This is also, by the way, the cornerstone of the Final Destination films; Death is the antagonist, but the fear comes from the idea that you will be killed and have no capability of saving yourself. These stories add to the horror genre through a sense of doom: you were screwed right from the start and couldn’t possibly change your fate. Self-determination is supposed to be a cornerstone of the natural world; we walk the path of our choosing. Demonic horror stories remove that control.

Believe it or not, there’s a way to plot out a scary story based on this upsetting of the natural, i.e. the supernatural. You see, we view the supernatural as being inherently feminine. This idea is because the natural world is supposed to be orderly, based upon predictable, testable, understandable laws.

Consider how often in horror stories the professionals- scientists, priests, governmental officials, etc., are men. For most of Western civilization, masculinity’s defining quality was rationality. Men were supposed to be governed by control.

The heroes of ancient myth were kings and warriors who defeated monsters and brought order to their homelands. Empires were founded and ruled by rational men. Even though the natural world was a violent place, so too were men. But, this violence was always in service of something, whether a king/nation or even just money/plunder. Everything in a masculine world made sense.

On the other end of this was the feminine/supernatural. While Western civilization spent centuries attributing masculinity with stoic self-control, femininity was believed to be irrational. Consider how often in horror stories that a character goes crazy or hyper-emotional, it’s a woman. Wendy Torrance from The Shining,

Carrie, from… well Carrie, Regan in Exorcist. Traditionally, women were always the ones portrayed as hysterical. Consider the earliest mythologies: there’s almost always a separation between the law-giving Sky Father and the nurturing Earth Mother. The Sky Father is rational to the point of cruelty whereas the Earth Mother is a source of passion and compassion. The ancients believed that magic derived from the feminine. The female was the source of life, but also of death.

Consider how often in our most popular, most enduring stories there is a woman at the center of any supernatural chicanery. Eve is tempted by Satan.

Delilah cuts off Sampson’s hair, crippling him. Pandora opens her box, unleashing evil upon men (cough, cough, phrasing). Medusa’s gaze turns men to stone.

The first witch in history? Circe, an enchantress who turns men into animals.

Merlin is betrayed and imprisoned by Nimue. King Arthur is seduced by his sister Morgana Le Fey. Baba Yaga is a Slavic witch who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs. The Witch of Endor, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Sanderson Sisters. One of storytelling’s most common tropes is feminine nature of magic and the supernatural.

But, here’s the kicker. Just having a manifestation of the feminine supernatural in your story doesn’t make it scary. Recall that, at the start of this, I pointed out that scariness comes from an upsetting of the natural order. We expect witches. We expect enchantresses or spirits or whatever else. Things get scary with the unexpected. In most horror stories, there is an encroachment across the line separating the natural world from the supernatural. In Alien, the crew finds that alien ship and goes inside.

In Dracula, the Count leaves Transylvania and goes to London. In The Exorcist, the crypt containing the demon is opened. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those kids wander into an apparently-abandoned house.

In The Evil Dead, some idiot reads a book with a literal face on the cover, screaming at them. John Carpenter’s The Thing has an alien come to earth. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, parents murder Freddy, allowing him to seek vengeance in dreams. In each case, something happens (the inciting incident of the story, by the way), in which either the natural or supernatural world crosses over, triggering the events of the story. Had the balance been maintained, had each world stayed on its side of the line, there would be no horror story.

So, this finally leads me around to my own scary story. Last week I spoke about the type of monster I decided to do: an animalistic grotesque. But now, I need to figure out how this monster upsets the natural world and I need to figure out the encroachment. Now, the second of these is easier. This will be a sci-fi horror, so the encroachment comes because humanity is moving further into space. That would be fine for a “normal” sci fi story, but I want this to be scary. So, I need to introduce “normal” into the story. Humanity is moving into space, but we’re not on the cutting-edge frontier. Instead, we’ll have our setting in the Asteroid Belt. It’s the almost literal middle ground of our solar system. Humans are pushing further towards the outer planets, and living and working within the asteroids has normalized, establishing our sense of a natural world. The characters will be miners heading to the job. Monday morning, they clock in. They expect another day on the job. And then, the scary starts. I’ll actually have a bit of a double-encroachment in this story. Yes, humans are pushing out, but something has decided to push in, as well. The encounter, the borderland between the normalized inner planets and the unknown outer planets, should make for a natural, easy-to-understand crossing over between the natural (male) and the supernatural (female).

That finally brings us to how the monster will upset this natural order we’ve created. I want to borrow a bit from the different types of scary. I want the disruption of natural functions, of understandable law that ghosts bring. So, my monster won’t have a natural life-cycle. When it should be dead, it ain’t. It won’t have understandable biological functions. Also, it won’t be clearly animal or plant, but rather an unnatural combination of both. This will lean into the idea of the grotesque. It won’t fit into how the characters understand that it “should” work. I also want some demonic scary in there. For this, the monster will take control, will violate humans. It will force them to do things they don’t want to do, to act contrary to their wills.

I’ve got a few ideas how these concepts will manifest. Controlling the body, but leaving the mind intact, so you know, you see and feel, as it uses your body to do things. The victim will also retain control of their voice, so they can communicate the horror of what’s happening to them.

I’m off this weekend. I’d like to really get going on this story. I’ve more or less got all the research together, so I’ll be outlining for the next few days. Next weekend, I’ll be in upstate NY for Albany Anime Fest.