Show, don't tell. It's the first rule of any sort of creative work. You show what you want the audience to feel, see, hear, smell, and maybe even taste. As many movies today prove, it is hard to do this in a visual work, but even more so when you are at the limits of the written language. So how can a horror writer improve their ability to show over telling? How can you make your audience cringe without telling them every detail? The key thing to remember is the scariest thing is a closed door.
For those unfamiliar, it is from King's book on writing horror called “Danse Macabre” during which talks about the fact that so many new writers will have never listened to radio dramas, gives this line:
“Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall'.”
That fear is what you should be going for in your writing and the key to showing over telling. When the monster is given a description that states that it is a vampire, a werewolf, or whatever you describe it as, the audience knows what to expect. If you tell them it is Cthulhu, they go “oh, squid guy, got it”. That does not help you in scaring them, that gives them expectations. Let's go with Cthulhu for a little longer, and go into how Lovecraft described our favorite beastie from the depths:
“The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”
Not exactly a crystal clear picture is it? Yet when we think the word, Cthulhu, we all have the same thought: a squid head, a pair of wings, probably deep green of some sort and very very big. We only think this due to the enormous amount of fan art and fan writings of the beast that have all seemed to settle on this ideal. Notice he does not mention color? It could be a shocking violet in Lovecraft's mind for all we know. But, that is not the point, the point is how Lovecraft describes what he calls indescribable. He gives a few words on what it might mimic, but lets your mind fill in the details.
Back to our closed door, you should always strive to describe what it is without more generalizations than needed to give a basic shape of the creature. Let the audience do the work for you. Focus if you can, on the details of the creature and describe it in the abstract. For example, let me give you a creature and see if you can guess what it is:
“It sort of human, tall and thin, thin enough where you wondered where it kept its guts. Its skin was tight and thin, tearing in places, reminded me of a piece of overly stretched fruit roll up, and its eyes were dark. Deathly dark. It ran toward the cabin, and headed for the window we were staring at it from, slamming its fists into it. I could see then that it was decaying, and the skin was an unnatural yellow.”
Got any ideas? It could be a variety of things. I will let you all decide what it is. Give me your best guesses, and your best descriptions of various creatures. Let's make it a fun game to keep going, maybe I will make it into a contest later! Anywho, just remember to show over tell and if you have any ideas of topics I should write about, send them to me!