Massacring millions of people just minding their own business, or killing a cute little puppy in front of its young owner; watching strangers being sadistically tortured, or torturing someone in front of you; gauging the nightmarish sins of good and evil is a part of writing a good horror story. Why did the character do that just now, especially when they condemned the action not too long ago? What caused them to change from being a nice, lovable coward, to a cold, calculating murderer? 

Just how the author writes these characters is one way to understand what goes on in the mind of the writer. After all, Edgar Allen Poe has referenced tuberculosis in many of his works, especially since both his mother and wife died from it. Nathaniel Hawthorne references his strict upbringing through The Scarlet Letter. When masterfully done, every detail seems to have an effect on your morality, and every scene is like a bloody footprint down a hole of insanity.

But when does the writer overstep their boundaries? What makes the reader so repulsed, so morbidly disgusted, that they just have to put down the book, and think about continuing? From François’s 120 Days of Sodom, to Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, there were moments in these books where the authors have truly overstepped these boundaries. I myself had to ponder on the sanity of the authors when they were writing these stories. Yet at the same time, I’ve enjoyed torturing my own characters, so much so I’ve found myself replaying similar scenes in my mind, if only to draw out my characters’ own suffering.  

So the answer is: we don’t know. 

Every person is different. For instance, for every person who can’t stomach the death penalty, there will be another who praises it. There are many viewpoints when it comes to murder, rape, lying, stealing, adultery, anything at all. It’s because of these viewpoints we’ve incorporated into our stories that our own unique narrative comes out. Though we try to subscribe to a universal code of ethics, that code isn’t really representative of all of us. It’s this kind of basic knowledge horror novelists use to deconstruct the reader, horrifying them to no ends.

In other words, if you’re writing a particularly disturbing scene, it should meet your standards and yours alone. And after you’ve written what you’ve written, especially if you yourself have high morals, you should be haunted by that scene. You should be afraid to turn out the lights, knowing fully that somewhere in the shadows your demons are lurking by. You should understand that whatever you’ve written will never be tolerated in polite society. You should delve into the terrified minds of your characters, never minding the craving of normalcy of everyday life.

The horror genre disregards everything that normalcy stands for. We should be proud of the lines we cross in our minds, and that our works of art aren’t as conventional as other genres. There is no happy ending guaranteed, and if we do have one, then the price we pay is just as steep.

And even that reprieve doesn't last long.