Just recently, my mother and I decided to watch Annabelle: The Creation. It wasn’t as subtle as the other Conjuring movies, but it was good nevertheless. I had also finished a psychological suspense novel, Lara’s Journal, by A. Gavazzoni, which, of course, kept me on the edge of my seat. After a countless number of nightmares, sleeping in my room with the lights on, and literally running away from every dark corner in the room, I had to ask myself; what makes a good psychological horror?

After all, it is this very branch of horror that offers the most terrifying experiences without the use of excessive language, gore, or violence. In Carrie, you have a young, abused girl just waiting to snap; in Silence of the Lambs, you’ve got a cannibalistic serial killer with an eerily calm disposition. In all horrors, at the very least you’ve got some psychological component to them. But how do we write it? How do we terrify our readers with our characters’ demonic selves? How can we induce terror on Annabelle’s level? 

Through conflict. Below are three main conflicts associated with psychological horror. 

You vs. yourself 

Psychological horror deals with facing past mistakes, whether it be murdering someone, or cheating on someone, or brutally bullying someone to the point of suicide. The video game, Silent Hill, is a testament to that. After all, no one wants to deal with the ugly part of themselves, but it’s something the protagonist has to do, especially if they want to make it out of the monster’s lair/corrupted court room/sadistic game show alive. 

You vs. others

The protagonist’s relationships with other characters can also determine whether or not they succumb to the horrors in your book. Turning against each other, enslaving one another, falling in love with one another; these characters tend to form a group with each other, especially if a need for survival persists. This is where society rears its ugly head; generally, people will tend to follow an authority figure, or the person who’s the calmest in a group. That being said, the authority figure could be completely psychotic. Or cowardly. Or manipulative. Whichever works. 

You vs. the world  

This is the part of the book that we associate horror with the most. Whether it be Jonathan Maberry’s zombies, or Stephen King’s creepy, sadistic children, this conflict is where the protagonist would expect to see the most monsters, or any other physical obstacle preventing them from escaping. This conflict can also encompass moral conflicts. For instance, The Feral Sentence has the government sending prisoners to some abandoned island filled with monsters and other horrible criminals to survive on their own. And apparently, the world couldn’t care less. 

Psychological horror has a special place in horror. We don’t have to have the gory serial killer or the frightening monsters to make the book any less terrifying. There’s no need for elements other than the protagonist’s demented mind. After all, the novel is about the protagonist, however unstable they may be.