With the increasing interest in movies such as Get Out, The Purge, and Us, many people are turning to the ailing conditions of our society for horrific inspirations. From religious decadences to psychopathic cults, social horrors have had a prominent place in literature for centuries. They make us fear the most mundane objects in our lives, but they also force us to make fun of the social injustices in our daily lives. It’s a sick twist to satire, and it makes it all the more entertaining to read.

But what makes a good social horror story? How can we write these stories without getting too political, or even preachy? Most importantly, how can we make our message terrifying?

Think of a Cause
Everyone has something to fight for. Whether it be human rights, animals rights, or even the right to our own freedoms, we all have a cause we rally behind. Believe it or not, humanity has a natural disposition to help each other out. It doesn’t matter if it’s biological, emotional, psychological, or otherwise, we have this sense of purpose that we’re instilled with from the moment we’re born, and when that’s taken away from us, that’s when we start freaking out.

We freak out when we watch innocent people getting murdered for a profit. We freak out when we see injustice in front of us. We freak out when our supposedly wonderful world suddenly cracks, replaced by cruel reality in that not everyone is nice and friendly. And when we see those cruelties, we tend to focus on that, and only that. So it’s only natural that we want the person who committed these cruelties to be punished.

Think of the Worst in Humanity
But because of this, we get frustrated when the villain doesn’t get their just deserts. And it’s not just them; essentially, they represent the worst in our fictional universes. We think of our words being silenced, our voices that don’t matter, our own value as humans being degraded until we become a shadow of ourselves.

In social horrors, we’re forced to confront what other people could do to us. We don’t have the luxury to hide behind fantastical monsters or a movie starred mean girl who could get run over by a bus. If anything, we have to see our own ugliness in the spotlight. We have to abandon our own innocence in exchange for the nightmarish fact that we’re going to have to grow up, whether we want to or not.

Then Combine Them
Whenever we think of the most terrifying thing in the world, sometimes, we don’t think of supernatural creatures. We think of other people, simply because they’re the ones we interact with the most. We see their atrocities the most, and because of that, we prepare for them. We don’t prepare for vampires or demons or witches, but we do prepare for the people closest to us because we don’t know who would turn. After all, none of us want to be a statistic, whether that be a missing person in a police report or a victim in a mass shooting, or even a casualty from an almost dystopian government.

Social horrors are a good way to get people to pay attention to the issues going on right now. It introduces concepts and develops conversations that people wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Even so, because the genre is a part of the horror world, it would be best for you to add elements of horror to it, whether that be thrills, or terrors, or simple suspense. It’s a good way to get your reader involved.