User blog comment:Bountybear/Is gore scary?/@comment-24685965-20140320044145

I can't speak for other people, but I can say that gore personally does not scare me. What you should undersand is that you aren't aiming to "scare" anyone, exactly.

You should aim, instead, to disturb or unnerve the reader. If something really violent happens in real life, it is scary because it actually happened. When you are telling a story, you cannot be too forceful or the readr will realize that you are trying too hard. You can make fairly mundane events creepy by describing them skillfully. Make good use of pacing and atmosphere. Learn about literature: use foreshadowing, motifs, etc to make your story more interesting. If you have to make something catatrophic happen in your story for it to be creepy, you are not a good writer.

Gore should be supplementary only. A story based entirely on gore is just exploitation.