User blog comment:ChristianWallis/Is the Written Word Scary?/@comment-4849011-20160901010732

First off, I’ve admitted on my user page that I’m squeamish, so you won’t see me claiming nothing scares me. Second, I think some great points have been made. I’ll throw in my two cents too.

I read creepypastas because I like finding good stories. I find a lot of duds, but I also find brilliant works. Is the written word scary? Not always, but it can be very scary. Sometimes the horror is subtle and other times it's graphic, but it can be scary. While we’re talking about literature, there are some works that are not considered horror, but are terrifying. House of Stairs by William Sleator is science-fiction, but I’d also consider it psychological horror, and there are non-fiction accounts of disease, addiction, kidnapping, and war that are nightmarish and bone-chilling. I’ll also note that films start out as written scripts (unless you were to improvise an entire movie). The reason some movies fail is poor/botched execution of a good manuscript or screenplay. Movies can also fail because the script was terrible to begin with.

Whether the written word has jumpscares depends on how you define the term. If you use the term to mean a sudden, shocking scene, then you could argue that Edgar Allan Poe had some stories with jumpscares, like “The Black Cat” or “Berenice” (I’ve read both versions of “Berenice”, and even the censored version makes me wonder why people are still writing horror stories. You'd think people would say, “All right, that’s it, let’s close up shop right here! Nothing could be creepier than this!”). There are moments of sudden horror or violence that come from nowhere, yet they sort of flow organically too. In other words, they’re not shock value, but scenes that relate to the overall narrative. A relative of mine has some Stephen King books, and one day, out of curiosity, I picked up the copy of Cujo. The scene I came across featured a girl getting sick. As she vomited in the bathroom, the mother thought of a plan for dealing with what she assumed was a stomach bug or the flu. When she came in to check on her daughter, however, she found that she had vomited copious amounts of what appeared to be blood. It was a shocking and frightening scene, but it wasn’t just for shock value. It showed how something that seems ordinary can turn out to be terrifying.

I’ve read comics and even make my own, and I say that anything that can be said about literature and movies can be said about comic books. There are people trying way too hard and there are people creating great stories. A horrifying panel may appear, but I believe that a line of narration or dialogue (or even a sound effect) can be horrifying too.