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Quote for the week
"I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one's nature."
~Anthony Hopkins
A shadow is darkness created when an object obstructs a source of light. It is hard to imagine a horror story without shadows.
Shadows are a great way to create a spooky atmosphere. They give monsters and villains a place to hide, or a place for the reader to imagine they are hiding.
Shadows have the ability to stretch out and twist themselves into strange shapes. Often a perfectly innocent object will cast a menacing shadow. Or maybe the object or person is not so innocent, and the shadow shows their true nature.
Shadows cannot exist without light. It is the light that turns an innocent hat rack into a horned demon or a tree branch into a monster's claw. Try not to make your whole story too dark, or you will lose the shadows. A spooky castle in a dark forest at midnight with a thunderstorm raging all around is definitely frightening, but there is something even more unsettling about the shadow of a tiny cloud in the middle of a sunlit meadow.
Dark colored animals such as crows stick out like a sore thumb in the sunlight, but are camouflaged when they move through the shadows of the trees where they live. Characters with a "dark" side may be more at home in the shadows than the light, while characters who are more at home in the light may have to learn to move through the shadows to survive a horror story.
Shadows can just help set the scene, or they can be malevolent characters themselves. A faceless shadow creature who could slip in and out of the darkness is more frightening than the most grotesque monster. A shadow creature who could become a creature of light when necessary would be especially powerful.
Something to try: Write a horror story that involves creatures of the shadows.
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Horror/Scary: March 04, 2015 Issue [#6859]
