Anon2024
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As someone who makes youtube videos I'm sure you already know the things I'm going to say about it... well here it goes... my subjective opinion.I never take part in these so why not. How about my spoopy Haloween short stories?
From what I understand you're either going for a scary tone, or a sarcastic tone. I couldn't quite tell but I felt your story leaned more towards sarcastic and bombastic and your "scarryyyyyy" word there probably leans into it.
If you're trying to be funny... well I didn't really find any of the stories funny. If you're trying to be scary then there is a tone problem. I mean that as in the tone of the 1st person in the shorts don't match horror, and the tone in the 3rd person don't really settle on a scene long enough.
Here's excerpt from Dossier 36
In a gurgling pool of his own blood in front of me is this man, at least I think he's a man because holy shit, what has happened to him? His skin is torn out and warped in shunks. It looked like some grizzly tore into his skin with some foot long claws. Big gashes exposing tracks of inards to the world, but with hooked claws because this shit is pulled outward– inverted– the skin folding into itself where these giant three gashes are, and they are everywhere: legs, arms, right through the fucking chests. There's bones lifted into the night sky on that injury with little yellow flecks of fat on 'em, had to be broken in at least three places to get that angle. And of course you can see the organs and shit in the wound itself.
Yeah, so it was bad and you'd think I'd throw up at this point, ready to at the start, but not even once. Instead, I'm in a cold sweat. My fingers try to tap out 9-1-1 with my blurry vision weighing them down and I'm missing all sorts of numbers.
The problem is you're giving the extremely "scared" thoughts of the narrator. By giving those thoughts and using a writing style that is too simple and acting as though it was difficult to describe it's hard to see the horror. The biggest horror is in literature is the horror of the unknown. This scene would work well in a movie/animation or in a comic where there is sound involved but if you're trying to paint a picture for the reader it loses the horror portion.
In simpler terms, it’s difficult to establish tone if the narrator themselves is reacting. Instead I was more distracted by the narrators feelings over the actual monster or situation.
Being scary in literature requires a consistent tone that puts the reader on edge and makes them question what is on the other side of what they're scared of.
As far as the short with the best tone I'd say it's Hush, Baby.
The thing is "fear" is experienced differently by different people so while some might find Dossier or Mirror Joe scary, there will be a large portion who won't.
If I had to rank in terms of horror:
1. Hush Baby
2. Objects in Mirror.
3. Clown Hospital
4. Dossier 36
There is an effort to establish the clown in Clown Hospital but there isn't much exploration of the unknown intentions of the clown until the very end when the victims are stitched. Not only that but the Clown didn’t have any scenes where it scared the characters in 3rd person and there isn’t much question.
Also, horror clowns will always be compared to It.
This is just my subjective opinion.
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