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Can we talk about how many writing prompts are just horror openings?
I was browsing through the top prompts from last month and something jumped out at me. Out of the 50 highest upvoted prompts, 34 of them were some variation of "you wake up and something is wrong." I actually counted them during my lunch break at the help desk. It's like horror has completely taken over this community. I get that creepy stories are fun to write, but it feels like half of them are just the same "there's a monster in your closet" setup with different words. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good horror prompt now and then, but there's way more to fiction than just suspense and dread. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just picking bad days to browse? Maybe I'm missing the good non-horror prompts because they get buried too fast.
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jake74720d agoMost Upvoted
Not quite right to lump all horror prompts together like that. A good chunk of those top prompts are actually psychological thrillers or eerie mysteries, not just monster-in-the-closet stuff, they lean way more on dread than actual horror. You might be skipping over some solid non-horror gems if you're only glancing at titles instead of reading the actual setups.
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jenny_lane1220d ago
Yeah I gotta admit I skimmed some of those titles and wrote them off as just "oh great another thing gonna eat my face" but then I actually read a few deeper. One about a lighthouse keeper who keeps seeing a second moon that nobody else notices? That one got me good. But also the other day I saw a prompt about a guy who finds a locked room in his own house and the setup was just "you don't remember building it" and that's not really horror, that's just weird and mysterious in a good way. So maybe I'm the problem here, like the guy who complains about too many action movies but only watches the trailers.
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Jenny you got a point with that lighthouse prompt, that one's a standout even for me. But jake's right that a lot of those aren't straight horror, they're more like unsettling mysteries that just borrow the mood. Maybe the problem isn't the prompts themselves, it's that people slap a creepy title on anything these days and it shoots to the top.
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