The horror genre has always had and always will have a special place in literature. Horror is terror and destruction, it’s death and damnation, torment, nightmares and madness. Yet horror is also all about everything life affirming the human experience has to offer us.

Horror gives us a safe place to explore the deep, sometimes dark, universal aspects of being human. Horror grants us a catharsis from fear, provides a tantalizing opportunity to explore the taboo. It teases us with spine-tingling threats, and begs us to question what we truly love and fear, and how far we would go to preserve what’s special to us.

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• A poultry farmer is caught supplying human flesh instead of chicken meat. 

• You wake up suspended upside down. Complete darkness. 

• You hear children’s laughter coming from your backyard. You look outside and your three-year-old kid is playing by herself. 

• You look at your video baby monitor in the middle of the night and see yourself standing over your baby’s crib. 

• You discover your best friend knows the simple cure for a devastating disease that is decimating the entire world but refuses to give it up. 

• “There are things you’ll never want to know about me, about where I was born. If you hear the truth, it will kill you or you will kill me. ”

• A man wakes up next to a dead child. 

• You have a recurring dream where a wind-up rabbit with a toy drum is sitting on your window ledge all night, tapping away. One morning you wake up and can’t stop hearing the tapping. 

• What is the least scary thing you can think of? Make it the reason everyone in a small town is dying a gruesome, painful death. 

• You wake up in the morning. Everything is normal. Until you see yourself in the mirror and you have a woman/man’s face (choose something different to you) that has been horribly disfigured. 

• You’re eating breakfast. The day is bright and sunny and you’re in a good mood. Blood rains from the sky and your life changes for the worse. 

• A woman lives alone in the penthouse of a very tall building. She hasn’t left her home in days. She finds her bathroom door is locked from the inside. 

• You wake up with your little girl climbing into bed with you. It’s warm and comfortable and you snuggle back to sleep. Come morning, you’re only clutching her nightgown. Besides that nightgown and your own memory, there is no trace at all that she ever existed. 

• A picture is shared on one of your social media accounts of you sleeping. You have always lived alone and haven’t ever had anyone stay over. 

• Babies in the neonatal unit are disappearing. Their parents have no recollection of them ever being born. 

• The employees at a small-town discount department store are all suddenly obsessed with geometric shapes. 

• “Even if we had a way to get out of here, are you really sure you’d want to stay alive after everything?”

• “That chill in the air, that’s death. ”

• A woman on a solo cross-country road trip keeps seeing the same car throughout her journey. 

• A wife from a happy marriage suddenly demands a divorce. 

• A horror novelist’s assistant uncovers some disturbing truths behind the novel their employer is currently working on. 

• Children start killing their parents. 

• “I can’t tell you what I’ve done until I figure out which part of it is real. ”

• A young girl finds she’s able to enter an alternate reality through her art journal. 

• A blogger becomes obsessed with a local murder story. 

• “There’s no such thing as a ghost, and as such, there’s no such thing as a haunted house. End of conversation. ”

• A popular TV program is linked to a series of violent acts committed by otherwise normal people. 

• A man starts an affair with his boss and starts an unsettling series of events in motion. 

• A couple mourning the death of their daughter decide to take a holiday. While away, they meet a strange woman who knows more about their daughter than they ever did. 

• A young man becomes a protégé of a serial killer. 

• “You’ve got two choices, death or damnation. ”

• The devil takes over heaven. 

• A socially ostracized teenage girl witnesses unspeakable events taking place in the backyard of the local pastor. 

• A parasite invades a small community through a batch of flu vaccines. 

• A young boy is separated from his group on a school camping trip in the woods. He encounters a she-wolf with mysterious powers and then has an important decision to make. 

• A plastic surgeon goes to extreme measures to rebuild her husband’s face. 

• A police officer gets involved with bringing down a religious cult and discovers a strange life form. 

• A young couple move into a dream apartment ready to start a new life. The apartment is perfect, but perfection comes at a price. 

• Animals everywhere start communicating via telepathy. 

• A recently widowed woman moves to a new town on the other side of the country and learns a startling truth about her husband’s death. 

• A man’s bones start growing inside his body. 

• A group of soldiers are on an undercover mission in enemy territory when they discover an enemy far worse than the one they’ve been fighting. 

• A young man sits alone, drinking coffee, looking out the window at the street below. He decides then and there, out of nowhere, today is the day he will find out what it’s like to kill a person. 

• Walking home one night, a woman sees two cats staring at one another from either side of the street. Her life is never the same from that point on. 

• “I’ve seen a lot of animal attacks in my time. And this isn’t like any of them. ”

• A young boy is haunted after he witnesses his best friend’s murder. 

• A man tries to kill himself and wakes up in the hospital unsure if he’s dead. 

• A pair of teenage siblings suspect their parents are involved with demonology. 

• An overbearing mother asks her overly coddled son to commit a minor crime. 

• A man comes home late at night and claims he was abducted by aliens that looked exactly like his boss. 

• A vegan grocery store worker is struck down by a flesh-eating virus. 

• A couple is having an intimate night alone when two men break into their house thinking no one is home. 

• “I’m not insane. They’re real. They did this to me. Here, I’ll prove it. ”

• A woman can see the dreams other people will have the following night. 

• You wake up and your husband/wife is holding a knife to your throat. 

• You wake up and you are holding a knife to your husband/wife’s throat. 

• A woman visits the house she grew up in and discovers a disgusting truth about her family. 

• A rural family who lives without technology are forced to move into a bustling city. 

• As an act of social charity, a wealthy man takes a random homeless man to dinner. The homeless man dies soon after, and the man is blamed. 

• An artist receives inspiration from a dark entity. 

• During a technology-free weekend, a mother in a young family makes a horrifying discovery about someone close to her. 

• A woman calls the police to report a murder, but from the moment she speaks, no one believes her. 

• Your young child starts talking in fluent German one day without ever having heard the language being spoken. 

• Your grandfather tells you a secret about how he came into the fortune that’s been supporting your family for three generations. 

• You’re walking through a cemetery and suddenly realize you can’t find your way out. 

• You find a weird key. 

• Suddenly everyone in your life really hates you for no reason you can understand. 

• A nun and a priest are having an affair. The priest is driven to horrendous ends to keep their guilt a secret. 

• The dead rise as flesh-eating zombies but only attack a certain group in a community. 

• A family is separated after an earthquake and finds themselves in alternate realities. 

• A group of psychic spies are employed to a demonic assignment. 

• You discover your home is haunted by a demon-possessed ghost. 

• A mark that looks exactly like a tiny face appears on your toddler’s forehead. 

• A ghost hunter falls in love with a spirit. 

• In a dystopian future where nothing natural grows, a man starts growing the first vegetables anyone has seen in generations. 

• Animals all over the world start interbreeding. The offspring have dark powers. 

• Your elderly mother is abducted without a trace and the officials are blaming you. 

• You move to a small town and discover something sinister about the local knitting group. 

• A troupe of dancers can control minds with their dance. 

• A heavily pregnant woman wakes up and there’s no sign of her having ever been pregnant. 

• A man develops a rash after an afternoon of light gardening. By night, he’s in the hospital on life support. 

• A team of scientists lock down a small town, and nobody knows why. 

• Your company offers you a free resort weekend as a bonus. You accept but soon regret the decision. 

• An old woman lives next door to an early education child care center and discovers a dark truth about the children. 

• A supermarket manager is arrested for a murder he knows nothing about and has zero connection to. 

• A zoo volunteer controls the bears with his mind. 

• A musician writes a tune that literally makes people’s ears bleed. 

• Your girlfriend breaks up with you and you’re sure you’ll never find another girl like her. Until you meet a girl exactly like her in every way. 

• “I’ve told you a million times, stop making that face. If the wind changes, you’ll be stuck like that forever!”

• “She has the kind of smile that looks like it might just bite you. ”

• You’re having a quiet night in front of the TV and suddenly your walls burst open and your home is overrun with rats. 

• Characters in a horror story you’re writing start appearing in your actual life as real people. 

• “I’m only going to ask you one more time. What the hell is that noise?”

• One day you wake up and can hear the thoughts of colors. 

• You start to hear the internet in your mind. 

• “Does this look like human skin to you?”

• A woman wakes up to find her cat eating her toes and she can’t feel it. 

• A man who lives a life of strict order suddenly starts engaging in bizarre random acts that become increasingly violent. 

• A player goes on a deadly rampage in the middle of a big finals game. 

• A father suspects the family au pair is less than human. 

• “I can’t be held accountable. I told him if he didn’t turn off the television, I would kill him. He brought it on himself. ”