Using Typical Genre Elements to Generate Horror Story Plots

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

By isolating the types of characters, actions, settings, processes, and motives or causes upon which horror movies are typically based, we can devise a plot generator.

Although this is a basic list, a starter, as it were, which can be extended by further considerations of horror, both on the sound stage and on the page, it suggests the method.

Who? What types of characters generally appear again and again in the horror genre?

Protagonist, antagonist, victim, authority figure, expert, parents, siblings, tormentor, extraterrestrial, supernatural being

What? What types of actions do many horror stories represent? In other words, what type of activity occupies the characters? What do they do, on a sustained basis, throughout the film or most of the film?

Filming, capturing, escaping, experimenting, rescuing, conceiving, avenging, exploring, invading

When? Where? What settings (times and places) are typical of horror fiction?

Isolated property, closed public property, private property, laboratory, spaceship, suburbs, school, town, forest

How? What processes are typical of the horror genre? In other words, what type of series of actions forms the basis, or vehicle, of the story's plot, as opposed to the actions of the characters themselves? What propels the story as a whole?

Traveling, visiting, creating, reproducing, disturbing, working, persecuting, vacationing, possessing, exorcising, trespassing

Why? What are the motives of the protagonist and the antagonist? If one or both of these characters is (are) otherworldly (e. g., extraterrestrial or supernatural) or a physical force (e. g., energy or disease), what causes them to “act”?

Revenge, financial profit, escape, conquest, insanity, invasion, survival, destruction

Now, it is possible to generate plots by mixing and matching these typical foundational elements. Here are a few examples.

This example uses the first words from each category:

Protagonist films on isolated property while traveling during a vendetta.

To make the plot more concrete, substitute more specific terms for the generic ones; in doing so, it is all right to eliminate an element that no longer seems to fit; in the following revision, “traveling” has been omitted.

The camera operator is hired as a member of a film crew shooting a documentary concerning life inside a prison so he can avenge his father's death by killing the inmate who murdered him.

Here is another example, based on the third term in each of the categories. In this example, it was necessary to add a noun after “by creating”:

A victim escapes from private property by creating a ruse in order to be free.

Again, to make the plot more concrete, substitute more specific terms for the generic ones; in doing so, it is all right to add or alter an element if doing so is desirable and appropriate.

An enslaved woman escapes from an island resort by disguising herself as a guest so she can leave with other departing visitors.