The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works

1

The World as Story

Everything you need to know about life can be found in stories. Why? Stories define life. And the philosophies developed over the course of human history inform and respond to both. As a result, understanding the anatomy of a story is about much more than writing. It’s also about knowing how to live.

In these pages you will find in-depth discussions of the fourteen major story genres that give shape to human existence. You will learn how to write them—and how to live them—in a way that transcends the ordinary.

Genres are types of stories: Detective, Love, Action, Fantasy, or Science Fiction, for example. When we understand how genres work, and what they tell us, we can apply their lessons in writing as well as in life. For example, did you know:

Action is about being successful, not morally right.

Myth represents a journey to understand oneself and gain immortality.

Memoir is not about the past; it’s about creating your future.

Fantasy is about finding the magic in the world and in ourselves to turn life into art.

Detective fiction shows us how to think successfully by comparing different stories to learn what is true.

Love stories reveal that happiness comes from mastering the moral act of loving another person.

As we struggle to make sense of our place in the world, we think we have a clear grasp of the problems. But the problems we face today are based on how the world appears to work. Plato referred to these appearances as shadows. When we don’t understand how the world truly is—its deep structure—how can we fit into it?

The solution is to use stories as a model.

Story is innate to human beings. It’s how we learn. It’s how we process the world and how we find our place in it. If you understand story, you’ve got a framework for life.

Story has always been fundamental to passing information from one generation to another. Whether it’s oral storytelling around the fire or parables in the Bible, story is how we record and communicate life lessons.

The earliest hunter-gatherer societies understood the tremendous importance of story in their everyday lives. But as societies developed agriculture and technology advanced, a different mindset began to take over. Human lives became dominated by the work required to eat, and later to turn a profit. Once people started living in large enough groups, religions formed to give people ethical guidelines for how to live together. Stories were considered a means to that end.

This move from the primacy of story to an art practiced only by the lucky few is expressed in this famous comment by John Adams:

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.¹

This quote describes an order of operations that has been a fundamental tenet of Western societies for centuries, if not millennia. It shows up in the work of Aristotle, arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all time. I began my first book, The Anatomy of Story, with Aristotle, because he was the key figure who established our modern division of knowledge. He first wrote his Metaphysics and then, among other works, his Ethics and later his Poetics.

Since metaphysics is the study of first principles, this order makes perfect sense. Ethics is about how to live a moral life. Poetics is the theory and practice of storytelling. For Aristotle, that included exploring the main genres of his time: epic poetry, tragedy, and comedy.

A version of this hierarchy of knowledge is what we’re taught to this day. We’re told that math and science are essential for our future success, while painting, music, and theater are extracurricular activities. Stories are diversions, something to take our minds off our troubles after a long day. They are something a few creative people write, and even fewer get paid for, while the rest of us enjoy stories in our spare time.

Yet there’s a different way of looking at things. Stories don’t just serve as forms of entertainment; they encapsulate everything from the basic organizing principles of the world to how we should live our lives in it. In this sense, everything is about poetics.

KEY POINT: Seeing the world through the prism of story marks a revolutionary change in how we look at the world, and it’s the reverse of what we’ve been taught.

All the things we thought were bigger than story, like morality, culture, society, religion, sports, and war, are simply different kinds of stories. We humans are essentially storytelling animals.

Consider this quote from Richard Flanagan’s novel First Person (2018). Scam artist Ziggy Heidl explains the reason for his success:

I made it up. Every day, just like you. Like a writer … What do you think a businessman is? A politician? They’re sorcerers—they make things up. Stories are all that we have to hold us together. Religion, science, money—they’re all just stories.

Story is a philosophy of life expressed through characters, plot, and emotion. It shows life as art. That’s why stories are the universal building blocks of religion and always have been. Story transcends specific religions, each of which is a collection of stories about how to live an ethical life. We find these stories in the Old Testament (Judaism) and New Testament (Christianity), the Koran (Islam), the Upanishads (Hinduism), the I Ching (Confucianism), and many other texts. The universal religion of story is why the novels, television series, films, plays, and video games we encounter today define the culture of the secular world.

Storytelling influences every aspect of a person’s life. Consider how business runs through advertising. Everything we buy and sell is part of a story. Parenting is full of storytelling. We tell stories to our kids at bedtime. We tell stories to our teenagers to prevent them from doing drugs. And we need to be better storytellers than the others who try to influence them.

At work, we need to tell a compelling story to drum up business. A good story can determine whether we can pay the rent.

Politics uses story to exercise power. Adlai Stevenson once observed, In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke’—but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’² Turning words into action is the central distinction in communication.

KEY POINT: Stories are maps of humanity.

Why have some ancient myths endured for centuries? They’re not just entertainment; they’re instructional. First, they explain the physical world. For example, the story of Persephone and why we have winter. Do we still think the seasons work that way? No, but it helps us to make peace with colder days and longer nights.

Myths also give us social structures. An epic is classically defined as the story of an individual or family whose actions determine the fate of a nation. Homer’s epic poem the Iliad shows how monarchical rule combined with personal alliances and jealousies caused a ten-year war that destroyed everyone caught in its grinding slaughter.

KEY POINT: If human life is poetics, the knowledge we get from story is the greatest knowledge of all.

Once we understand that all of human life is a form of story, the next step becomes clear: genres are the portals to this world.

Each of the various genres—Detective, Love, Fantasy, and the like—is a unique window onto how a particular aspect of the world works and how best to confront it. Writers have a unique perspective because it’s their job to think in terms of different worlds and deeper structures. If they want to write stories that will achieve critical and popular success, they need to consider elements such as morality and point of view. Morality refers to how a character’s actions affect others. That’s why, in the Crime chapter, we discuss the moral code of both the hero and their opponent. While all stories require a point of view, the Detective genre explores the way this fact variously limits and empowers the human mind.

The purpose of this book is to reveal to the world the deep structures of story and genre. That’s why this book can be read on two levels. The first provides specific, technical information about how to write great stories that sell. The second explores philosophical issues with the kind of X-ray vision that can enrich and change everyone’s life.

Rules of Play

The only way a writer can be successful in any medium is to play by the three unwritten rules that define storytelling today.

RULE 1

The Storytelling Business Is All About Buying and Selling Genres.

Genres are far more than types of stories. They are the all-stars of the story world that have achieved immense popular success over centuries. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories the business wants to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.

Each major genre has fifteen to twenty specialized beats, or key plot events, that determine that form. These plot beats have more to do with the success of a story than any other element by far.

These beats are also why people choose to read or watch a particular genre again and again. If these classic plot beats are not present, the story will not be popular. Period. For example, a Love story without the first dance beat will have Love story fanatics up in arms.

Genres Are Story Systems

At the professional level, the game is won or lost by how well the writer executes their particular genre. This is a major challenge. Many writers believe they can master their genre simply by tossing in a few tropes of the form. A trope is an individual story element such as a character, a plot device, a theme in variation, a recurring image, or even a tagline of dialogue. The best authors understand that tropes are just the sprinkles on top. The real mechanism for a compelling bestseller is the structure beneath the tropes.

The genre beats connect under the surface to form an entire story system that expresses a unique philosophy of life. Each beat is effective because it has been set up as part of a deeper structure through which the writer is leading the audience. The sequence of plot beats is what knocks the audience out.

KEY POINT: You have to hit all the plot beats of the particular genre(s) you’ve chosen.

Each genre uses a specific strategy to express its philosophy. The great architect Louis Sullivan referred to this as form follows function. Philosophically speaking, genres are the Platonic forms, the structures beneath the shadows that truly explain our lives. Every story presents a particular challenge; the genre provides the structure for solving it.

KEY POINT: The main function of the genre beats is to express the unique theme/life philosophy of that form.

The Never-Ending Diversity of Genres

Story has evolved and diversified over thousands of years. Genres are the product of various influences: the human mind, the nature of the medium (novel, film, or television), and the particular culture where the genre first developed.

Depending on how one classifies genres, there could be six, seven, thirty-two, hundreds, or even thousands. Here, we will work through what I believe to be the fourteen most influential of them.

KEY POINT: The fourteen major genres in this book, alone or in combination, compose 99 percent of storytelling forms today, including novels, film, television, plays, and video games.

The fourteen major genres are: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming-of-Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love. Note: the order of presentation is critical.

Many of these genres cluster into families that share certain characteristics: Myth (Myth, Action, Western), Crime (Detective, Crime, Thriller, Gangster), and Speculative Fiction (Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy).

Each of the fourteen major genres can be broken down into subgenres, and we will discuss the most important. For example, the Caper (Heist) story is a popular form of Action and Crime. These subgenres diversify into hundreds of sub-subgenres, but the main beats are the same.

KEY POINT: Writers should know how all the major genres work.

Why? First, having some knowledge of all the forms helps you write your specific genre better. Second, you can combine genres in a way the world hasn’t yet seen. This increases your odds of success.

RULE 2

Popular Stories Today Combine 3–4 Genres.

Mastering one genre used to be enough. No longer. The problem with that strategy is that there are few stories today limited to a single form. Instead, most stories are a combination of two, three, or even four genres.

Mixing genres is how the game is played in every medium, no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, who you know, or how you market your work. The storytelling strategy of mixing genres has been responsible for the success of hit movies and bestselling books since George Lucas used it in Star Wars.

Imagine, if you can, a pre–Star Wars world. In the summer of 1975, Jaws was released in movie theaters throughout America. This realistic Horror story was based on a bestselling book. When Jaws turned out to be a monster hit, the film industry saw that the game went beyond the U.S. market. It was now about worldwide box office.

What was Jaws’ storytelling strategy? A single genre done extremely well. Then, in 1977, Star Wars: A New Hope hit theaters. There was a paradigm shift in popular storytelling strategy.

My Star Wars Epiphany

Let me tell you about the revelation that changed my writing life. I was sitting in a packed theater munching on popcorn. Then a massive space battleship came over the top of my head. I stopped eating and gasped, as did everyone else in the audience. That moment had such grandeur and power that everybody there knew we were in for the ride of our lives.

Surely, this is where the expression blown away was born. Yes, I was watching Star Wars for the first time. And while it played, the strangest thing happened. I experienced a feeling of pure delight. In 95 percent of stories, I could predict what would happen three beats ahead. But not with Star Wars. Here was one story beat after another I didn’t see coming. This was nonstop excitement.

Better yet, these beats were coming at top speed. I was totally overwhelmed. The recognition began to dawn on me about what was really happening. I began to understand what writer-director George Lucas was doing under the surface.

This was obviously a Fantasy in outer space, which meant elements of Science Fiction. But that wasn’t all. I loved the classic Western, but it had long since died. Now I was seeing all the Western beats in outer space. It was wild! And who doesn’t love King Arthur, one of the great Myth stories? I noticed some of those beats as well.

Ever wonder where all those ever-popular lightsabers came from? They’re from the samurai movie, a subgenre of Action. Since college, I’d been a big fan of Japanese films like Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress.

As a result, the plot was dense. And instead of getting the beats of one genre, like Fantasy, we were getting beats of Science Fiction, Myth, and Action, in rapid-fire succession.

KEY POINT: Star Wars was exciting because the writer was weaving beats from multiple genres in a single movie.

A revolution for writers unfolded right in front of my eyes. BSW (Before Star Wars), it was a single-genre story world. ASW (After Star Wars), Hollywood knew we were in a multigenre universe. Popular stories from then on were going to be all about mixing genres.

In the last twenty years, this has only intensified. Giving the audience more story for their hard-earned dollars has been one of the major trends in worldwide storytelling in every medium.

Mixing Genres

As important as this strategy is, mixing genres is tougher than it looks. Combining the beats of every genre can create chaos. Sometimes the beat from one genre will prevent the writer from being able to use the beat from another. The trick lies in how you combine the beats and which beats you choose.

One technique for mixing genres is to combine story forms that don’t normally go together. For example, a big reason why Inception was so popular is that it combined two genres that don’t usually appear in the same story: Science Fiction and Caper (a subform of Action and Crime).

Another example is The Godfather. On the surface, it appears to be simply a Gangster story. In fact, it combines Gangster with Myth and Fairy Tale (Fantasy). One classic scene in the film—the moment at the hospital when Michael discovers his father is about to be assassinated—is straight out of a Horror story.

Combining genres requires two things above all:

You must know the story beats for every genre you’re using, even if you don’t include all those beats in the story.

You must be able to apply techniques from the other genres to write your own story well.

This is why we will go through the plot beats for all fourteen major genres in this book. Writers can begin by reading about their chosen genre, but they can also dip into other chapters to see what genres they want to combine. Nonwriters will see why they love their favorite story forms so much, and appreciate them more.

RULE 3

To Rise Above the Crowd, the Writer Must Transcend the Primary Genre.

Executing the beats of the genre is the basic requirement for any story. But it takes you only so far. While necessary, it’s not sufficient. Yes, you’ve written a solid genre story. But it’s the same story everyone else has written. There’s no creativity, no surprise, no way of setting yourself apart as an original author.

The word transcend means to rise above or go beyond the limits (to something abstract). The three main ways to transcend a genre are to

twist the story beats;

express the genre’s life philosophy in the theme;

explore the story forms of life unique to the genre.

In this book I’ll show you how to do all three.

Transcending the Genre 1: Twist the Story Beats

KEY POINT: The first way to transcend the genre is to twist the story beats. Instead of breaking the rules, you’re bending them.

When you twist the beats, your audience still gets the pleasure of encountering the beats they expect. They also get the pleasure of seeing the beats done in a way they’ve never seen before.

One way to twist the beats is by changing their order. The sequence of genre beats creates certain expectations in the reader’s mind. After a while, those expectations dull their vision. When you twist all the beats, people light up because you are undercutting their expectations of what will happen. Now you’ve shown them how the world works in a new way. You hook the audience because the view is something they recognize—it’s still their world—but it’s recast in a different light.

All of the very successful things on television have come from ideas which are in genres that people know, or know something of, but are done in a different way. And people flock to something they haven’t seen.

—JOHN WELLS, writer, ER, The West Wing, Shameless

Transcending the Genre 2: Express the Genre’s Life Philosophy in the Theme

Transcending the genre means more than twisting the unique story beats to give audiences something they haven’t seen. Hidden below the surface of these beats is a philosophy, an entire way of seeing and living in the world. This is expressed through the theme, which is the author’s view of the best way to live.

We will refer to this life philosophy embedded in each genre as the Mind-Action story view. This refers to how the human mind sees the world and then acts accordingly. Like the slides of a kaleidoscope, each genre has a different point of view about how the world fits together. Each offers a unique philosophy for how to live well.

Expressing the genre’s philosophy is the key to any story you write. This unique Mind-Action story view is what really hooks the reader. In turn, drama infuses the genre’s lesson for how to live with tremendous emotional power. This is the story gold.

Each genre’s recipe for how to live well is based on its fundamental concern. For example:

HORROR: Confront death and face your ghosts from the past.

ACTION: 90 percent of success is taking action.

MYTH: Seek immortality by finding your destiny in this life.

MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE: Examine your life to create your true self.

SCIENCE FICTION: Make the right choices now to ensure a better future for all.

CRIME: Protect the weak and bring the guilty to justice.

COMEDY: Success comes when you strip away all facades and show others who you really are.

WESTERN: When you help others make a home, you create a civilization where everyone is free to live their best life.

GANGSTER: Don’t be enslaved by absolute power and money or you will pay the ultimate price.

FANTASY: Discover the magic in yourself that makes life itself an art form.

DETECTIVE AND THRILLER: Look for the truth and assign guilt in spite of the danger.

LOVE: Learning how to love is the key to happiness.

One of the advantages of using genres is you can express powerful and complex themes through the form’s deep structure.

Transcending the Genre 3: Explore the Story Forms of Life Unique to the Genre

Looking at the world through the prism of story gives us X-ray vision into life itself.

KEY POINT: The idea that the mind works through story leads to another revolutionary idea about transcending genres: each major human activity is its own story form.

Morality, culture, business, sports, war, religion, politics, justice, society, and the mind are some of the grand activities that make up human life. They are also complex works of art expressed through the emotional and dramatic form of story. At its best, each genre explores one or more of these story forms of life.

The Order of Genres

For me, the most revelatory part of coming to understand genres was the realization that they exist in a hierarchy of their own, or what might be called a ladder of enlightenment. Perhaps the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s greatest insight is that every step up the ladder of human enlightenment also reveals the flaw that holds someone back. Like sand in the oyster, that flaw is what creates the next step of growth.

The hierarchy of genres is based on three things: the primary character flaw the hero must overcome, the quality of the life philosophy the form expresses, and the major art/story form it explores. The first and most primitive genre is Horror, the story of escaping death in this life or the next. From there, the sequence moves from least to most enlightened, from Action to Fantasy, Detective, and Love stories. At the end of each chapter, I will explain what is missing from each genre’s life philosophy—the thing that leads us to take the next step up the ladder.

Here, then, is the genre ladder, with each genre’s fundamental concern:

HORROR: Religion

ACTION: Success

MYTH: The Life Process

MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE: Creating the Self

SCIENCE FICTION: Science, Society, and Culture (yes, science is a story form)

CRIME: Morality and Justice

COMEDY: Manners and Morals

WESTERN: The Rise and Fall of Civilization

GANGSTER: The Corruption of Business and Politics

FANTASY: The Art of Living

DETECTIVE AND THRILLER: The Mind and the Truth

LOVE: The Art of Happiness

Story Examples

Transcending genre and exploring the major story forms of life are highly complex tasks. Because we learn best by example, I’ll break down a number of stories from novels, film, television, and theater.

Since there are thousands of stories, choosing those that exemplify a particular genre is a near-impossible task. I’ve tried to use recent examples where appropriate. But my main criterion is always: which one is best. This is especially true when discussing transcendent genre stories. My choice is typically a classic that defines the form itself.

The following best express the techniques needed to write a great story in each genre:

HORROR/Religion:Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, Alien, Get Out, Psycho, Ex Machina, Westworld

ACTION/Success:Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, Seven Samurai, the Iliad, The Thomas Crown Affair, Rocky, The Hustler

MYTH/The Life Process:Star Wars: A New Hope, The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Black Panther, Avatar, the Odyssey

MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE STORY/Creating the Self:The Liars’ Club, Into Thin Air, Moonlight, Cinema Paradiso, CODA, To Kill a Mockingbird

SCIENCE FICTION/Science, Society, and Culture:Arrival, The Matrix, Inception, Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey

CRIME/Morality and Justice:Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, The Usual Suspects, Crime and Punishment, In Bruges

COMEDY/Manners and Morals:Seinfeld, Little Miss Sunshine, Groundhog Day, Wedding Crashers

WESTERN/The Rise and Fall of Civilization:Shane, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Once Upon a Time in the West

GANGSTER/The Corruption of Business and Politics:The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, The Great Gatsby, Mad Men, Network

FANTASY/The Art of Living:Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Big, Pleasantville, Mary Poppins, It’s a Wonderful Life, Alice in Wonderland

DETECTIVE AND THRILLER/The Mind and the Truth:

- Detective: L.A. Confidential, The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Vertigo, Knives Out, Murder on the Orient Express, Chinatown, Rashomon

- Thriller: The Silence of the Lambs, Michael Clayton, The Sixth Sense, The Conversation, Shadow of a Doubt

LOVE/The Art of Happiness:Silver Linings Playbook, 500 Days of Summer, When Harry Met Sally, The Philadelphia Story, Sideways

Who Is This Book For?

If you’ve picked up this book thinking you will be able to impress your friends at cocktail parties, congratulations, you’ve come to the right place. But there’s so much more.

This book is for everyone interested in how stories shape our lives and for the writers pursuing this vital craft.

If you’re a writer, you’ll learn the techniques and plot beats that must be in your genre stories. More important, you’ll learn how to write a transcendent story of your own that expresses the deeper theme all readers crave. I’ll teach you that by showing you both the life philosophy of each genre and the one or two art/story forms of life that transcendent stories are really about.

This combination of technique and thematic life philosophy provides tangible, advanced strategies that few other writers now possess. It will help you write powerful stories that achieve both critical and commercial success.

And that’s not all. I believe there is a craving in everyone for deeper understanding in their lives. That’s why the broader intention of this book is to give people more profound models of the world. By exploring philosophical issues and ideas, we can learn how to grapple with them in ways that will enrich us on our life’s journey.

The Anatomy of Genres takes us from the poetics of storytelling to the poetics of life. Join me in exploring the multidimensional maps of humanity that help us navigate our lives.

2

Horror: Religion

The first genre we’ll investigate is Horror. Why? Because the major distinction governing human existence is life versus death.

Adam and Eve: One of the First Horror Stories

Although monsters have been present in story from the beginning, Genesis in the Old Testament is where horror elements first come together as a genre. Adam and Eve are the first man, first woman, and first couple. They live in paradise and are innocent and unashamed of their nakedness. But they are confronted by a trickster character—the devil in the form of a serpent. He lures Eve into eating the poison, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Enter God the Father, the couple’s second opponent. According to Him, the cost to Adam and Eve of gaining knowledge is losing their immortality—they are expelled from the garden so that they cannot eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and live forever. To know is to die. This father is a tyrant. When his children make the mistake of wanting to understand their world and themselves, their punishment is to be driven out of paradise.

In this story, we see the fundamental distinction between life and death, and the tendency of the Religion story to use Horror as its preferred form of expression.

Horror in Storytelling from the Beginning

KEY POINT: Horror is embedded within life itself. Life is the story where the big kick at the end is that everybody dies.

Horror as a modern genre is about 250 years old. It is generally agreed to have begun in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. But Horror elements have been a part of Myth, the oldest genre, from the beginning. For example:

EPIC OF GILGAMESH (2100 BC): Enkidu is the primal man who lives like an animal.

OLD TESTAMENT (CIRCA 1200–165 BC): Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son on God’s orders.

GREEK MYTHOLOGY (CIRCA 3000–1100 BC): The Gorgons are three sisters whose hair is made of venomous snakes. Perseus kills the Gorgon Medusa.

THE MINOTAUR: A creature—half-man, half-bull—that eats human flesh and lives within the labyrinth.

HERCULES: When the goddess Hera makes him go mad, he kills his wife and children.

AGAMEMNON: He sacrifices his daughter so that the Greek army can sail and avenge the kidnapping of Helen.

OEDIPUS: He cuts out his eyes when he learns he has slept with his mother and killed his father.

From these supernatural beginnings, Horror evolved and eventually entered the psychological realm it occupies today. The writer Michael Capuzzo has observed that earlier European Gothic fiction emphasized the supernatural, castles and curses; [Edgar Allan] Poe brought horror down to earth and made us fear the ordinary and everyday.¹

KEY POINT: Poe’s shift from the supernatural to the psychological is the most important change in the Horror genre. It is the basis of the modern form.

Horror: How It Works

Horror’s basic distinction of life versus death is a binary opposition that allows for no complexity: one is either dead or alive. This points to a fundamental quality of the human mind: It always begins in binary mode. It starts with Yes/No, Either/Or, Me/Other, Us/Them.

The Horror genre itself is not so simple, however. Hegel’s great insight about the flaw leading to the next step of enlightenment is based on the idea that from a simple binary opposition (known as the dialectic), we create the new, the better, and the diverse. Thinking about the elemental forces of life and death can inspire great creativity. Horror, especially realistic Horror, often focuses on the finality of death, and how humans cannot comprehend the idea that they will no longer exist.

Horror’s Mind-Action Story View

Every genre shows the mind reacting to the world and then acting upon it. Each lays out a different understanding of how the world works, and how it works best. This is the genre’s Mind-Action story view.

The Horror version of the Mind-Action story view is that life is an ongoing struggle to defeat death. It is a fight we are all destined to lose.

Great Horror storytelling pushes the audience into a smaller and smaller box until that box is in the ground. Horror makes us feel what it means to be dead.

This increases the power of death in our minds tenfold. No longer is it an abstraction that happens to everyone else. The idea that the magnificent complexity of a human being, especially this human being, could suddenly cease to exist is too absurd to comprehend.

In essence, the Horror story strategy is to have a unique monster relentlessly pursue a victim. This plot sequence translates into pressure on the hero and thus the audience.

After contemplating the finality of death, we end by asking: What is to be done? Surely there is an answer somewhere. But we can’t find it. That, too, is a death. There is no hope. That is, unless there is something like a god or religion.

Horror expresses the story of religion. This is the story of how we defeat death, how we avoid a horrible afterlife and find the promised land of life ever after. The main goal of the Horror Mind-Action story view is to force us to confront death. To pry our eyes open and shove death in our face. Whether this highly emotional approach induces us to see our end honestly and make real changes to our lives is another question.

Horror Compared to Other Genres

Horror is part of a major family of genres known as Speculative Fiction, which includes Fantasy and Science Fiction. These three genres are about projecting and abstracting in the extreme. Fantasy projects a character into a fully detailed imaginary world so she can learn how to live. Science Fiction creates a society and culture, with special focus on the science and technology by which the world operates. Horror creates a character out of the most dangerous of all opponents: death itself.

Detective fiction, on the other hand, is Horror’s polar opposite. Horror is the most primal form, while Detective is the most intellectual. But Detective and Horror are both fundamentally about the mind.

KEY POINT: Detective fiction highlights the brilliance of the mind while Horror emphasizes its flaws.

Detective fiction shows us how the mind works; Horror tells us how it fails. One form shows off the mind’s symbolic power while the other reveals the products of illogic, hatred, and prejudice.

Detective and Horror also have a basic opposition in how they treat death. In the Detective genre, death is something we know happens to someone else. In Horror, death is what is happening to me right now!

On the other hand, Horror shares a basic similarity with Comedy in that characters in both forms are reduced in type, such as to animal or machine. The difference is that the reduction in Horror is much more extreme. This creates fear in the audience instead of laughter.

Examples of Horror

Stories

Sisyphus, Old Testament Genesis (Adam and Eve), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death

Novels and Films

The Castle of Otranto, A Christmas Carol (also Myth and Fantasy), Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, Jaws, Alien, Psycho, Carrie, It, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary, A Quiet Place, Hereditary, The Wolf Man, Wolfen, The Fly, The Invisible Man, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, The Omen, Misery, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Ring, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, The Amityville Horror, Hell House, Poltergeist, Joker, Lost Boys, The Innocents, Tales from the Crypt, The Night Stalker, Sleepy Hollow, Trilogy of Terror, The Blair Witch Project, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Angel Heart, Terror in the Wax Museum, The Crawling Eye, The Vault of Horror, The Legend of Boggy Creek, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Twilight, Underworld, Cat People, Peeping Tom, An American Werewolf in London, Dawn of the Dead, Deliverance, Shaun of the Dead, Godzilla, Sisters, The Thing, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Television

The Walking Dead, True Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American Horror Story, Les Revenants, Stranger Things (also Thriller), Grimm (also Horror, Detective, Love, and Fantasy), Kingdom, Sleepy Hollow (also Thriller), The Stand, Supernatural, The Haunting of Hill House, The Vampire Diaries

Horror Subgenres

All the major genres have multiple subgenres. These are a diversification of the form using different characters, plot beats, story worlds, and themes. Horror subgenres include Ghost Story, Vampire, Werewolf, Slasher, Occult, Paranormal, Gothic, Horror/Myth, Horror/Science Fiction Epic, Superhero, Savior, and Comedy.

Horror Story Overview

Here’s what we’ll cover in this chapter:

HORROR STORY BEATS

THEME: Being Is Trying to Avoid Death

- Thematic Recipe: The Way of Facing Death and Taking Humane Action

HOW TO TRANSCEND THE HORROR STORY

- Horror/Myth: Religion, Including Religious Story Beats and Christian Story Beats

- Horror/Science Fiction Epic

The Seven Major Steps of the Story Code

All good stories—not just Horror stories, but stories of every genre—work through seven major structure steps. These foundational steps compose the Story Code. They mark the process of the hero’s character change, or evolution, over the course of the story.

WEAKNESS-NEED: The hero is enslaved by habits of thought and action and suffers from a deep personal weakness that is destroying the quality of her life. The hero needs to overcome this flaw to grow.

DESIRE: The hero desires a goal outside of herself that she perceives as valuable and missing from her life.

OPPONENT: She confronts an opponent and an obstacle/challenge preventing her from reaching her goal. She will find at the end that the obstacle/challenge is herself.

PLAN: She concocts a plan, or strategy, that will allow her to defeat the opponent and achieve the goal.

BATTLE: She enters into a final conflict, or battle, with the opponent to determine once and for all who wins.

SELF-REVELATION: At the end, the hero, if she grows at all, has a revelation about her true or better self, about how she has been wrong psychologically and morally. She then makes a decision about how to act and takes new action, proving what she has become.

NEW EQUILIBRIUM: With the system in a new equilibrium, the hero stands as a new version of herself, along with a new capacity for growing in the future.

Horror Story Beats

Like those of all genres, the Horror story beats twist these seven major structural steps to express the theme of the form. Horror also has a surprisingly large number of distinct beats. Why? It is such a narrow form, with so little natural plot, that it must have that many specialized beats to deepen and extend it.

These beats represent the superstructure, the Horror mythology, if you will. That prevents a plot that normally has only one beat—attacking the victim—from being repeated ad infinitum. Beats like the sins of the parents and crossing the forbidden barrier aren’t just a natural outgrowth of the unique theme of Horror. They create the plot complexity and character depth that this form needs to expand beyond a short story.

HORROR STORY BEAT: Ghost—Sins of the Past

A ghost, while not one of the seven major structure steps, is an essential element of any story—and not just Horror stories. It is the event from the past still haunting the hero in the present. Depending on how one classifies it, it is either a secondary structure step or part of the first one, weakness-need.

In Horror, ghost is a commonly misunderstood beat. Writers often think the term refers to the Ghost Story subgenre. In that form, the ghost is the monster or opponent. It is the ethereal projection of a dead person who haunts those still alive for a transgression committed against them in life. More broadly speaking, the ghosts in most Horror stories are events from the past that haunt the hero to the extent that they define that person and even affect their behavior. Oftentimes a ghost is a past crime committed by the hero’s ancestors that has not been atoned for. It will keep reappearing, because the debt must be paid.

KEY POINT: Ghost is the most important beat in Horror.

Why?

It represents the power of the past over the present, which is one of the fundamental themes of the form.

It encapsulates the sins of fathers and mothers affecting the lives of their children.

The ghost is the mind attacking itself.

It keeps attacking throughout the story, becoming the driving force of the plot.

In Horror, the ghost that keeps attacking the hero is really the power of suggestion acting on the fallible mind. It is the self-confirming hypothesis the mind cannot help replaying and making real.

KEY POINT: In good Horror the structural alignment is tight; a crime from the past is connected, through the psychological and moral weakness of the hero, to a horrifying crime in the future.

In A Nightmare on Elm Street, ten years before the film takes place, vigilante parents, including Nancy’s mother, Marge, killed the child murderer Freddy Krueger by lighting him on fire and watching him burn. Here the ghost becomes the monster.

The Shining sets up a psychological ghost for the hero before he enters the Overlook Hotel. After drinking too much, Jack jerked his son Danny’s arm and separated the boy’s shoulder. His wife, Wendy, has never fully trusted him again, while Jack has never forgiven her for blaming him.

In Alien, the robot Ash was sent by the company to bring back the alien to use as a weapon. When Ripley overrides the onboard MOTHER computer to determine what happened, it says: Gather specimen. Priority one: ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable. The past crime is the company giving permission to commit murder.

Psycho has the most complex psychological ghost in movie history. The ghost that determines the story is not that of the initial hero, Marion. It’s Norman’s. He is the outwardly mild-mannered young man who murders Marion and drives the story. At the end, the psychiatrist talks us through Norman’s psychological decline:

DR. FRED RICHMOND:… hearing it from the … mother half of Norman’s mind … you have to go back ten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover … and it seemed to Norman that she threw him over for this man. Now that pushed him over the line and he killed ’em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all … most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime, at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse … So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his life … Now he was never all Norman, but he was often only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he assumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild … When he met your sister, he was … aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the jealous mother and mother killed the girl! Now after the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son, covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!

Although all genres require the seven major structure steps, some emphasize certain steps more than others. Horror emphasizes ghost and opponent. This makes perfect sense when you realize that ghost and opponent are the internal and external opponents, respectively. Using a pincer attack from inside and out, Horror puts more pressure on the hero than any other form.

HORROR STORY BEAT: Story World— Haunted House and Closed Society

The story world is an expression of the hero’s ghost and weakness-need. In Horror, this is some version of a haunted house that becomes a pressure cooker surrounding the hero. The haunted house represents the flawed mind made physical: the hero’s greatest fear is the very structure in which she has no choice but to live.

Examples include The Fall of the House of Usher, Dracula, The Innocents, The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the grand hotel on the mountaintop in The Shining, and the mansion in the modern, tragic vampire story Sunset Boulevard.

The haunted house is usually a closed social world. Often, aristocrats or the upper classes inhabit it. This class has rotted, so the house feeds, sometimes literally, on the common people who live in the village. Dracula is a count. Dr. Frankenstein, the corrupt father who abandons his child, is a baron. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator visits his dissolute friend with gray-white skin, and his apparently dying sister. They live in a decaying mansion with a crack running from roof to floor.

The United States likes to believe it is a classless democracy. Therefore, in American Horror stories, the corruption of the social world is often buried beneath the happy facade of the small town. But sooner or later it roars to the surface. We see this in Friday the 13th, Halloween, Poltergeist, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Get Out transcends the Horror genre in part because it depicts a story world based on both class and race. The modern-day plantation owner uses medical technology to keep Black people in permanent servitude.

One strategy writers use to make Horror believable is to begin the story in a foreign, mysterious, or Old World location. These places are the home of fairy tales. The Horror is then transported to the new, modern world, like a plague from which no one is immune. This technique is used in The Exorcist, Dracula, Arachnophobia, and Hellraiser.

One distinction within the haunted house of Horror is the cellar versus the attic. The sins of the mothers and fathers are buried in the cellar. But the sins must be atoned for. So these sins, in the form of skeletons (literal or figurative), rise up and strike again. Psycho is the prime example of this effect. The attic, on the other hand, is usually a place where fond memories are locked away. But as the head of the house, the attic can also be the place where the mad are imprisoned. The Gothic romance Jane Eyre is the most famous example of this use of the attic.

The Haunted Town and City

In Horror, the haunted house is often part of a haunted town. The classic ghost town has empty buildings that create a sense of death. This reduces the pressure cooker effect of an enclosed house, but it highlights the idea that there is no escape. This is a world of death. The French television show Les Revenants uses this to great effect by placing the town in an enclosed mountain setting where it is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to enter or leave. 28 Days Later expands the haunted town to the city, with London empty of humans and crawling with the living dead. In one scene, the small band of escaping heroes must change a tire in the middle of a tunnel. When thousands of rats run past them, the group realizes that a horde of fast-moving zombies is right behind. This scene is a textbook example of the intense pressure the Horror story puts on the hero.

HORROR STORY BEAT: The Monster Attacks

The opponent, the monster, is extremely powerful and typically drives the action. The monster’s attacks, from without and within (ghost and weakness), put the hero on the defensive and in a pressure cooker almost immediately. The pressure only gets worse.

HORROR STORY BEAT: Hero as Victim

Because of the constant attacks by the opponent, Horror always shows the hero being beaten down to the point of death, which symbolizes our own mortality.

KEY POINT: Since the hero is diminished over the course of the story, one trick is to start with the hero on top of the world. This story strategy takes the hero from the highest high to the lowest low.

In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the genius Dr. Frankenstein wants to create the Nietzschean Overman from a corpse. Because he must inevitably fail in this grand quest, he falls physically and morally. We also see this technique in The Fly, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Invisible Man.

A second approach is to start with an average but good person who stumbles into a terrifying phenomenon. We see this approach in Pet Sematary, Jaws, Arachnophobia, The Exorcist, Psycho, Alien, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

For this second approach to be most successful, you must spend time at the beginning of the story making the character intensely human. He might be kind, sensitive, a family man, about to be married or have a child, or a leader in the community. Giving the hero these positive traits makes his fall more extreme and more tragic.

HORROR STORY BEAT: Weakness-Need 1— Slavery of Mind and the Monster Within

The weakness holding the hero back from success takes two forms: psychological and moral. Need refers to what the character must do to fix the weakness, what she must do to grow. The source of the character’s weakness is her ghost. This is why ghost is sometimes considered part of the weakness-need step.

As we saw in the ghost step, Horror isn’t really about scary monsters. It’s about a character whose weakness-need is so severe her mind is effectively enslaved.

KEY POINT: The great value of the Horror story is that it shows us the human monster within, the inherent flaws of the symbol-making animal that result in its self-destruction.

Binary Thinking

The first cause of the slavery of the mind is either-or thinking. It comes from the self-conscious mind’s tremendous power to project symbolically. This begins with the same two-point opposition from which all stories grow: desire versus opponent.

As soon as we want, we become aware of something else. That something else is the Other who stands in our way. The Other may even kill us.

KEY POINT: The tendency of the human mind to see differences as opposites is its foundational flaw.

The mind always begins, and usually ends, with a binary: Either/Or, Me versus the Other, Us versus Them, Optimist versus Pessimist, and so on. Contrast and duality are easy to see and understand.

When we realize the monster is also the hero’s great fear personified, we see why Horror is the most psychologically attuned of all story forms. Specifically, it shows a person at the edges of sanity.

KEY POINT: In good Horror, the weakness-need is a duality within the mind itself.

We see this made literal in stories like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Fly. But the duality is in every Horror hero, and it becomes clearer as the story progresses.

There are two main sources of this duality:

Fundamental fears

Unsociable desires

KEY POINT: Horror, like Thriller, focuses totally on the emotion of fear.

Fundamental Fears

The essential fear in Horror is of death itself. Other fundamental fears that Horror dramatizes include being killed and eaten, being enslaved, being raped, being a failure, losing one’s mind, and living a life of quiet desperation (The Stepford Wives, Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Horror, like Myth, is highly symbolic and employs a number of metaphors to express a character’s devolution. Physical transformations represent the internal struggle between the character’s light and dark sides.

KEY POINT: People fear being reduced in two main symbolic ways: to an animal or a machine. Each represents something within the hero and the audience.

Animal Horror represents the body, the fear of losing control, and, more specifically, the fear of sexual passion. Examples in story are the wolf, ape, cat, bat, fly, snake, and horned animals in general. These animals are often associated with hell. Dracula and The Wolf Man are classic Animal Horror stories.

Machine Horror represents the fear of losing one’s identity or individuality. Character expressions of Machine Horror are the robot man, Frankenstein’s monster, and the living dead. The zombie is the perfect personification of Machine Horror because it has a blank, dead face and walks like a jerky machine. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the textbook example of a Machine Horror story.

While Animal Horror has been popular since the mid-nineteenth century, Machine Horror increased in popularity after the Second World War. This coincided with the rise of mass society and the fear that one would be swallowed up in groupthink. Bestselling books in the mid-1950s like The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit are expressions of the same fear of becoming a cog in the machine. One of the great dystopian novels of mass conformity, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949.

Unsociable Desires

The second source of duality in the mind is that the character is hiding something so horrible in herself she cannot face it. As a result, she compartmentalizes these desires within the mind. But those compartments won’t stay separate for long—the character is ready to crack.

What are the unsociable desires that make up this dark side? The part of the self that likes to feel power, to inflict pain, to do what is forbidden, to kill, rape, devour, have illicit sex, or commit matricide or patricide.

HORROR STORY BEAT: Weakness-Need 2— Shame and Guilt

The primary weapons of the self-conscious mind are shame and guilt. An essential part of almost every major genre, shame and guilt highlight the distinction between the individual and society.

Why? Shame and guilt are personal feelings that stem directly from the individual’s relationship with others. Shame is the mind attacking itself for failing in the eyes of others, of not acting in accordance with public standards of behavior. Guilt is the mind attacking itself for failure to meet a private standard such as a personal obligation, especially to someone