A lot of people tend to acknowledge that comedy is an effective way to get people to think critically. But what if I said that scary stories do this too?

What makes a story scary? 

For a story to be effectively frightening, it needs to be scary on two levels: 

• First: the surface level.
  • These are genuinely scary plot devices or characters. Think monsters, devils, ghosts, death by ax murdering, etc. These are the things that go bump in the night – the things that you’ll lay in bed thinking about when it’s dark.
• Second: the subtext.
  • These are the overarching themes that point out what’s actually scary about our real world. 

Rosemary’s Baby

Let’s take Rosemary’s Baby as an example. Rosemary’s Baby is a psychological horror novel by Ira Levin that was published in 1967 and later adapted into a film. 

What’s it about?

The story follows a young couple named Rosemary and Guy who befriend their older neighbors, the Castevets, who begin to exert a strange and unsettling influence on the couple’s lives. After becoming pregnant, Rosemary becomes convinced that her neighbors and husband are involved in a sinister plot to use her unborn child for their own purposes. Despite her growing fear and paranoia, no one believes her. 

SPOILER: Rosemary discovers that her husband made a deal with the Castevets to offer their unborn child to a Satanic cult in exchange for success in his acting career. When the baby is born, it is possessed by a demon.

Analyzing Rosemary’s Baby

So on the surface level, one could say the story is scary because the devil is scary. A person could walk away from this book or this movie, and without doing any further digging, still agree that this is a pretty scary movie on that fact alone. 

But what’s the subtext here? Underneath the surface, one could argue that what’s really scary here is marriage.

This book came out in the 1960s. If you were a woman in the 1960s, you couldn’t have your own bank account without the permission of a man, you may not have been allowed birth control, spousal rape was not a criminal offense, and you weren’t guaranteed to not get fired if you became pregnant. And that’s if you were white. If you were a woman of color, for the first half of the decade you couldn’t even vote. 

A woman had to be able to trust her spouse with pretty much her entire well-being. If she made the wrong choice, she could be putting herself in a very vulnerable position indeed. 

So yes, the devil is scary, but that’s not what’s truly frightening about Rosemary’s Baby.

Truly good horror or thriller novels are the ones that build on this sort of subtext. 

In this way, scary stories are actually an extremely effective tool at making people think critically about their society at large. Another book that does this well is The Hacienda – I highly recommend. 

Check out some of my other recent blogs:

• The Sky on Fire: Great worldbuilding, slower plot
• Literary Atmosphere: A basic building block for immersion
• My Lady Jane: Funny and charming
• Discovery: The best part of reading
• Hell Bent (Book 2): More fantasy than horror