30+ Horror Tropes for Your Next Spooky Story
7/31/2025 | Daphne Strasert
Horror Tropes
Tropes are like seasonings. You add them to your story to give them flavor. Certain genres have a particular flavor—a set of tropes that are predominant (if not exclusive) to that type of story. For romance, you have the meet-cute, just one bed, or the third-act breakup. For fantasy you have the Chosen One, magic forests, and training montages. And for horror… well you have this blog post.
Tropes and clichés go hand in hand, but it’s important to remember that readers EXPECT certain tropes to show up. They like the genre, after all, so they want to see some of the familiar hallmarks. So how do you write a story that utilizes tropes without falling into cliches? It’s a matter of balance. Use old tropes in new ways, turn them on their head, and combine them in unexpected ways.
Settings
The Dark
When characters are robbed of one of their normal senses, it leaves them vulnerable to whatever is lurking. Add in the terror of never truly seeing what is coming and the dark is large enough to hide all our fears.
Who Does It Well: Lights Out
Bonus: Hush (2016) – while this movie doesn’t use darkness, it does use silence in a nuanced take on the trope.
Inclement Weather
Trapped with no escape. Deadly natural forces beyond all reasoning and control. Whether a civilization ending hurricane or the icy silence of a blizzard—a good storm can spell bad news for your characters.
Abandoned Places
Asylums, hospitals, hotels, museums—places that should be teeming with life feel cavernous when empty. It’s impossible to shake the feeling that something is lurking around every corner.
Who Does It Well: The Shining by Stephen King
Children’s Facilities
When the innocence of youth is corrupted, the perversion feels particularly sinister. We like to think that locations meant for children—summer camps, circuses, schools, amusement parks—are safe. How terrifying to be wrong.
Home
Home should be a sanctuary, a place to feel safe and grounded. When that security is stripped away, a home becomes a prison.
Caves
Caves combine a multitude of phobias into one potent powerhouse of fear. Tight spaces, darkness, strange creatures, and uncertainty about the way out—if there even is a way out—all make for spine-tingling terror.
Example: The Descent (obviously)
Churches
There are multiple ways to approach religious horror, but the basis for this trope is all about what a church should be—a holy symbol of good, a sanctuary for the downtrodden—and what happens when it’s not.
Remote Locations
Isolation. This trope is all about isolation. Whether deep in the jungle or on the ice sheets of antarctica, when help is hours or days away and there may be no way to call for assistance, your characters are alone with their demons—literal or not.
The Apocalypse
I’m not sure whether this really constitutes a setting or if it’s more of a premise, but it certainly shows up a lot in horror. The complete collapse of society leaves
Characters
The Unreliable Narrator
Written fiction can take this to heights that other mediums may struggle with. Is the narrator insane? Misled? Lying? When you can’t trust the person telling the story, every scene is suspect, and the final twist can change everything.
Who Does it Well: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Final Girl
Who gets to survive the harrowing events of the story? That depends on the kind of story that you’re trying to create. Do you want someone ‘deserving’ that the readers have rooted for?
The Jerk
When you know a lot of characters are going to die, it can be cathartic to see someone get what is coming to them. Set someone up as such a terrible person that we can’t help but cheer when the villain takes them out.
The Unbeliever
“That’s not possible!” they cry in the face of indisputable evidence of supernatural forces. They are the voice of reason, and in any other genre, they’d be in the right. But this is horror, and the impossible will bite the Unbeliever in the ass here.
Monsters
An Actual Monster
How does one make a monster? That could be a blog post all on its own (maybe I’ll write it one day). Monsters are a hallmark of the horror genre, and there are a few tropes that can help you make a monster that’s memorable:
It’s Bigger Than It Should Be
Leeches! Tarantulas! Ticks! Ants! Alligators!
Anytime you blow up something to gargantuan proportions, you make a monster.
From The Long, Long Ago
Monsters from the lost eras of history hold a certain fascination for us. We are both in awe of them and terrified of them. They threaten our place at the top of the food chain.
Who Does It Well: The Predation Series by LJ Vitanza
Monstrous Mutations
Too many eyes, too many teeth, too many limbs, maybe a few tentacles. Creatures of impractical proportions get under our skin and make it crawl.
Who Does It Well: Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper
The Supernatural
Sometimes the threat isn’t physical, but more unexplainable. Whether you choose to explain the mysterious happenings or leave them to the imagination, anything can happen when the supernatural is in play.
Demons (and Possession)
Strangely enough, your horror story doesn’t need to be religious in order to include demons. Cultures all over the world include the concept of demons and possession. You can even make up your own mythology.
Ghosts
Death should have some finality, at least that’s what I hope. Ghosts fly in the face of that natural order, forcing us (and our characters) to confront the unknown in our own mortality.
Haunted Objects
Games, coins, and particularly dolls—the fact that these things are undead is all the more frightening because they shouldn’t have been alive in the first place!
Turns Out It’s Man!
People can be more terrifying than any monster. When you find out that what you’re up against is sheerly pure evil human nature, it rocks you to the core.
Psychopaths
Cold and calculated murderers? Or killers so divorced from reality that they don’t see their victims as human? Psychopaths are terrifying in their unpredictability and are a staple of the slasher genre.
The Secret Squatter
Okay, maybe this is a personal phobia of mine, but this trope scares the bejeezus out of me every single time. Someone living in the walls, the basement, the attic. Creeping around while you sleep. *shudder*
My Personal Favorite: The Boy (2016)
Your Friend
Betrayal. This trope is all about the twist—of a knife in your character’s back. If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust? And if someone you know and love can be a killer… anyone can.
The Family that Slays Together
What’s more frightening than a single killer? A whole family of them. The dynamics that lead to a family tradition of murder are infinitely fascinating to explore. This trope often ties in cannibalism.
Ways to Die
Just because it’s a dumb way to die, doesn’t mean it’s dumb to include it in your writing. Some of these Darwin Award winning moments can connect deeply to the themes of your story.
Split the Party
Should the characters go off on their own in search of their missing friend? Absolutely not. Does doing so increase the tension and allow for individual scares tailored to their particular fears? Oh yes.
Curiosity Killed the Cast
Creaks in the attic? Scratching in the walls? A horror story can never get off the ground if the characters don’t take the plot hooks. Some level of personal interest needs to drive your characters so they aren’t just being pulled along by the narrative.
Death by Self-Interest
This is a classic death for The Jerk. When a character is unwilling to give up fame, treasure, or ego to save themselves, it’s satisfying to watch them get their comeuppance, especially if they’ve been endangering the other characters with their greed.
Death by Pragmatism
This trope is a little subversive in that it relies on the characters doing something smart. They make all the right choices and still find themselves the victims—true horror at its finest.
The Hero’s Sacrifice
This trope is meant to tug at the heartstrings of your readers, especially if they’ve come to love a character and honestly expected that they’d make it through to the end. Sacrificing themselves so others can live is the ultimate hero’s end.
Gruesome Demise
Beyond the circumstances of your characters’ deaths, there are also specific methods of dying that crop up time and time again in horror fiction.
Devoured by the Horde
Readers love hordes of things, right? Whether zombies, tiny dinosaurs, or ravenous fish, seeing a character fall to dozens or hundreds of hungry mouths showcases the overwhelming odds they face.
The Squeeze
An absolute staple of sci-fi horror, squeezing a character through a hole far to small for them to fit through is a bone crunching and stomach churning death that makes anyone flinch.
Going Halfsies
Slicing a character in half is a gruesome and visceral death that can leave a lasting impression. A character trying to pass through a closing hatch at the last second or a secret slicer in a hallway can create abrupt shock.
The Big Chomp
Big monsters have big teeth. There aren’t any animals (that we know of) that can devour a human in one go, which is what makes this death so shocking. This trope is often played for laughs though, so use it wisely.
Tropes to Avoid
While I love tropes, and they’re important to the establishment of the genre, some tropes are better left in the past. Whether they’re overplayed or just plain offensive, here are some tropes to think twice before using.
Truly Stupid Characters
I mentioned this a bit in the Ways to Die section, but having characters make only dumb decisions doesn’t make for a satisfying story. Instead, you wind up with your readers screaming at the page in frustration.
Death to Fornicators
Sure, this trope appears in every 80’s slasher classic, but what purpose does it serve in modern fiction? Unless you’re explicitly trying to slut shame and promote purity culture (and why would you?), this dated trope can stay in the stone age.
Mentally Ill Villain
Mental illness is frightening, that is true. But using mental illness as a shorthand for evil isn’t just offensive, it’s inaccurate. The mentally ill are far more likely to suffer violence than inflict it. If you’re going to use this trope, do your research and write it well.
Token Minorities
For too long, minority characters were slated to be the first to die, to the point that there is an entire movie lambasting the trope. This trope stinks of token diversity without caring about the characters or communities. Include minorities! And make them actual characters, not cannon fodder.
Queer Villain
This is another trope steeped in bigotry. There’s nothing wrong with a villain who happens to be LGBTQ+, but considering them evil just because they are is insensitive at best and lazy at worst.
The Other is Evil
The flipside of the Token Minority is the use of marginalized cultures as villains. Fear of differences combined with stereotyping creates flat characters with little substance beyond racism. Watch out for common versions of this trope like: the G*psy Curse, Indian Burial Ground, and Voodoo Magic.
That is not to say that you can’t include other cultures in your stories—even as villains! Once again, make sure that you’re doing your research and writing it well, with a respect for the people you’re representing.
So what is your favorite horror trope? And how do you plan to use it in new and refreshing ways? If you’d like an professional opinion on your work, or just a friendly ear to bounce ideas off, inquire about working with a Tomeworks editor today!