There is an art to a jumpscare, it’s finely crafted in ways that even if you don’t like it you must admire it. The ramping tension, the music dropping, the stillness of the air, and — finally — the impact.
Inelegant as it may seem in practice there is a beauty to it, but all this really only goes for visual mediums such as film, television and video games.
It’s not easy to capture the mounting dread followed by an almost explosive payoff — BOOOO! See you didn’t even flinch.
Yes, horror literature relies far more on the slow plodding dread that ultimately ratchets up over the course of 500 pages. It’s the realm of your Stephen King’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s of the world, an art bereft of brevity.
Or so you might think, but in 1948 Fredric Brown wrote “the last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door…”
This, at the time, was the shortest horror story ever written, and while many have attempted to go lower. Others have decided that, in Goldilocks fashion, two is just right.
r/TwoSentenceHorrorStories on reddit.com boasts over 1.4 million with many contributing their own bite-sized chilling tales. Are they all as evocative as the fredric brown original? Well no, some surely come close but the vast majority lack the same kick.
In fact it has even led to an account on X, Bad 2 Sentence Horror(@Bad2sentence), that catalogs some of the worst the subreddit has to offer. Yet even at its worst it’s still immensely entertaining.
So to flex our writing skills/horribly embarrass ourselves here at the collegian we’ve decided to treat you to a special halloween treat, Tales from the News Morgue.
TWO-SENTENCE HORROR STORIES
- You know I thought ghost were scary. Until I seen the random fees from Delta pirate ship what’s next there going to charge me beginning haunted?
- I saw someone with a gun walking near by, then suddenly died cat parts appear.
- I saw something moving under my bed, but honestly, I’m more scared of checking my bank account.
- After a series of bizarre disappearances, the town’s detective finally tracked down the killer, only to find out he was just a guy who really hated sharing his snacks. “Relax,” the killer said, munching on a bag of chips, “I just wanted some peace and quiet during movie night — now who’s up for a thriller?”
- There’s an abandoned house tucked away behind a field of tall grass. The locals call it the “devils house,” after a murder took place at The Flamingo club across the street, where a woman’s face was slashed before she died, the man, or supposed thing, who did it vanished into the house evading the police.
- As Julie changed her squiggly toddler daughter on the changing table, the little girl looked upward at the corner of the room and exclaimed: “Scary mommy!” The hairs on Julie’s neck began to rise as she felt the slight touch of a cold hand on her shoulder.
- I thought I had finally written the perfect submission for the 2 sentence horror contest. Sentence fragment
