In another recent Halloween-themed post here, I discussed the psychology behind the nature of ghost stories and, to a degree, horror stories more generally. In response to a comment about what I thought were among the best "scary stories" and films, I thought about another post from years ago recommending psychologically-driven horrors. However, that also got me thinking about the nature of being scared, successful scary story-telling, and potential interest in an adapted list of recommendations.
The length of a tale has always struck me as playing a large role in its "scariness," not only because of reasons associated with attention but also because of exposition. For example, a novel or a feature-length film is typically predictable in terms of narrative structure. The opening section sets the scene, develops characters, and does all that "busy work" before the scares finally enter our focus. Then, by the end, story-tellers need to clean up the tale into a nice, neat little package to conclude the story, even if they sometimes make room for one last scare. The difficulty here is that, in an extended tale, like a novel or a feature film, there are perhaps too many opportunities to explain away the horror. What makes for many good scares is the ambiguity, uncertainty, and mystery surrounding them. For me, when the scary stuff is explained, the unease goes away.
In short stories and films, such exposition is not expected. The narrative structure is less predictable. The auteur only has so much time to achieve their purpose. Thus, I often find short narrative forms much scarier, hence the focus of this list is on short-horror tales.
The other caveat to this list is the relative recency of the tales. Horror succeeds in cases where it is relatable, where the audience can place themselves in the shoes of the stories’........