Horror Writing Prompts

“I awoke not with a bang, nor a whimper, but rather a long steaming tongue scraping its way up the side of my face.”

Take a famous romantic quote, or lyric, and use it as the opening line to a horror story.

The line must be related to the story.

Even the wolves don’t come out at night because they’re afraid of what hides in the shadows: being banished here is worse than a death sentence.

'When nightmares are all you’ve ever known, dreams can be a truly frightful thing.'

Write a story or poem inspired by this phrase.

Your protagonist walks into a room with crimson walls and red lights. Rose petals are strewn on the perfectly fitted bed. A woman lays on the fluffed pillows, facedown, blood trickling down her flesh...

You’re walking down the sidewalk when you notice everyone around you has a collection of zippers holding their skin together...

Write from the perspective of a character that has been experimented on their entire life.

Consider how they view themselves, and how they feel about the world, after the extensive modification of their body.

Your significant other frantically calls you. As the call continues, you notice the person on the other end of the line sounds just like them, but the way they speak is slightly off in such a way that it brings an unsettling feeling...

A character becomes friends with the grim reaper, and sees the worlds of both the living and the dead.

“We live in a land where the footprints of ghosts linger.”

Use this line to start or end a poem. It can be any genre as long as you feel it fits the sentence well.

As the darkness sank into her veins she felt the evil take her over…

Your protagonist finds the diary of a little girl in the basement of their new house. She wrote of strange things, her drawings splattered in blood...

Against the stone wall of the cave, a scraping talon sounds...

Write a spooky story or poem inspired by this image.

Drawing from typical tropes of supernatural or ghost stories, create a short story set in an old manor house.