The Writer’s Playground Series – Horror: The Unseen Thing

Horror: The Unseen Thing

• Objective: To create fear and tension by describing everything except the monster/threat.
• How to Play: Given a setting (e.g., “a campsite at night,” “an old house”), the writer must create a scene of terror. The rule is that they can describe the character’s reaction, the sounds the threat makes, the effect it has on the environment, and the shadows it casts—but they can never describe the thing itself.
• Best for: Building suspense, horror writing, and mastering indirect description.

Take some setting inspiration from this list:

Classic & Gothic

• A dusty, forgotten attic during a thunderstorm.
• The cold, silent catacombs beneath an old city.
• A derelict, fog-bound lighthouse.
• An abandoned Victorian orphanage, with rooms full of empty iron-frame beds.
• The damp, echoing boiler room of a decommissioned asylum.
• A family mausoleum in an overgrown, moonlit cemetery.
• Behind the heavy velvet curtains of an empty, decaying theater stage.

Mundane & Suburban

• A 24-hour laundromat, long after midnight.
• The claustrophobic crawlspace beneath a suburban house.
• An empty elementary school after dark.
• A public swimming pool, covered by a tarp for the off-season.
• The end of a long, dark residential hallway, where the motion-sensor light keeps turning on.
• An empty, multi-level concrete parking garage.
• A child’s bedroom, as seen from inside the closet.

Natural & Wilderness

• A deep, unexplored cave system behind a waterfall.
• The Florida Everglades at night, surrounded by mangroves and unseen water.
• A campsite beside a perfectly still, black lake.
• A dense, ancient forest where the thick canopy blocks out the sun.
• A vast cornfield in the dead of summer, just before a storm.
• A lone, isolated cabin during a whiteout blizzard.

Sci-Fi & Industrial

• A decommissioned, powerless space station adrift in orbit.
• The vast, shadowy cargo hold of a creaking ship at sea.
• A deep-sea research station after a sudden communications blackout.
• The long, humming maintenance tunnels of a particle accelerator.
• A server farm, with its endless, identical aisles of blinking lights and the constant drone of fans.