lock your doors because today we're going to talk about how you can create memorable monsters what's up guys my name is brandon mcnulty i'm a writer i'm the author of bad parts and welcome to my writing channel last week on the channel i did a video on how you can add tension to every single page of your story and when i was doing that video i talked about how you don't necessarily need any major threats going on in your store you don't need anybody with a knife to their throat or guns going off or anything
like that you can add tension on every page no matter what today i want to take things in a totally different direction and tell you how to make threats specifically monsters that you can put in a horror story or a fantasy story or whatever it is and while i was doing research for this topic i came across a number of videos and articles that suggested that you can create a monster from a checklist or from a recipe as if you can just you know maybe come up with some strengths and weaknesses and make sure that
the villain's ugly and make sure that this monster has like a backstory and you can just all mix it up into a cauldron somewhere and then you're gonna have the next hannibal lecter but it doesn't work like that in fact i think that's terrible advice if you're gonna create a monster don't do it from a checklist or from some kind of recipe that's just not the way of going about it instead i think you need to take a certain approach to building a monster and that's why today i have three methods for creating a memorable
monster so my first tip is that you want to scare your characters before you worry about scaring your audience a lot of writers make the mistake of creating a monster with the intentions of just scaring the audience they just want to go after the audience and that that's something that if you do it you're going to fail the reason for this is that because most audience members are smart enough to know that a novel or a movie is fake they know it's fiction and they know that the monsters within these stories aren't real so just
showing them a monster isn't enough you need some kind of middleman some kind of person in there who can be threatened by that monster who can also act as an anchor point for your audience if you can convince the audience to care about a character who is threatened by the monster that's where things start working now you might say okay well bran what if i'm i'm making a monster that preys upon like a common fear like a lot of people are afraid of spiders and maybe i can make a monster that's like this spider monster
type thing wouldn't that work well yes maybe it will for certain audience members but not everyone who who steps into a theater or opens a book is going to be afraid of spiders for instance i have friends who yes they won't go within 10 feet of spiders but me myself i love spiders i will go out of my way to save them and put them outside instead of killing them so i mean if you're going to write a story you want one that's gonna have impact on as many possible people in your audience as possible
preferably the whole audience so the only way to do that is to make sure that your audience is invested in your main characters and that these main characters have some kind of relationship to the threat in your story tip number two keep your monster mysterious the scariest monsters out there are the ones that involve some aspect of the unknown either we don't see what they look like or we don't know what they're capable of we don't know what their motivation is or we don't know their origin those types of monsters are terrifying if you think
about the original alien movie this is a movie where the monster is constantly changing and because of that we don't know what to expect and when it does finally hit its mature form we don't get to see it we get to see movements in the shadows we get to see that it's capable of killing different people but we don't actually see what it fully looks like until the very end of the story and this movie has persisted through time as one of the great horror movies because of the way that the monster is conveyed to
the audience and whenever you yourself are creating a monster keep in mind that you don't want to give the audience the full details about this thing it's okay if you know the full details but sometimes it's best to just leave things up to the unknown because the unknown is scary because it's so full of possibilities now a great recent example of a monster comes from the novel bird box by josh mullerman and in this story there are creatures that if you look at them you instantly die there's just no way around it and it creates
this world where basically people if they're going outside they have to wear blindfolds they just can't open their eyes things like that and the really brilliant thing about these monsters is that we will never actually be able to see them in the pages of the book and we can't get a description of them we can't study them and because of that there is this air of mystery to them and when they're left unknown to an extent and that makes them scary that makes them something that we can only speculate about and it makes us wonder
and that's something that can have impact on an audience so think about that when you are coming up with your monsters ask yourself is there a way that i can keep these monsters hidden in some way or another can i hide their appearance or their origin or any other aspects of their being now my third and final tip is to embrace stupid fears now when i'm talking about stupid fears i mean fears that are neutral or harmless or meaningless or unusual things that are not your everyday things or things that are not typically associated with
the idea of being scary i think a lot of writers make the mistake of just going for the low-hanging fruit when it comes to making monsters they create monsters with teeth and claws and they have monsters with these distorted appearances but sometimes if you just take something unusual and you build from there like like like one of your fears like maybe you have like a stupid fear like you're afraid of band-aids or you're afraid of crayons or the hair on your toes or anything like that if you can take an idea like that and extrapolate
on it and ask yourself well how could a monster develop from something like that maybe you rip a band-aid off and like a monster comes to life or something like that i don't know something so just something unusual but i mean if you like you play around with it and you toy with new ideas and you take chances eventually you can come up with something original something that really gets under your reader's skin and throws them off because it's something they haven't seen before so i hope this helps question the day what is your favorite
monster from a movie let us know in the comments section below thank you guys for watching if you want to support the channel pick up copy of bad parts if you haven't already also be sure to check out my other videos hit the like and subscribe buttons for me share this video with a friend and as always remember to keep on writing
