"Oh yes, there will be blood."
Saw II
“Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion”
Douglas E. Winter
"Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk."
Robert Bloch
"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
“The Matrix” Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving)
"Ever danced with the Devil by the pale moonlight?"
“Batman” The Joker (Jack Nicholson)
"Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas."
“Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves” Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman)
"Last night I saw upon the stair, a little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away…"
William Hughes Mearns, "Antigonish"
"Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red."
Clive Barker, "Books of Blood"
“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”
Joe Hill, "Horns"
“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
Bram Stoker, “Dracula”
“Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them”
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“People fail to realize that horror isn’t just monsters and death. Sometimes, it’s learning to accept the darkness of human nature.”
Kayla Krantz
“We're both drowning
in our rotten shells.
I look to you for comfort,
but your hand is already pushing my head down.”
Cristina Isabel, Beat your Heart Out
“He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.”
Stephen King, It
“We stopped checking for monsters under our bed when we realized they were inside us.”
Charles Darwin
“One, two, Freddy’s coming for you
Three, four, better lock your door
Five, six, grab your crucifix
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late
Nine, ten, never sleep again.”
“A Nightmare on Elm Street”
“It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.”
Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
“The Fly”
“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
“Silence of the Lambs”
“I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes… the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.”
“Halloween”
“I’ve always believed that talking to the dead is sometimes easier than talking to the living.” She shrugged at his questioning look. “They listen better.”
Grace Draven, “Phoenix Unbound”
“If I can not inspire love, I will cause fear”
Mary Shelley
“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
Chuck Palahniuk
"I'm a killer, a murdering bastard. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard."
“Kill Bill: Volume Two” Bill (David Carradine)
“A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”
Alfred Hitchcock
“I'm giving serious thought into eating your wife”
Hannibal Lecter Thomas Harris
“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
Alice Sebold, “The Lovely Bones”
“Sometimes the only way to stay sane, is to go a little crazy.”
Harley Quinn
“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.”
Baltasar Gracian, “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”
“I don’t like to look out of the windows even–there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
Stephen King
"Catch me when you can, Mishter Lusk"
Jack The Ripper
“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
André Gide
“And in the way of children, he did feel something and knew they were no longer alone. A great hush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them.”
Stephen King
"I like to play with things a while before annihilation."
“Flash Gordon” Ming The Merciless (Max Von Sydow)
“Every day is Halloween, isn’t it? For some of us.”
Tim Burton
“Demons? No problem. Just find your local stalker psycho and ask the whistling dear head hanging above his fireplace how many licks on a toostie pop does it take to make a demon go away.”
Mav Skye, Behind the Black Door
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”
Albert Einstein
The shortest horror story: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
Frederic Brown
"Imagine what horrible fate awaits my enemies when I would gladly kill any of my own men for victory."
“300” Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro)
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
Stephen King
“Whatever you do… don’t fall asleep.”
“A Nightmare on Elm Street”
“Hell is empty. All the devils are here.”
William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
William Shakespeare, “MacBeth”
“Welcome to my nightmare, I think you’re going to like it.”
Alice Cooper, “Welcome to My Nightmare”
“Blood is really warm,
It’s like drinking hot chocolate
But with more screaming.”
Zombie Haiku (Ryan Mecum)
Stare at the dark too long and you will eventually see what isn’t there.
Cameron Jace
“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Mae West
“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.”
“The Haunting of Hill House”
“The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.”
Andrew Hudgins
"I was born with the devil in me."
H. H. Holmes
“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”
H. P. Lovecraft
“Hello Clarice...”
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
“If the town were a black hole, I was the helpless star being sucked into oblivion. It was an oblivion I craved.”
J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness
“We don’t live in a rational world, Ethan. It’s an irrational world under a thin veneer of logic - just enough to throw us off.”
Alistair Cross, The Crimson Corset
“The things a man sees when he ain't got a gun.--Watson the Caretaker”
Stephen King
“Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.”
Michael McDowell
“And I thought:History is like a horror story.”
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
“You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.”
Jean Lorrain
“You can't drink 'English afternoon tea' in the morning," the barista said to her, his eyes blazing like shards of crystal meth about to ignite. "Do you want to be responsible for fucking up the universe?”
Christa Carmen, The Book of the Macabre
“Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”
“Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”
David Wong, John Dies at the End
“You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.”
Tasha Alexander, A Fatal Waltz
“Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.”
Michael A. Arnzen
“Yes, this was a haunted place. He had read about certain materials absorbing the sounds of their surroundings like divots in a vinyl recording, and now, as the sun started to dip below the horizon, this concept chilled him more than the creeping cold. Put a needle to the mortar of these walls and listen to the screams. His own would be among them.”
Aaron Dries, The Fallen Boys
“I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.”
Sergio Aragones
“Horror spawns horror”
Stephen King
“It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.”
Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools
“Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster.”
David Wellington
“I grew up in a spooky little town in a house with a spooky little basement, so the sensation of uneasy trepidation is home for me; it takes me back to boyhood.”
Alistair Cross
“I sleep with the lights on now. Not because I’m afraid of the dark, but because I like to keep the night as far away as I can.”
Keith Kekic, Nightwalkers
“THERE IS A LOVELY LITTLE horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood—the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along:
I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn't any justice.
A voice behind him said, “There isn't.”
Fredric Brown
“Daylight does not lend itself to terror: objects and people are plain to see; and we encounter there only those things which dare to show themselves in the glare of day. But night, opaque night denser than walls, night, empty and infinite and so black and fathomless that terrifying things reach out and touch us, night when we feel horror stirring, mysteriously prowling―night seemed to him to hide some unknown, imminent, threatening danger. What could it be?”
Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories
“Ms. Fang is the nicest, sweetest teacher at Scary School. She only ate twelve kids last year.”
Derek The Ghost, Scary School
“Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.”
Stephen King
“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
“It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.”
Stephen King, Rose Madder
“I write about the scariest monsters: The ones inside us all. And the ones that want to eat what is inside us all.”
Aaron Marcusson
“When you love to kill and can do it as well as I can, then what better way to raise hell?" -Javier "Bones" Jones”
Justin Bienvenue, A Bloody Bloody Mess In the Wild Wild West
“Middling monsters died at the point of pitchforks, burned with torches, or at the butt of silver-capped canes wielded by angry, geriatric Poles. Middling people were dime-a-dozen, emptied souls, shorn sheeple, human husks. A good monster didn’t worry about what it was doing; it just did it. A true predator didn’t worry about guilt, or being popular, or anything. It just cruised along, living for the kill, surviving. A good person, well, she’d put a bullet in her head or weigh her feet down and throw herself into the Chicago River, holding her breath until she went to the sludgy, filthy bottom, and had to open wide and breathe water until she died.”
D. T. Neal, Saamaanthaa
“Just tell yourself they're only stories.
Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)”
“Horror demands answers to the deeper questions; it requires the contemplation of life and death and the examination of good and evil. I know of no other fictional genre that puts morality as front and center as horror does.”
Alistair Cross
“Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.”
T.E.D. Klein, Seeing Red
“He breathed in hard. The stench of blood filled his lungs. Only now, for the first time, could he truly appreciate it.”
Shane K.P. O'Neill, Bound By Blood: Volume 2 (Bound By Blood, #2)
“Richard felt about as conspicuous as a foreskin at a Jewish nudist camp.”
Dylan J Morgan, HOSTS
“It is not what we know that scares us, it is what we do not”
A.G. Phillips
“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.”
John Carpenter
“The horror had begun.”
F. Paul Wilson
“When you stop chasing your dreams, your dreams start chasing you.”
Dez Del Rio, The Lipstick Killerz
“I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.”
H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
“Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath”
Dean Koontz, 77 Shadow Street
“Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes.”
J.M.G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
“Well did you call the hypothetical hardware store and buy a theoretical chainsaw?-- Pam to Jessica, True Blood”
Alan Ball, True Blood: All Together Now
“Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead.”
Jim Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!
“Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind bending that it must be presented as fiction to be accepted. George Saunders The Bookseller”
C. Robert Cales
“He’d need the woman’s help to set things right; he just didn’t like having to wake the dead.”
Joe DeRouen, Small Things
“There was a naked jock on my bed and a thing with tentacles coming out of my toilet. One of these things did not belong, and if you tell me that it was the naked jock, you shouldn't be reading this story.”
Johnny Murdoc, The Horror in Dunwich Hall!
“They called her plain Jane,
Until she was slain,
The culprit being the clown,
Stuffed down a drain,
Without her mane,
Little Jane was cut down.”
Anthony Hulse, Tales of Enticement
“A horror writer is one who is not only willing to look into the darkest of shadows...but to reach into them too.”
Thomas Scopel, Twitch
“I will come,' the priest answered, 'for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood.”
Francis Marion Crawford, For the Blood is the Life and Other Stories
“The place was silent and - aware.”
P.C. Wren
“While his brain lay slowly dying, Bevan felt his body come back to life.”
Stephanie Bedwell-Grime, The Deadwalk
“Evil Comes to you when you don’t expect it. When life is shining bright to you Evil will show up to show you the dark side of life. That’s always happening in the worst case scenario that makes your life in danger. Despair is what you will feel. Fear is what you will get. no way out of this horror”
Sami Abouzid
“Oddly, most of the movies that actually managed to scare me were not really supposed to be horror movies”
Nitya Prakash
“Some people are eaters and some people are dinner.”
--Dave
From Purgatory the Audiobook”
J. Costa
“Avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.”
Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
“While some monsters are born, others are created. But, the worst monsters are those who believe themselves to be heroes.”
E. H. Night, The Four Before Me
“Just as every villain imagines themselves a hero, few heroes see when they've become the villain.”
Nicholas Tana
“Serial killers don't kill their girlfriends.”
Front 242 title
“You didn't have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if you never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing.”
Stephen King, Desperation
“I’ll sing you a tale,
Of evil and woe,
On his way to school, was little Joe,
All that was found was his bloody coat,
His bastard tormentor had cut his throat.”
Anthony Hulse, Tales of Enticement
“Fetch him breakfast.
Fetch him coffee.
Fetch his sheets for his bed.
Fetch him lunch.
Fetch his drink.
Fetch the ax to cut his head.
Fetch him dinner.
Fetch him tea.
Fetch the mop but watch him bleed.”
Cristina Isabel, Beat your Heart Out
“What is a hit man to do when the things you kill won't stay dead?”
Mitch Hyman, Vinnie & Mook - Family and Fiends: A Hit Men of the Supernatural Anthology
“She was the monster that defended them from the other horrors of the world.”
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin
“Madness is in the mind of the beholder.”
Boris Lee, The Shadows of Insanity
“The pain was blinding, the agony all-encompassing as the smoke of her seared flesh scorched her nostrils. But despite the pain and her horror, Marta's mouth watered all the more at the scent. She smelled like meat. She smelled delicious.”
M.D. Presley
“To keep up with the times these days, it seems you have to be a little bit demented.”
William F. Kinderman”.
“Thick as spleen soup.”
Grivante, The Zee Brothers: Curse of the Zombie Omelet!: Zombie
“She lived in private with her own horror.”
Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato
“I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.
She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak - but then she reached inside, and pulled out her tongue.”
Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10
“I'm sorry I didn't believe you, babe," he whispered to the twisted corpse.”
Allan Walsh, Low Life
“Be careful when you pray for help. Because when you pray to God, the Devil hears you too.”
Ajinkya Bhasme, When the Devil Whispers
“He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come, though afterwards he can come as he please.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula
“I don't believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain...lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough...the way a carton of milk will take the flavour of certain strongly spiced foods if it's left open in the refrigerator.”
Stephen King, Christine
“It seems people don't want to be awake these days. Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced”
Charles Stross
“Fear is a question, really. What are you afraid of, and why? There's a history to every horror. Fear is a training master whom you run from or you face. Defining your backstory is the prelude to the story. That's how you solve fear. You rewrite it.”
Angela Panayotopulos, The Wake Up
“Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things - I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.”
Peter Straub
“The baby wasn't supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste.”
Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth
“The air down here doesn't smell of sugar and coffee. It smells damp, rotten.”
Danielle Vega, The Merciless IV: Last Rites
“The monster is bigger than the human. It represents abundance—overabundance. ... It has lots of eyes, extra arms, too many teeth. Everything about it is too many and too much.”
Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
“Even then I found the word fitting, soothing.
Fireflies.
Fire flies.
Fire, fly.”
Rin Chupeco, The Girl from the Well
“In a moment of instant clarity, Gary realized that he was about to see exactly what his insides were made of. And he wasn’t afraid. He was curious.”
T.E. Grau, The Nameless Dark: A Collection
“Anger, The spring of all life's horror. - Medea”
Euripides, Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Hecabe / Electra / Heracles
“My friends, a vicarious obsession with celebrities and a few dearly held political opinions is not a useful life of the imagination; that's the life of a beetle that just happens to have opposable thumbs and the ability to count to ten.”
Stephen King
“I'll show you all things I can spell with a little spilled blood.”
Victor LaValle
“Maybe for all our technology and fancy talking phones and smart cars, we're still just primitives huddled around the fire- or, ya know, the electronic glow of screens, whatever- trying not to look too closely into the dark where the beasts are.”
Greg Mitchell
“One can only see what one observes, one observes only things which are already in the mind.”
Alphonse Bertillon
“Homecomer, hitcher, phantom rider,
White lady wants what’s been denied her,
Gather-grim knows what you fear the most,
But best keep away from the crossroads ghost.”
Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road
“Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”
Dario Argento
“The less one knows about meat, the more one is able to enjoy it. Meat tastes wonderful, of course, but as with the lad hawking hard-to-find wares at unbelievable prices, its best not to ask too many questions.”
Brian South, The Zombie Sheriff Takes Tucson: A Love Story
“She barely saw him through the darkness, but her throbbing arm was enough to announce his presence. Hot breath blew against her ear, raising goosebumps on her neck. "If I can't have you, nobody can.”
Amy Crandall, Delusions
“For anyone who might be of the opinion that horror is strictly the domain of men, we graveyard girls are here to change your way of thinking—and to make you sleep with the lights on.”
Gerri R. Gray, Graveyard Girls
“One sometimes kills for the love of it.”
Cornell Woolrich, Black Alibi
“But if you want to know who the scariest person in the group is, look for the one who’s been fighting zombies without smearing her eyeliner.”
Mira Grant, Feedback
“For anyone, man or woman to desire me, it is absurd! I am nothing but a gargoyle filled with the blood of others.”
Ilse V. Rensburg, Blood Sipper
“Sometimes the wind made her feel like she was not alone. The icy blasts there seemed to whisper and call her name; they had done so tonight. Not only whispered her name but told her to do it. A frigid voice from somewhere in those January howls had told her to kill them, kill them all.”
Don Roff, Snowblind
“No one needs to look beyond their walls to find monsters.”
Theo Sage, Tiny Terror
“...but what are people but deaths that haven’t happened yet?”
“Births that already happened?” Jackie said without thinking.”
Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale
“Some of our truths are scarier than our horrors.”
Dominic Riccitello
“Don't dream it. Be it.”
Rocky Horror Picture Show
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was a zombie for the simple reason that I thought he was dead, but then he seemingly came back to life and tried to eat my girlfriend. If that doesn’t make him a zombie, I don’t know what does!”
Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
“Here’s a fun fact for you. Flies are necrophageous. That means they feed on the flesh of the dead. Yes, just like zombies. Actually, many insects are necrophageous. Will I become necrophageous? I won’t lie. It’s a pretty cool word. Necrophageous.”
Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
“The demon needs permission to stay?” Kyle asked, a bit amused now.
“Of course. You need to give it permission to come into your home otherwise the game can’t start. The demon cannot come in without permission,” she repeated, emphasising on the last part.
“For a demon that probably wants to rip my head off, it’s kinda polite,” Kyle grinned, grabbing her hands.”
Aparajita Yadav, Let's Play A Game
“Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein IS the monster.”
Anonymous
“Way I look at it, you get to a point in your life when you turn a corner and realise that’s about all you’re gonna get. If you can face down that knowledge and not crack open a bottle, well, you’re a better person than I am. If I make it to eighty I intend to start smoking again.”
Andrew Cull, Knock and You Will See Me
“Sin is like mold—the longer it lives, the blacker it becomes. And spores can’t be avoided. Never.”
Aaron Dries, The Fallen Boys
“Monsters are created. And they’re created by monsters."--Chris Miller, A Murder of Saints”
Chris Miller, A Murder of Saints
“We're going to isolated woods to contact aliens. What could go wrong?”
Yawatta Hosby, Six Plus One
“It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.”
Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories
“Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I've written.”
Stephen King
“I was crying for the little girl I had been, who had withstood terrifying nightmares of death and blood and war and maiming. And when I had tried to share those horrors, the shock on my friends' faces had told me I was not normal, and I should keep my dreams to myself.”
Cheryl R. Cowtan, Girl Desecrated: Vampires, Asylums and Highlanders 1984
“I'd ask my parents to leave the door open just a little bit so I wouldn't be stuck in the prison of my bedroom and mind, the imaginary horrors barring me from entering dreamland.”
Caspar Vega, Donald Trump: Plague Doctor
“The sun will always rise, but we may never know”
Aprl Ray
“He sat on the grass, rested the carcass on his lap and bit into its soft underbelly, spilling its rank contents onto his freshly pressed shirt and slacks.”
Howard Dunkley, The EF76 Strain: The Complete Narrative
“It was humanoid in form but it was certainly not a person. Its big upside-down teardrop shaped head was covered in blood yet I could still see it pulsating as if there was a big heart stuck inside its forehead, next to the brain, aching to pop out.”
Caspar Vega, Southern Dust
“If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one–probably a child–who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.”
Stephen King, It
“Good children do taste better, but there are so few of them. If you can be satisfied with naughty children, you will always have food on the table. They are never in short supply.”
David Demchuk, The Bone Mother
“What is fear but that ‘thing’ that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
“You coming or not?" he repeated impatiently.
I was going to say no. But then, glancing at the curtains, I thought, it's probably no more spooky out there in that cemetery than it is here in my own bedroom!”
R.L. Stine, Welcome to Dead House
“Knitting is a good way to pass the time when you're waiting for something to die.”
David Demchuk, The Bone Mother
“I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
“Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust.”
Oliver Markus Malloy
“Well, yeah, you listen to a talking snake and there's gonna be trouble.”
Mike Mignola, Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea
“But he doesn't see what's so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you're dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that's absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.”
M. R. Carey
“Ben knew that no matter how far you run, you're still yourself when you get there.”
Brendan Duffy, House of Echoes
“Even in death, may you be triumphant”
Darren Shan, A Living Nightmare
“Reality—there’s nothing but horror in that.”
A.L. Kennedy
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night, may the good lord deliver us.
Scottish prayer
“All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.”
Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort
“Can I borrow a cup of your face...?!”
Jim Dyar, The Zeus Gambit
“Logically, it doesn’t make sense for people to make stories of things that go bump in the night during a full moon.”
He paused for a moment, then added one final comment. “No, Megan… it’s during a new moon that the night is darkest. It’s during a new moon… that the real monsters come out.”
Richard Crofton, Agents of Shadow
“Hell is behind a black door.”
Mav Skye, Behind the Black Door
“You have no idea what it’s like, knowing you’re going to die in an hour. Sixty short minutes are now the only things that separate you from the other side. From the country undiscovered by the living. From that inevitable end we all must face. Guess that’s what the whole death row thing is about, though. If you ask me now if I feel sorry for what I’ve done, I’d have to tell you plainly the answer is no. I’d do it all again, given the opportunity. I’d kill them all. Over, and over, and over. The court-appointed psychiatrist described me as having a “severe antisocial personality disorder with excessive violent tendencies.” But I’m letting you know now I never stood out in a crowd. Never drew attention to myself. I was just a regular woman, one you’d see in the convenience store, and smile at politely. Who would have ever suspected what I was capable of?
All those people. Those useless, useless people. I gave them a use. I was an artist. And my canvas of choice was the clean human skull.”
Sean M. Thompson, Too Late
“Clearly, you don't know much about horror, he said. Horror is premised on the experience of what we do not and cannot understand, whereas what you're talking about is mere low-class smut, which every schoolboy has encountered before he's in long pants.” Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean
“Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.”
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“I love waking up to the sound of babies laughing. Unless it is at 1 am and you live alone...”
Youtube Video
“Revenge: it's a dream of flames fueled by scorched remains that are lit to a torch and brought back upon the one who burned you.”
August Verona, What To Do When You Are Dead
“The organism - there was no other thing she could think to call it - churned and moved as it propelled itself across the ground, the living bodies of animals briefly appearing before being submerged in a sea of bugs as others rose to the surface. And then there were the bones. At first she didn't quite understand what she was seeing. For a moment she believed that they were pieces of wood - limbs of trees picked up by the undulating mass - but when she saw the skull, its jaw hanging open in a silent scream, she understood the horror of what it was. The remains of victims were a part of its body, flowing within the multitude that made up its mass.”
Thomas E. Sniegoski, Savage
“The wolf had begun hunting human prey. They were plentiful in the dark city streets and provided enough good meat to satiate his gnawing hunger. He was still very careful not to let any who saw him live. To do otherwise would displease the Master. He would only stalk those people that were foolish enough to walk alone in the night”
Brian S. Ference, The Wolf of Dorian Gray: A Werewolf Spawned by the Evil of Man
“Some dreams shouldn't be remembered.”
Chloé Danielo
“Once they're in...they stay in. And that little bitch invited that evil into herself like a hard dick on prom night.”
Kyle M. Scott, AFTERTASTE
“If there’s anything in life that’s an undisputed fact, it’s this: Buildings with strange symbols carved in their lintels are bad news. You rarely find symbols leading to unicorns and fields of candy—and even that’s bad news if you’re diabetic.”
Daniel Younger, Zen and the Art of Cannibalism: A Zomedy
“The corridor didn't seem long enough to contain so much blackness.”
Ramsey Campbell, Holes for Faces
“I stared into the man's lifeless eyes. His face was blue, but it could've been from the cold. His body was bloated, but he could've just been fat. None of this explained the crows lining up on the tree branch though. --The Body By the Tree”
Yawatta Hosby, When the Lights Go Out - Ink Slingers' Halloween Anthology
“He had never actually said what he hunted, only that he enjoyed it.”
Kayla Krantz, Dead by Morning
“If you go chasing your freedom your fate will only follow you there and force you back.”
Christina Henry, Alice
“Life is so fragile and unpredictable, especially when you are in a gang or in a life of crime. It’s like playing poker; you think to yourself that you have a good hand. However, it is only when you reveal your hand do you sometimes discover to your horror that someone else’s hand is better.”
Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
“Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.”
E. F. Benson
“What you seem to forget is that I'm not one of the embodiments of evil. I'm one of the embodiments of fear. That means I know what makes evil quake in the light of the sun.”
Emily Kirby, The Silver Codex
“Those monsters in your closets and under your beds? They are just as real as us. The difference is that we fear what we don't understand, while they understand exactly, what we fear.”
Rob Shepherd
“I don't believe in monsters."
"Well, Red, I think you might want to start." Pike turned and looked him in the eye. "What do you think those green things were? And what do you think is trying to smash its way in here? A pony?”
Jack Keely, The Whistlebrass Horror
“With apologies to Judy Garland and Cole Porter, all the world does NOT love a clown. John Wayne Gacy might have been the final nail in the coffin in terms of anyone associating clowns with funny (if a bunch of clowns die, do they all fit into one coffin?)”
Christopher Lombardo, Death by Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons
“The air changes. Then that invisible spider crawls up my spine, tickling the hairs behind my neck. I have come to know this spider these last couple of years. It whispers there’s something else in the room, breathing with you, watching you, grinning at you. I hate that damn spider.”
Rin Chupeco, The Suffering
“I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?”
Stephen King, Finders Keepers
“Whats good for the bacon;
Stinks for the pig.”
Natas Reverse, Satan`s Vertebrae
“They were like lightning and rain, existing together but clashing at their very natures.”
T.S. Pettibone, Hatred Day
“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”
James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes
“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
This it is, and nothing more.”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
“I can't believe that she's questioning the existence of magic when she's standing before me dead and talking.”
Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
“I am War. I am Death. I am the Unloved God.”
T.S. Pettibone, Hatred Day
“Something unspeakable left the room.”
William Peter Blatty
“What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.”
Jerome A. Miller, The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis
“Be dangerous, darling, for the whole world rises and falls at your feet.”
Mav Skye, Wanted: Single Rose
“Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.”
Octavio Paz
“Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.”
Robert Dunbar, The Streets
“I noticed the dudes in the ambulance were staying put; I hoped they were calling for backup, or maybe somebody who could do an exorcism, or maybe my pal Stephen King, because if anybody on earth could figure a way out of this mess, it'd be Uncle Stevie.”
Tobe Hooper, Midnight Movie
“At the end of the world, music always played on like a bad movie.”
Mav Skye, Wanted: Single Rose
“In the end, it all comes down to the Blood...”
Nathan Walsh
“Teenage girls know more than we're given credit for. We sense danger even when everyone's telling us it's fine, he's a perfectly nice man, an upstanding member of our community, have you tasted his sugar-cream pie?”
Nova Ren Suma, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys
“It’s a long story, but one you’ve never heard before. This story is about a place that dwells on the mountain; a place where bad things happen. And you may think you know about the bad things, you may decide you have it all figured out but you don’t. Because the truth is worse than monsters or men.”
C.K. Walker
“Everyone has a monster inside”
JG Faherty
“Horror is a situation, not a character, no matter how evil one may be.”
Rachel Deering
“We stopped looking in the shadows, when we realised that WE were the monsters that we are afraid of. I want to take these monsters, give them a voice and put them back under our beds, in our closets and in the shadows, back where we are most afraid of them.”
Rob Shepherd, The Grays Anatomy
“I felt absolutely nothing, and that frightened me even more than the darkness of oblivion”
Catrina Burgess, Awakening
“The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.”
Clive Barker, The Forbidden
“Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.”
Robert Dunbar, The Streets
“There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey.”
Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape
“I think everyone should have a problem with zombies on fire.”
Faith McKay, Lipstick & Zombies
“Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.”
Matthew De Abaitua, If Then
“The Professor gripped his axe, having pulled it, with some difficulty, from the boy's head.”
Neil Davies, The Village Witch
“It was like a commercial for laundry detergent or tampons or a prescription medication with death listed as a possible side effect.”
Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
“There's a transparent face that looks deep into my eyes, baring my soul, right before terror consumes me and the image becomes a black mass of horror.”
Brandy Nacole, Deep in the Hollow
“There is no light at the end of the tunnel for us. We are who we are.”
Isaiyan Morrison, Old Farmer's Road
“No wonder many people dare not look closely at life: It's a horrible sight.”
Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
“Claws grabbed his head from behind, curving round his face, serrated talons gouging into his eyes”
Neil Davies, The Village Witch
“I have found so much beauty in the dark,
as I have found a lot of horror in the light.”
Azereth Skivel
“Snape looked horrified. 'You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?' 'Don't look shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?' 'Lately, only those whom I could not save', said Snape.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“He's evil, and the only thing that stops evil is death.”
Kayla Krantz, Dead by Morning
“Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.”
Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories
“There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.
Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone.
Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out. Mooshed. No loss of talent in that mess. Morrie thought.”
Stephen King, Finders Keepers
“Their laughter was like the stridulation of the ghosts of grasshoppers.”
John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights
“So, I poisoned his coffee this morning and watched him drink it.”
A.F. Stewart, Killers and Demons II: They Return
“Don't be afraid of the dark, it's a place where you can hide.”
August Verona
“There are some young almond tress, which ordinarily look as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the white bone of the brittle bright night.”
John Collier
“Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.”
Martin Amis
“Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.”
Criss Jami, Healology
“Only a few can survive and face reality without a vice.”
Jacob Wild
“His meat was going to be very fulfilling.”
Derek Ailes, Zombie Command: A Horror Anthology
“Everyone knows a Wixen when we smell one. You smell the prettiest, a mixture of strawberries, sex and deceit. Dior should bottle it.”
Beverley Price, Blood Bound
“They say revenge is a dish best served cold. This isn’t correct. Revenge is a dish best served lukewarm or at room temperature (depending on the room) with a side of sauerkraut lightly sprinkled with pepper, a generous helping of golden brown roasted potatoes, and a large loaf of marble rye, washed down with any kind of unfiltered wheat beer. But whatever you do—and remember this, as it can be a matter of life or death—don’t put any sort of fruit in the beer. Fruit doesn’t belong in beer.”
Brian South, The Zombie Sheriff Takes Tucson: A Love Story
“Do you know how to hide a dead body?”
Chris Grams, 3 DOWN
“We'll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we'll drink your screams”
Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
“Innards came out crossed and complex, like a tumble of plus and minus signs--the equation of human life.”
M.P. Johnson, Cattle Cult! Kill! Kill!
“Fear is quite the anaesthetic”
L. Ashley Straker, Infected Connection
“If you look into the face of evil, evil's gonna look right back at you”
American Horror Story
“How many people has this hotel eaten?”
Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody
“Behind every legendary monster, there is an unknown tragedy.”
Julie Deshtor
“Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon et autres nouvelles de terreur
“I don't have expensive tastes – just bloody ones.
– Vampire Dragul Mangorian”
John Matsui, Late Bite
“Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.”
Michael Cisco, The Traitor
“Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams”
Stephen King
“One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.”
Brooke Warra
“It is not in my nature to be interested in the living.
But there are many things, I have found, that defy nature.”
Rin Chupeco, The Girl from the Well
“Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.”
Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
“The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, and they would feast upon the corpse until they were fat and could feast no more. The young would come with the old to see this trick and glory in it. No worm knew where the gravedigger got his corpses, but they were always succulent and nourishing. They praised the gravedigger’s generosity. -- From "Worms”
L. Joseph Shosty, Swallow the Evil
“Pretty doll," rasped the dark haired vampire as he went about behind her, and she could feel his ravenous hunger practically radiating off him.”
J.E. Keep, Theodora's Descent
“I don't remember ever signing up for weird. It just sort of happened.”
Justin Alcala
“The ghosts that exert the most power in people’s lives-at least, the people I know–tend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.”
Glen Hirshberg
“Is it possible for one to enter sleep and wander while never waking? And if so, for how long can one survive this way?”
Tiffany Apan, Descent
“There. We can be friends now."
"Someone like you could never be my friend."
"Why ever not?"
"Because I'm a nice person, and you're a sick, twisted bitch.”
John Hennessy, Dark Winter: Crescent Moon
“What was it? What could it--
His last thought was surprise.”
Peter Benchley, Beast
“She stared at her face in the mirror, feeling everything around her slipping away. The face stared back, and she wondered who was looking at her.”
Joe DeRouen, Threads
“There was blood on the hair of his chinny chin chin.”
Fawn Bonning, The Leader of Lors
“We all go a little mad sometimes.”
Robert Bloch, Psycho
“And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Holding onto anger is like carrying a bucket of poison. Every step you walk, it splashes onto yourself and others. When you finally reach the one who deserves it, you have poisoned yourself and many other innocent people.”
Dean Henryson, A Love in Darkness
“No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.”
Robert Dunbar, Vortex
“People do not ever change. The person you see later is merely the one that was hidden from you in the beginning.
Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon.”
“The world's full of wonder, he said. Or at least horror that looks wondrous from afar.”
Luke Scull
“Come now, I was not about to let that thing eat you.”
stacy buck, Squanto Undead: Wake the Undead Part 3
“Cold. Foggy cold. Soaking through fabric, biting into the skin, clutching the bones until flesh crawled.
There was no moonlight, only orange, smoky lanterns, and the light made the snow glitter and turned the shadows into blood.”
Erik Tavares, House of Corruption
“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
“No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.”
Ilsa J. Bick, Monsters
“It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.”
Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner
“Between the world we see
and the things we fear,
there are doors.
When they are opened,
nightmares become reality.”
A Haunting
“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off.”
Stephen King
“Person 1: "Stay back....I have a demon inside of me."
Person 2: "Let me get closer...I have a hell inside me where your demons can live."
(from Dark Winter, #2 - out Halloween 2014)”
John Hennessy
“When am I going to learn to stop questioning authority and just eat the Soylent Green?”
Red Tash, This Brilliant Darkness
“Sal turned, an eye stalk hanging from his teeth.”
Steven Ramirez, Tell Me When I'm Dead
“the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.”
Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
“I went for the door and opened it, not wanting to see how much this corpse was willing to destroy to get into my bedroom. His body probably would’ve crumbled to pieces before he got in, and I had no clue how to get dead guy out of the carpet.”
Kelly Hashway, Stalked by Death
“It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.”
Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape
“Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!”
H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator
“Terry loved candlelight dinners and red wine. It was a nice contrast from work.
And killing people.”
Jonas Eriksson, Everyday Psychopaths
“I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment.”
Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood
“From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.”
Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
“You have really nice teeth,” Terry said and thought they could be excellent for his collection of human body parts.”
Jonas Eriksson, Everyday Psychopaths
“The diamonds glinted under the glare of the chandelier and they looked like a thousand spider eyes”
Kate Chisman, Creep
“It was like some mad scientist threw a bunch of DNA into a blender and this is what came out. What the heck could it be? Was it some kind of alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly wrong? Did we have a Dr. Frankenstein living in Billings? Seriously, the creature looked like a resurrected Wookiee made from spare parts.”
Kendra C. Highley, Matt Archer: Monster Hunter
“There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.”
Stephen King
“There’s a big difference, I discovered, between wanting to die and not wanting to live. When you want to die, you at least have a goal. When you don’t want to live, you’re really just empty.”
Brian Hugh Warner
“There's wickedness, dark as night. There are things that are wicked and if you touch them, they know you. They know where to find you now. - Knock Knock”
S.P. Miskowski
“Cattle... it called us cattle...
We're hamburger, you mean.”
Peter Clines, 14
“Shall I compare thee to a Shoggoth?”
D.R. O'Brien, Shakespeare vs. Lovecraft: A Horror Comedy Mash-Up featuring Shakespeare's Characters and Lovecraft's Creatures
“Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.”
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
“This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.”
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“if you're a teenaged babysitter caring for a mute toddler in a remote Maine cabin during a once-in-a-century blizzard while and escaped killers (bearing a strange resemblance to the handicapped boy you and your friends bullied off an embankment and left for dead all those years ago) roams the woods, you're probably in a horror movie.”
Seth Grahame-Smith, How to Survive a Horror Movie
“And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now... or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he'll be pounding and... will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.”
Alan Moore
“There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.”
Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”
Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
“Fresh is best.”
Die Booth, Re-Vamp
“You will live to see man made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
Tesla
“If you are reading this, then you are blissfully unaware what is creeping up behind you.”
Unknown
