When you watch a scary movie or read a book that is labeled as “Horror Genre”, do you ever think about how different they can be, just based on how the story is told? But what makes a story scarier? Is it the way the setting is set up? The tone, pacing and sound effects? Or even the beginning of the story, before it begins? All three can if used correctly. To demonstrate what I mean, we will have a competition between the story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by none other than Edgar Allen Poe, and”The Hitchhiker”, a radio story read by Orson Welles. Before the story starts, both of the stories have a different approach to getting the reader interested and wanting more. In “The Hitchhiker”, talks about ghost stories and how he hasn’t met any people who don't like them. He also says that the one he is about to tell was labeled “ a real Orson Welles story”. In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the author talks about how he is not mad when he quite probably is. He says that he isn't mad and that he was haunted by an idea that he hadn’t mentioned yet. Both stories were set up differently and in very good ways, but the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart” helps to create more suspense, and …show more content…
For example, referring to pacing, whenever the character’s hearts are racing, the pace of the story seems to increase, and everything seems to go much faster. Sound effects are used in both stories effectively. When the main character hears the old man’s heart in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart”, he starts with the sound effects of “bump” or “thump”. Whenever something happens in “The Hitchhiker” you can expect a sound. For example, when his car crashes, you can hear a sound that sounds like scraping metal. Too many sounds are used in “The Hitchhiker”, in my opinion. The sound of just the thumping heart is all you need to get your heart racing in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. That means one more point for “The Tell-Tale