Winter Horror Story

‘Tis the season to go through old things, isn’t it? It’s a rather nostalgic time of year, and for me, that means rifling through my older pieces of writing. Sometimes, it can lead me down a bad road and cause me to doubt my writing even more than I already do. Other times, it brings a smile to my face and makes me want to share what I’ve rediscovered with others. Fortunately, I’ve recently stumbled across the latter.

I was going through some of my old posts on my blog, The Writer’s Scrap Bin, and I found an old gem that still seems to be a favorite this time of year: a Friday Fun-Day writing prompt that I simply called “Winter Horror Story”. I haven’t touched it in a while, but when I look at the statistics for my site, it seems to be among the top posts, even outside of the season. Since this prompt seems to be popular on my blog and it would be fun to see what people on here would come up with, I decided to pass it on to the wonderful writers of Vocal.

Mind you, I cannot afford to hold any unofficial contest like all the wonderful ones I have entered on here. As such, I am only leaving this prompt for people to have fun with, as I have seen many others before me do. Still, I hope that doesn’t discourage people from taking the premise and rolling with it.

The prompt itself is fairly straightforward. All you have to do is write a horror short story, microfiction, or poem that takes place in the winter. If you can tie in Christmas or some other winter holiday, even better! In fact, for maximum benefit, I highly recommend incorporating any festive elements that you can and try to twist them to enhance the horror in your story. You could even write it in the form of a rhyming children’s story or Christmas poem, like “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. (Nothing like scarring the little ones for the holidays, right?)

Get as disturbed and deranged as you want. Turn white winter snow red, explore the darkest thoughts that arise around this time of year, do whatever you feel it takes to make the most wonderful time of year frightening. You can follow Krampus on his annual journey to beat naughty children, turn Santa into a psychopathic stalker that sees you when you’re sleeping, make elves into the cannibalistic beasts of your nightmares–the only limit is your imagination!

There are several examples of winter horror stories in movie form: Krampus (2015), Elves (1989), even The Abominable Snowman (1957). My personal recommendation for inspiration, though, is this reading of “The Night Before”, a zombie twist on “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, by paranormal investigator John L. Tenney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjXQe0fWrRM. (Yes, I watch a lot of paranormal investigative shows and follow paranormal investigators online. Don’t judge me for it.)

Even though there is no contest for this prompt, I would still love to see what people come up with. If you do use this prompt to write a short story, piece of microfiction, or even a poem, feel free to leave a link to it in the comments here. I might even write one of my own if the inspiration strikes me. If you have your own winter-based writing prompts, feel free to leave them as well. The more, the merrier!

For the original writing prompt and more of my blog posts, check out The Writer’s Scrap Bin. For more of my Vocal pieces, go to my Vocal profile.

Edit 12/10: I took on my own prompt! Below is the link to my microfiction piece, "All is Bloody and Bright":