Trope Talk: Horror and Suspense
First off, what even are tropes? It’s a word given out in the academic and literary sphere like candy, but the majority of people don’t really know what it means.
The short answer is: depends on who you ask.
Technically speaking, in rhetoric, tropes are the same thing as figures of speech, like irony or symbolism. But the way most people (especially when talking about literature) use tropes is often synonymous with “clichés.”
So why do people use tropes? Isn’t that a bad thing to include in your writing? We want to be original writers and thinkers, right? But tropes do serve their own value. As book marketer Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur put it, part of writing is “providing stories that are unique but not so unique as to be unrecognizable as a thriller or a romance or whatever genre you write in.”
With the spooky season on the horizon, a lot of people are turning to Halloween or horror movies, going to haunted houses, and just trying to get scared. When we think of holidays like Halloween or Dia de los Muertos, a lot of images come to mind—skulls, ofrendas, trick-or-treating, jump scares, and carved out pumpkins. Is it a bad thing, then, when we see some of those elements of the spooky season—elements that we expect to see—in the real world? No! These elements, like tropes, are a part of humanity’s and reader’s experiences, and the job of the writer is to subvert some of your expectations in their work but also sprinkle in a little of what you know (tropes!) so you don’t get lost.
But where did all of these tropes start? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it dates back to, not YA novels or even Shakespearean tragedies, but instead—Aristotle. This is where “trope theory” has its roots. But where did some of the modern tropes we have today come from, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense?
Maybe for this, we can take a look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. Widely considered the first science fiction novel, we can look at some of the tropes she presents here—the mad scientist, haunted settings, and lightning bringing things to life are just a few of them that have since been expanded on and manipulated within modern popular culture. Movies and books like Frankenweenie, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and even Ghostbusters have used some of these tropes, expanding their scope to reach a larger audience.
Besides older works like Frankenstein and Dracula, some movies have popularized their own tropes and spawned their own genres. Movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th kicked off horror movie slashers by using tropes such as a chainsaw as a murder weapon, creepy masks, and stalkers.
Our world today, literature, and popular culture would not be the same without the tropes we use. Tropes are a pivotal part of writing and literature, and as writers, we are continually seeking to better ourselves through purposeful use of these tools.
With that in mind, contributors at The Literary Palette also wanted to share with you our “Top Tropes” for the spooky season, with more to come later on Trope Talk!
Top 5 Horror/Suspense Literary Tropes for The Literary Palette
Unreliable Narrator
Gaslighting (in the sense of psychological suspense)
Missing people
Twist Ending
The world is ending
Sources: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/ & https://kindlepreneur.com/book-tropes/
Image Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/daviddv1202/art/Horror-Movie-Villains-845011388
