101 Terrifying Horror Story Prompts - ScreenCraft (2023)

Welcome to the den of horror, fright and macabre stories.

Most writers are often asked,"Where do you get your ideas?"Most of the time, writers find it difficult to answer this question.

We get our ideas from a multitude of sources: news headlines, novels, TV shows, movies, our lives, our fears, our phobias, and so on. They might come from a scene or moment in a movie that hasn't been fully explored. They can come from a single image that appeals to the creative mind: a seed that keeps growing and growing until the writer is forced to finally put it to paper or screen.

In the spirit of helping writers find those seeds, here we offer 101 Originally Conceived Scary Story Prompts that you can use as inspiration for your next horror story.

They can inspire screenplays, novels, short stories, or even smaller moments that you can include in the stories you are already writing or that you will create in your next projects.

But be careful! If you're easily startled and have an active imagination like most writers, turn on the lights and proceed with caution...

1. A girl disappears in the forest and her parents find only a creepy and decrepit doll. They soon discover that the doll is actually her daughter. And she is alive.

2. Friendly neighbors invite new residents of an old neighborhood to a Halloween party. The neighbors are vampires.

3. A family dog ​​runs away from home. He returns a year later to his family's delight. But there is something different about it. Something demonic.

4. A girl disappears. Fifteen years later, her parents get a call from her. But they listen in fear because her daughter was killed that dark night years ago.

5. A man reads a novel and soon realizes that the story is his, and according to the book, a murderer is coming.

6. A scientist clones his family who died in a plane crash, but soon discovers the repercussions of playing God.

7. A man wakes up tied to an electric chair.

8. A man wakes up in a coffin next to a freshly killed corpse.

9. A woman wakes up to find her family gone and her doors and windows boarded up with no way out.

10. A man afraid of snakes is shipwrecked on an island covered in snakes.

11. Serial killers around the world are connected through an obscure website.

12. The world's population is dominated by vampires, all but one little boy.

13. A woman who is afraid of clowns is forced to work in a traveling circus.

14. An astronaut and a cosmonaut are on the International Space Station when their countries enter a nuclear war with each other. Your last orders are to eliminate the other.

15. A treasure hunter finds a tomb buried underground.

16. A young brother and sister find an old door in their basement that didn't exist before.

17. Winged creatures can be seen within the storm clouds above.

18. A man wakes up to find a homeless clown staring at him.

19. The residents of a town suddenly drop dead while the dead in the cemeteries around them rise up.

20. A doctor performs the first head transplant: things go wrong.

21. A man receives images of himself in various stages of torture that he does not remember.

22. A girl wakes up to find a boy sitting on her bed who says he is her little brother but never had one.

23. A spooky walk in the woods on Halloween is really real.

24. A bartender serves last call to the only remaining patron, who is the Devil himself.

25. Earth suffers a planet-wide blackout as all technology is lost.

26. A boy's stepfather is actually a murderous werewolf.

27. Something has turned the neighborhood pets into demonic killers.

28. A priest is a vampire.

29. A woman wakes up without eyes.

30. A man wakes up without a mouth.

31. A monster is terrified of the scary boy who livesAboveyour bed.

32. An astronaut thrown into cold space on a mission gone wrong suddenly shows up on his family's doorstep.

33. A woman answers a phone call only to discover that the voice on the other end of the line is herself in the future, warning her that a murderer is coming.

34. A boy realizes that aliens have replaced his family.

35. A woman wakes up in an abandoned prison from which she cannot escape.

36. A bank robber robs a bank in a small town that holds the wealth of witches.

37. A traveling salesman circa 1950s visits the wrong house.

38. Dead soldiers return to their Civil War-era homes.

39. Snatchers kidnap a vampire's child.

40. An innocent circus clown discovers the dark history of the trade.

41. A homeless person is chased by faceless beings.

42. A speleologist stumbles upon a series of rattlesnake-infested caves.

43. A group of friends are forced to venture into a chamber of horrors where only one has sworn to survive.

44. He's not the man she thought he was. In fact, he is not a man.

45. The suburb is actually purgatory.

46. ​​​​Someone discovers that we are all robots. Who created us and why?

47. She is not an angel. She is a demon.

48. An old shipwreck washes up on shore.

49. A sinkhole swallows a house whole and releases something underneath.

50. A man has sleep paralysis at the worst possible time.

51. A woman walking is caught in a bear trap as the sun begins to set.

52. Naked, faceless figures stalk campers in the woods.

53. An astronaut is the sole survivor of a moon landing gone wrong, only to discover that the moon is infested with strange creatures.

54. A woman is unjustly condemned to an asylum.

55. A mother's baby doesn't come out of the womb and keeps growing and growing and growing as doctors try to remove it, but they can't.

56. Friends on a road trip come across a rural town whose residents dress up as different types of clowns.

57. Tourists in Ireland retreat to an ancient castle when the country is taken over by greedy and vengeful goblins.

58. A boy on a farm makes a scarecrow that comes to life.

59. A figure dressed in an old and dirty Easter bunny outfit chases the children of a village.

60. Abused zoo animals are released and wreak havoc in a small town.

61. A deceased grandmother's old doll collection comes to life.

62. Little Red Riding Hood was a vampire.

63. Someone cloned Hitler and raised him as a white supremacist.

64. A pumpkin patch comes to life: beings with the heads of pumpkins and the bodies of vines.

65. An endless swarm of killer bees wreaks havoc on the country.

66. Christ returns to Earth, or so people thought.

67. A natural anomaly brings all the country's spiders to a horrified town.

68. A woman finds an old 16mm film from her childhood and sees that she had a sister. What happened to you?

69. Something old emerges from an old lake.

70. A woman suddenly starts waking up in someone else's body every morning; each day she ends up being stored and killed by the same killer in black.

71. An Artificial Intelligence starts communicating with a family online, only to terrorize them through its technology.

72. A family buys a cheap house only to discover that an old cemetery is their backyard.

73. Years after the end of the zombie apocalypse, the survivors discover that the epidemic was caused by aliens who appeared to reclaim the planet.

74. A woman has memories of being abducted by aliens, but soon discovers they weren't aliens. They were...

75. A boy has a tumor that slowly develops into a Siamese twin - the older he gets, the meaner the twin becomes.

76. A cult that worships the deadliest serial killers in history starts killing by copying their methods.

77. Stone gargoyles suddenly appear on top of buildings and houses in a small town.

78. A family on a boat trip comes across an old pirate ship.

79. A snowstorm traps a family in an abandoned asylum.

80. A girl comes downstairs and asks her parents, "Can you hear him breathing? I can."

81. A city is shrouded in inexplicable darkness for weeks.

82. A passenger plane flies high in the sky as Nuclear War rages below.

83. Children discover a deep, dark well in the forest: an old ladder leads to it.

84. A sleepwalking boy enters his parents' bedroom and whispers, "I'm sorry. The devil told me."

85. While a woman is taking a shower, a voice comes out of the drain whispering, "I can see you."

86. A boy finds a crayon drawing of a strange family: it is inscribed with the wordswe live in your walls.

87. All the graves in the cemetery are now open, with gaping holes: the earth has come out from underground.

88. A woman is watching a horror movie alone on Halloween night; someone, or something, keeps knocking on her door.

89. Someone is taking a shower when a hand from behind the shower curtain pushes their head under the water.

90. A farmer and his children begin to hear the children's laughter coming from their fields at night; no children in sight.

91. Someone looks out the window and sees a clown standing in the corner holding a balloon, looking at them.

92. Mannequins in a department store seem to move by themselves.

93. What if God's worshiped people were really Satan, and Satan had somehow held God prisoner?

94. A man dies and wakes up in the body of a serial killer, and no matter how hard he tries to stop killing, he can't.

95. A prisoner wakes up to find the prison empty, but he is locked in his cell.

96. A running woman stumbles over a dead, bloodied body; she then hears a strange clicking sound and looks up to see a dark figure running towards her.

97. A girl hears laughter downstairs: she's the only one in the house.

98. An Uber driver picks up the wrong person and may not live to tell about it.

99. There is someone or something that lives and moves in the attic, but it's not a ghost.

100. A child's imaginary friend is not imaginary.

101. The reflections we see of ourselves in the mirror are actually ourselves in a parallel universe, and they plan to do whatever it takes to take our place in this world.

Share this with your fellow writers or anyone else who enjoys a good horror story.

For more scares, check out ScreenCraft's20 terrifying horror stories with two sentencesy8 Ways Horror Movies Scare Audiences!

Sleep tight and keep writing.

---

When you're inspired, take your idea to the next level andDevelop your horror movie idea in 15 days.

Ken Miyamoto has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades, primarily as a studio liaison for Sony Studios and later as a script reader and story analyst for Sony Pictures.

He has many studio meetings under his belt as a produced writer, meeting with Sony, Dreamworks, Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers, as well as many production and management companies. He had a previous development deal with Lionsgate, as well as several writing assignments, including the produced miniseries.Energy left, starring Anne Heche, Sean Patrick Flanery, Billy Zane, James Brolin, Haylie Duff, Brian Bloom, Eric La Salle and Bruce Boxleitner. Follow Ken on Twitter@KenMovies

For the latest ScreenCraft news and updates, follow us atGoreyFacebook!