: Re: Horror story in a hospital: how to unsettle the reader? I'm new and I hope to do this thing right, soo Hi! I'm willing to write a short story about a girl who wakes up in a hospital and

@Samaraweera193

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It's all psychological. You don't necessarily need hallucinations, or even anything supernatural at all, because it's not the specific details or events that make it scary, it's how your character perceives them. You can do this in several ways:

Direct: "The hospital was comfortingly clean" versus "The hospital was eerily sterile"
Subconscious: "Light glinted off the counter like sunshine on a knife"
Biographical: "Hospitals always reminded her of that terrible night..."

Remember, compelling details are never neutral, they always tell a story, and that story is always about your character's internal life, even with a third person POV. The movie Signs is a good case-study: Contrast how scary the first part of the movie is, just from small, seemingly innocuous details (and a group of people living in fear), with the ending, where you actually see the monsters in all their fearsome gruesomeness (and can hardly keep from laughing).

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