[i]MerrileeHeifetz, Neil Gaiman’s agent, told him that Coraline was too scary to be a kid's book and that it was crazy to try to publish it. Gaiman suggested she give it a try and read it to her daughters, to see what they thought about it. And so she did. The girls loved the book and assured her mom that they weren’t scared at all. Sometime after that, Gaiman and the youngest daughter of his agent met and the girl confessed the book had terrified her, but she had lied to her mom because she needed to know how the story continued. The book was a success, and so was its movie adaptation. This is to show how hard it is to measure an element as volatile as fear. There are no formulas or parameters aside from what common sense and, in our case, the PEGI rating system dictates. So I’m going to talk about my particular case as a creator, without pretending to give a lecture. I’m simply going to tell you how I approach a horror story depending on if I’m aiming it at an adult audience or a younger audience. First is the theme. Horror themes are varied, some always resonate with people of all ages, and others are more appropriate for certain moments. Fear of death, decadence, or sickness usually resonates more with adults, and even more so as we grow older. Other fears are more typical of young ages. Fear of darkness, abandonment, not being accepted… Or fear of change, the strangeness of a body that is transforming and makes you feel different. I wrote a trilogy centered on that topic: change, growing into an adult in a world that, suddenly, has become incomprehensible. Some fears that start during childhood are indeed universal: they work in all stages of our lives because adults were kids before (big spoiler, right?). That’s why GYLT works so well because its imagery is based on symbols and situations that we all recognize regardless of our age. There are other important differences when I work on a horror story targeted at young people or adults. The intensity and the pace are different. When I write for adults, I know I can keep a high degree of terrifying intensity for a good while; with the younger ones, I try to leave more room to breathe. Narrative rollercoasters don’t work well if they only go up, so you must play well with the falls and the areas of calm that let us recover our breath. I work on them in a different way when I’m in one field or the other. And I use more relieving strategies when I write for a younger audience. For example, I use more comedy, although sometimes it has a dark touch. Humor is a good counterpoint to horror and it also serves as an outlet to release tension. Yes, there are elements that I try to control when I write for a young audience: the excess of violence, gore, cruelty… I can use them, but only in an anecdotal way. Generally speaking, I try to avoid anything explicit, I like to stay more on the evocative side of horror, rather than the provocative one. I’m not aiming at causing shock for the sake of it, I’m not looking for the scare, but for an enveloping experience. Another important difference is endings. Adults accept tragic, pessimistic, and dark endings better than young audiences. That’s why it’s convenient to end stories aimed at that age range with happy endings and hopeful messages: the good ones survive, they beat the monster, and good triumphs no matter how many tribulations our heroes go through. That doesn’t mean that sometimes you may stumble upon a story that asks for a bitter ending. Stories, no matter the format they come in, are trying to elicit emotions in the other. And fear is one of the strongest emotions that exist. Being able to feel it in controlled situations, in the security of your home, before a book or the screen of your computer, is cathartic and liberating. I believe that the youngest audiences also deserve to enjoy that catharsis. Yes, we have to take into account that they have fewer experiences on their shoulders and, thus, fewer tools to manage certain emotions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to enjoy a good horror story. Like GYLT, like Coraline, which, to be honest, is scary no matter how old you are. But the thing is we’ve all been, on one occasion or another, like the youngest daughter of Gaiman’s agent, paying close attention to a story that terrifies us, but incapable of abandoning it because we need to know how it ends.[/i] - Text by [b]José Antonio Cotrina[/b], writer at Tequila Works and author of Cycle of the Red Moon series. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2206210/GYLT/