Voices in the Old Forest
A group of friends goes on a hiking trip in a remote forest where no human has stepped for decades. As night falls, they realize that something in the forest is hunting them, mimicking their voices and separating them one by one.
Suggested length: A short story: 1,500 to 5,000 words, or flash fiction under 1,000
Start the clock
Pick a sprint, press start and keep going until it stops. Momentum beats polish on a first draft.
Make it yours
Three ways to take this prompt somewhere nobody else will.
- Use a single repeated sound as the warning sign.
- Start somewhere safe and ordinary, like a kitchen or a school run.
- Let one rule of the house or town be broken, and show why it existed.
Writing horror books
Something is wrong here, and it's getting closer.
Horror is defined by the feeling it creates: dread, then fear, then the urge to keep reading anyway. The threat might be a ghost, a creature or the person in the next room. Underneath, the best horror is about something real: grief, guilt, the things we can't control.
What readers expect
- Dread that builds
- A threat that can't be reasoned with
- Characters out of their depth
- An ending that doesn't let you off easy
A tip before you start
What you don't show is scarier than what you do. Let the reader's imagination fill in the dark.
More Horror prompts
- The Book That Makes Things RealAfter inheriting a strange old book from a relative, a college student realizes that every time they read a passage aloud, bizarre occurrences…
- The Hospital’s Last RoomsAn urban explorer decides to infiltrate an abandoned psychiatric hospital rumored to be haunted. Inside, they find unsettling sculptures made from…
- The Room of ClocksA character wakes up in a room lined with clocks, all ticking out of sync. Each clock shows a different time, and with each full hour, a deeply…
- The Hospital’s Hidden WingCraft a story centered on an old, dilapidated hospital scheduled for demolition. A group of urban explorers goes in for one final look and stumbles…
Fifteen minutes in? Keep going.
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