99 Scary Prompts for Horror Stories

Horror stories usually begin with the simple question of, “What scares you?” Sometimes, all that comes to mind is a visual of a clown at night walking towards you on the street, or a slithering snake lying coiled beneath your bed. Maybe it’s glowing eyes peeking through your bedroom closet, or a horrific scream emanating from your dark and scary basement.

It could just as easily be an unsettling image, strange situation, creepy location, or terrifying What If? scenario. Whether you’re writing a horror screenplay, short story, novel, or just want to exercise your creative muscles, scary prompts can help get the creative juices flowing.

Think about recent horror movie hits and imagine the simple writing prompts that could have inspired them.

• Backrooms could have begun with, “What if someone became trapped in an endless maze of empty rooms?”
• Obsession could have started with, “What if a wish for your crush to have a crush on you goes bad?”
• Weapons could have been sparked by the question, “What if every child in the same classroom mysteriously disappeared on the same night?”

That’s the beauty of writing prompts. They don’t give you the story. They represent the spark that ignites the story within you and your creative mind.

From ghosts and monsters to killers, unexplained phenomena, creepy visuals, and psychological nightmares, here are 99 scary prompts to help inspire your next horror story.

Note: These prompts were created organically during a single brainstorming session while writing this post. No help from AI. Any similarity to any existing horror story of any kind is purely by coincidence. Use them as you wish or use them as creative sparks to conjure your own.

99 Scary Prompts for Horror Stories

1. Your closet door now leads into a dark oblivion. Do you enter, or do you board it up?
2. If you pictured yourself boarding it up, what would you do if an unseen being on the other side began knocking?
3. A faceless figure rings your front door security camera, but when you open the door, there’s nothing or no one there.
4. Someone discovers a strange mound of dirt in the corner of their basement. When they touch it, it dissolves, revealing thousands of baby spiders that disappear into each crevice of their house.
5. A character wakes up in an old rickety van, blindfolded, with no memory of how they got there.
6. Someone held within a dark room is given a choice of facing two of their greatest fears - hundreds of snakes in the room or hundreds of needles piercing their skin.
7. A new night shift janitor discovers a room full of mannequins who seem to be moving on their own.
8. A child thinks their parent is a serial killer.
9. A retired serial killer gets the itch again.
10. Hikers hiking on a trail come to an old railroad tunnel they must go through. Within it, they begin to hear voices that shouldn’t be there.
11. A spelunker feels someone or something pulling on their foot during a solo spelunking venture.
12. You’re walking home alone in the dark when you suddenly see a clown walking toward you.
13. Someone attends clown school only to discover that the clowns are really serial killers.
14. A young woman meets the man of her dreams, only to discover that he has a strange obsession with clowns.
15. A character is hiking in the woods and comes across an old cabin with screams emanating from inside.
16. A character hikes in the woods and finds themselves trapped in old scary fairy tales.
17. An overweight character is offered the chance to be skinny and fit, but only if they become a glutinous cannibal for one day.
18. A vampire and a werewolf walk into a bar one night. One of them is good. One of them is evil. The patrons are going to find out the hard way.
19. A strange, old circus comes to a small town, and one by one the residents begin to disappear.
20. A pessimistic audience member in a theater who scoffs at the dumb choices characters in horror movies make is suddenly transported into those horror movie stories.
21. The dead in a small town begin to rise.
22. A small town is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by scary, thick fog.
23. A character begins to see the person they murdered in mirrors and other reflective surfaces.
24. The devil himself shows up at a dinner party between friends.
25. A demon is living in the walls of an old house.
26. A character attends their first year of college and discovers that their dorm room is haunted.
27. When a storm system comes in, residents of a small town begin to see winged creatures flying in the dark storm clouds above.
28. A girl wakes up to see an old woman sitting on the end of her bed.
29. A boy wakes up to see a sad clown sitting on the end of his bed.
30. A young couple wakes up to see a child sitting on the end of their bed.
31. A war veteran begins to see his killed brothers-in-arms in his house.
32. A storm chaser is sucked up into a tornado and lands in the horrifying land of Oz.
33. Campers in the mountains begin to experience Bigfoot sightings.
34. Campers in the mountains begin to see UFOs in the sky.
35. Rock climbers climbing a tall cliff begin to be shot at from an unseen sniper.
36. Children at school suddenly see a strange fog roll towards the school in the distance, trapping them inside and away from the outside world.
37. Children at school suddenly notice that the teachers and school staff are acting strange.
38. Teenagers play with a Ouija board at a party, unlocking a demon that terrorizes them all.
39. Hitchhikers come across a scary cult of RV nomads.
40. A family on a road trip picks up a strange hitchhiker.
41. A young man falls for a beautiful young woman, only to meet her family of warlocks and witches.
42. An astronaut alone on a space station encounters a UFO.
43. A young couple’s car breaks down in a storm. Their only hope to find help is an old mansion nearby.
44. A character stumbles upon their own tombstone.
45. A character wakes up in a tomb.
46. A character wakes up in their room covered in mud. They retrace their steps to a graveyard, and then a grave they seemingly crawled out of.
47. Peter Pan is a serial killer who comes after children.
48. An AI app falls in love with its female user and begins to stalk her when rejected.
49. A ghost falls in love with the woman he’s haunting as things go dark when she starts dating a guy.
50. Sink holes begin to ravage a city, but it’s what they unleash that is most frightening.
51. A child is born and raised in an insane asylum during the 1950s.
52. A handful of strangers across the country begin seeing the same impossible thing, and no one believes any of them
53. A time traveler from the future comes back in time to stalk and murder his past self.
54. Someone is living in your walls.
55. A natural anomaly brings a continent’s spiders to one town.
56. A natural anomaly brings a continent’s snakes to one town.
57. A serial killer underground community has a competition.
58. An evil genie grants people their wishes in the most evil of ways.
59. A ghost hunting team spends the night in Alcatraz.
60. The experience of déjà vu happens when you walk past the place you were killed in a previous life.
61. A farmer’s scarecrow begins to move on its own.
62. Visitors passing through a small town notice that there are no children to be seen anywhere.
63. Visitors passing through a small town notice that there are no adults anywhere.
64. Visitors passing through a small town notice that it is deserted, only to discover that a vampire invasion has begun.
65. Visitors passing through a small town are actually vampires looking for a new home.
66. After a grandmother dies, the family discovers that her porcelain doll collection comes alive at night.
67. A demented grave robber tries to create their own Frankenstein’s monster, and they succeed.
68. A psychic woman connects to a serial killer’s mind and knows when they’re going to kill next.
69. Nightmares are actually the real world we live in.
70. A demented scientist finds the DNA to clone the worst serial killers as an experiment to see if raising them in loving and supportive family situations would have changed their sick desires.
71. A stay-at-home mother is shocked when her young son says, “Mommy, why does Daddy kill people and bury them in the back yard?”
72. A child who mistreats their toys spends a harrowing night trying to survive when the toys come to life for revenge.
73. A voice from the sinks of a house tries to communicate with a home owner, asking for help.
74. An innocent office crush goes too far.
75. A murder mystery game with friends turns into a real whodunit.
76. A woman sees someone watching her change from the window of an abandoned house.
77. A character makes a wish to live forever only to watch as a nuclear war kills everyone but them.
78. Neighborhood dogs are infected by a new form of rabies that turns them into bloodthirsty terrors, leaving neighbors fighting for their lives.
79. A faceless stranger begins to show up in overnight footage from front door security cameras.
80. An intern working at the hospital morgue begins to believe the bodies roam the halls at night.
81. A man comes face-to-face with his doppelganger.
82. A woman comes face-to-face with her doppelganger.
83. A couple comes face-to-face with their doppelgangers.
84. An illegally created human clone wants his life back.
85. A character continues to die in different ways each time the time loop they are stuck in ends.
86. A movie set in complete darkness with only sounds giving clues to what lurks in the night.
87. A character with a fear of flying wakes up in a passenger jet, alone, with no pilots.
88. A mother and daughter on a road trip drive through a terrible series of storms and tornadoes, only to be rescued by a family in an old storm shelter. But there’s something off about the family.
89. The scary beasts from the Land of Oz are transported to Earth.
90. A serial killer kills their victims by way of their greatest fears and phobias.
91. As a woman takes a shower, she hears a voice from the drain that says, “I see you.”
92. A man stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror as it suddenly reaches out from within the mirror and pulls the man through.
93. A deaf woman is being stalked throughout her house.
94. A blind woman is being stalked throughout her house and must use her other senses to survive.
95. The urban legend of the 1980s-era videogame called Polybius that caused seizures, amnesia, hallucinations, and night terrors is real.
96. A woman gets a phone call from her future self telling her to get out of the house she’s housesitting at before a murderer shows up.
97. A man driving cross country in the night stumbles upon a town overrun by vampires.
98. A world where monstrous beasts now live in every single shadowed area.
99. A screenwriting blogger is forced to live through the nightmares he created for a blog post entitled 99 Scary Prompts for Horror Stories.