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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30612
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The most terrifying novel I ever read and one of the greatest horror novels (Stephen King's **Pet Sematary** ) started with a happy family moving into a suburban house. The horror element starts many pages later. Such a simple beginning -- an everyday event as mentioned in Emily's answer here -- can be disquieting on its own if the reader _knows_ this is going to be a horror novel. As other answers have stated, horror is not about horrifying scenes alone, but equally about terrifying possibilities as in W.W.Jacobs' all-time classic ["The Monkey's Paw."](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw) Of course if you are writing a short story like that you might need a more impactful opening.

I am no writer myself but a _very_ experienced 'constant reader' and I have found that great power can be achieved by **surreal scenes** which some writers describe as 'a few degrees off-angle to reality' or 'just a shade insane' -- somebody even called it 'the mind going off the rails for a few seconds' and that somehow tremendously intensifies the reader's unease. A brilliant example is the _'boys' boarding school scene'_ in **Talisman** by King and Straub, as also several scenes related to the magician's craft from Peter Straub's great novel **Shadowland** -- I write this to make the point that in our over-exposed age when youngsters are thoroughly familiar with slasher genres, a subtle terror that disturbs the subconscious mind can still be extremely effective, paradoxically more sinister than obviously florid horror.

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