Scary story video

The highest-retention faceless format, and the least forgiving. A horror short that is not frightening is just a slideshow with a low voice.

Built on create_faceless_video. Read faceless-video first for the pipeline; this skill is the craft that makes the genre work.

The ids this genre actually uses

From list_styles — call it yourself, these are rejected if mistyped:

niche          scary-stories · true-crime · unsolved-mysteries
visual_style   cinematic-noir · cinematic-moonlight · emotive-anime-nighttone
music          dark-cinematic · blade-runner

cinematic-noir for crime and rain. cinematic-moonlight for isolation and outdoors. emotive-anime-nighttone when the story is about a person's dread rather than an event — animation lets you avoid uncanny faces entirely.

Method

1. The hook is a fact, stated flatly

Horror hooks do not announce horror. The flat delivery of a wrong detail does more than any adjective.

weak    "Here's the TERRIFYING story of the Dyatlov Pass incident"
strong  "They cut their way out of the tent. From the inside."

No "you won't believe", no "this will give you chills". Telling the viewer how to feel gives them the option to disagree. See the hook-writing skill.

2. Withhold, then pay

The genre runs on an open gap. Structure:

• 0–2s the wrong detail. One sentence, no context.
• 2–8s the context that makes it worse.
• body escalate by revealing, one fact per scene. Each one should make the

previous fact more disturbing in retrospect.

• close the resolution — or the explicit absence of one. "Nobody has ever

explained it" is a legitimate ending in this genre and the only one where it is.

Roughly two words per second. A 45-second short is about 90 words.

3. Write cold

The genre's failure mode is over-writing. Cut every one of these:

• Adjectives doing emotional work: terrifying, horrifying, chilling, eerie.

State the fact; the fact is the horror.

• Hedges: allegedly, some say, many believe. They are a disclaimer, and a

disclaimer tells the viewer not to be afraid.

• Rhetorical questions mid-body: But what really happened that night? This is

padding and it reads as padding.

Vary sentence length deliberately. Short sentence. Then a longer one that lets the dread sit before the next short one lands.

4. Pick a narrator, not a voice

list_voices gives style and category. A true-crime narrator and a campfire horror narrator are different performances — measured and documentary for crime, closer and quieter for supernatural. The default soothing-narrator is wrong for both.

5. Scene images carry the dread

Never show the thing. Show what is around it.

weak    "a ghost standing in a doorway"
strong  "an open doorway at the end of a hall, lit from behind, nothing in it"

Empty rooms, objects left mid-use, weather, the back of a head. Generated figures and faces break the spell — they look generated, and a viewer who notices the generation stops being afraid.

6. Show the script, then render

quote_faceless_video { "script": "<the script>", "visual_style": "cinematic-noir" }

create_faceless_video {
  "script": "<approved>",
  "visual_style": "cinematic-noir",
  "voice_id": "<from list_voices>",
  "music_id": "dark-cinematic",
  "aspect_ratio": "9:16"
}

Five to ten minutes, two stages. Poll get_run_status { wait: true }. Hand over output_url only at completed — watch_url is a preview page, not the file.

Two things to get right before publishing

• Real crimes involve real people. For true crime, keep to documented

public facts, do not name uncharged suspects, and do not invent dialogue for real victims. Reach for unsolved-mysteries or fiction when the facts are thin.

• Platforms restrict graphic content. Implication travels further than

depiction anyway, and it also stays monetisable.

What fails

• Adjectives instead of facts. The defining failure of the genre.
• Showing the monster. Dread is anticipation; a reveal ends it.
• A twist the body did not earn. Plant it, then pay it.
• A moral. Resolve the question; do not explain the lesson.
• The default bright visual style. Atmosphere is half the format.

Spending rules

• Show the script and the quote before the first spending call.
• Credits are charged on completion by the pipeline, not at submit.
• Failed runs cost nothing.