Something that I think is fairly well known about me is that I'm not the biggest fan of horror. It's not fear, so much as that I didn't really see anything horror related for a lot of my childhood. Plus, being who I am, I'm drawn to stuff that you can sink your teeth into and read a ton of lore about. There's obviously a ton of digging and thinking to be done about horror, and I actually kind of enjoy that kind of media analysis, but I tend to be much better at spending six hours on a wiki than watching a piece of media that functions specifically because it withholds some information from you. I started writing this as a piece about horror media, but I think it's probably going to warp into me talking about "less is more" as a writing/worldbuilding tool, because I actually think these pieces of media have a lot to say about that.
All of that building up to two pieces of (sort of) horror media that I really love. The first, is Bad Space Comics, which is a weird mix of outright horror, political statements, and social commentary via well illustrated science fiction comics. It's often poignant, sometimes a little bit eye-roll inducing, but at its best it makes me think a little. Not a lot, there's only so much you can get at via a short form comic, but comics like Neanderthal Secrets are compelling.
I think it's something that gets talked about semi-frequently in writing/worldbuilding circles, which is that "less is more" is actually a pretty compelling way to give a world depth. In the real world, I don't have any barometer for what kind of advanced mathematics a Neanderthal is able to glean in the world of the story. But I know that the protagonist would be willing to torture her friend for them.
It's an uncomfortable thought, what kind of knowledge is out there that I would be willing to torture my loved ones for? I can't tell, but the story is compelling because of that. If it were "we're torturing children for an answer to the answer to the Collatz conjecture", that would be deeply uncompelling. It's a pure math problem with (as far as I know) no real-world application. Cloning and torturing people for that would be absurd, so it's much more compelling to let the audience fill in the details.
The same principle plays out in a lot of Bad Space Comics. Land of the Free and Home of the Brave are some of my favorites, especially taken together. Climate change and wealth inequality play into a lot of the BSC canon (most of the comics that aren't some kind of evolutionary or body horror include one or the other), and I love the idea of these two divergent takes on the future of the United States. I could honestly write a lot more about just these two comics. The fact that they have the exact same final panel. The emotional resonance. That they were released in this order. It's all so interesting to me, whether or not the author implied anything by it. The form of government that supplants the modern USA, if any, is left undescribed. It lets the audience reach their own conclusions, and in some ways to impose their own dreams (or fears) onto the world being described.
They're not perfect by any means. Land of the Free is pretty airtight, but Home of the Brave kind of loses out in the details. The "simple" initial demands of the strikers are kind of all over the place. Part of it is that once you provide a small detail, you need to fill out the rest to put it in context. What does a 95% tax on the rich mean here? As a top tax bracket, or as a pure wealth tax? One is much more extreme than the other. A living wage is a simple demand, sure, but made much stranger by the VERY extreme demand for a UBI. This isn't even a statement about my preferences politically, I'm just confused by this chain of three demands, and by the assertion that they're "simple enough" when the context we're supposed to be taking them in is the modern United States.
Then, when the strikers demands "grew", we get another weird combination. Free healthcare is undoubtedly less extreme than UBI, arguably less extreme even than a living wage. The other three new demands are kind of interrelated, and don't work well together in my opinion. Electoral reform is a decent one, but hard for me to call more extreme than a UBI. The problem is that the next issue is "parliamentary democracy", which is in and of itself electoral reform, but also so thorough a reform that it's hard to understand what "electoral reform" the strikers are also demanding. An end to the office of the president is a nice capstone, pretty obviously an escalation of the rhetoric, and it fits into the broader theme, but again: if there's no more president, what's the electoral reform? Is it just gerrymandering that they want ended? Some kind of rank choice voting? I'm not convinced that these demands are incompatible, but I need more information to put them in context.
All of this to say that there's a flipside to the whole "less is more" paradigm. If you reference a city without describing it, or have Obi-Wan mention "The Clone Wars" and never elaborate, that's a really good way to give the world depth without doing any work. People have something to imagine, and give your world a context and complexity on their own. On the other hand, once you start putting details into the world, especially when that world is one that the audience is intimately familiar with, you create potential weak points for suspension of disbelief, and give the audience something to tear down rather than build up.
I think it's an interesting dynamic. The same details that make a story compelling, and make it interesting to inhabit and think about a world are the details that can potentially make that world fatally improbable. In the context of Home of the Brave, that detail was that I couldn't imagine the political coalition that the author intended to portray. If I think about it, I can make up some kind of explanation or solution, but it doesn't happen readily.
And that brings me to the second piece of "horror" media that I like. SCP, usually taken to stand for "Secure, Contain, Protect" is the motto of the shadowy Foundation that serves as the only constant in a truly massive semi-shared universe of "horror" stories. Outside of that, every article on the site (barring a number of large, multi-article projects) is a short-form standalone story. They vary in quality, but also in just about everything else. I have far less to say about them substantively, mostly because there's such a wide breadth of content that I can't say anything holistic. That said, I think the particular stories and projects I like tend towards less-is-more as their central theme.
There are some exceptions, for example, a truly massive collection of interlinked articles called Project Paragon is something I keep my eye on and genuinely enjoy, but which derives its horror from a more cosmic "there are forces beyond our control or comprehension" style than from leaving things unknown. These major projects are a fundamentally different genre of both horror and writing than the original genesis of the site, and for me they scratch the same itch as loading up the wiki for a setting I'm vaguely interested in, and reading a dozen articles in the span of an afternoon.
What's more interesting to me in terms of horror content are the short, more basic articles that stick closer to the site's original theme. They derive most of their horror from avoiding explanations, redacting key details, and using the detached, scientific writing style to create even further distance between the reader and the horrific events being described.
I think that I'm drawn into this kind of media more than I am the creepypastas that it descends from because it implies information. Though there are no canonical answers to what lies behind a redacted chunk of text, or a concrete universe connecting the various pieces of this world, there's an implication that both of those things could exist. If you just looked hard enough, or were viewing this article with the right clearance, there would be answers to your questions. Sometimes authors actually make good on this promise. They hide clues and secrets in the HTML of the page, use white text or other tricks to conceal dialogue. It all builds together to create a world that implies an immense amount of knowledge and context that only exists in the readers imagination.
Ultimately, "less is more" is (at least from what I've heard) a fundamental tenet of horror as a genre. It's not really interesting for me to sit here and point that out. On the other hand, I think it's interesting to look at these two examples and see how the tools that allow you to write effective and interesting horror are the tools that allow you to make an intriguing world in other genres of fiction, just applied in slightly different ways. There isn't really a broad takeaway, I just wanted to write about Bad Space Comics, and I think that leaving space for imagination is something I struggle with in my writing. This summer, I'm hoping to start work on a new writing project, and I think the big key to remember is that sometimes, letting the audience know something exists is far more interesting than explaining to them what it is or what it means.
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