The natural world is often beautiful… and sometimes terrifying. There are simply so many terrible things that can happen to you when you walk into the wilderness. You can get lost. You could find yourself completely alone… or maybe not so alone. You may hear animals (or worse) rustling in the dark as you pray for the sun to rise again. You may have to resort to unspeakable acts to survive. You might discover dark, terrible things hidden in the untraveled corners of the world.
To survive in an unfamiliar, isolated, and often brutal environment evokes some our most primal emotions: paranoia, desperation, and dread. A wilderness horror story’s main ingredient is a wild environment that the protagonists, for whatever reason, cannot escape from. It could be a forest, or a jungle, or a desert, or a cave, or a mountain, or the tundra—anywhere far away from civilization. Key themes are often isolation, the trials of day to day life, fear of the unknown, and the struggle to escape.