Imagine that in the middle of the night, you suddenly start seeing the faceless ghost of an eighteenth century maiden.  This ghost creeps slowly towards your bed in a crawl of mist, with their hands facing the direction of your throat.  The spirit cracks its neck to the side of its body, blood dripping from its decaying mouth.  You scream at the deathly sight in front of you, and in a move only the smartest horror genre characters could only wish to do, you dash out of the room before the ghost can choke you.  The door to your bedroom slams shut with a thunderous boom behind you, while you make a beeline to your sleeping quarters for the night; the family bathroom.  However, you can just barely get a wink of sleep with the image of the malicious creature in your mind, its presence imprinted on you consciousness.  When you can sleep, you always enter a seemingly unending nightmare where you wake up sweating and shaking like a miniature dog.

  Basically on the brink of sleepwalking, you walk down the stairs like a zombie in the morning to hopefully fully inform your family of the unjust haunting you experienced the night before.  You get to the kitchen table, ready to sleepily tell the rest of the family the horror you witnessed.  However, instead you find your family glaring at you with hatred, restraining themselves from outright slapping you in the face.  The house while you hid in the bathroom has been completely totaled by the unknown entity, with the only family member lacking an alibi being you.  They accuse you of the misdeed, punishing you for a month with the added bonus of having to pay out of pocket from your savings for the repairs on the house.  You try to tell them what really occurred the night before and about the entity most likely being the true home wrecker, but they dismiss it as nothing more than foolishness on your part.  Also, good luck getting breakfast on your own, because your punishment for the month begins with being denied the most important meal of the day in their cruel way of making a point to you.

  Like in this scenario above, many horror stories tend to make everyone but the main character strangely misbelieve the supernatural evil forces they claim are causing havoc.  In all cases, the trope itself tends to be a huge annoyance, not only for the main character in question but to most of the audience trying to invest themselves into the story.  It gives the audience a huge level of disbelief towards the blind characters in question, or makes them question the IQ of the entire cast due to them being so ignorant to the supernatural forces right in front of them.  Every time someone tries to use this trope in any type of horror story, the result almost always results in a huge face palm from the audience.

  It can be argued by many that having most of the cast being disbelieving of the entities only the main character believes in helps to drive the plot along its tracks.  After all, wouldn't the plot have even more stakes in it if no one believed the main character until the very last minute, making the mission for the protagonist even harder than it would have been with assistance?  Well, think of it this way.  If more characters were willing to believe the main character's claims, the stakes would get higher anyway due to the rush these characters will all have for answers towards this evil threat.  Fear of the unknown would hit each of the characters in various unique fashions, with some acting negatively towards the conflict while others would be extremely motivated to help end the terror.  It creates a great diversity of internal and external conflict for all the characters, not only making them feel more real but possibly crafting stakes in the story much stronger than if they were misbelievers of the unknown evil.

  Automatically making the rest of the cast misbelievers takes away so much potential character expansion as well as development for each particular main player of the game.  Making the story scary is only one element in multiple that makes a horror story enjoyable for the audience.  Fleshing out the characters in unique ways is just as needed as the scares, similar to the plot, the tone, and the style of writing you choose to venture in.  Frustration from the audience from a single damaging cliché could be enough to disrupt everything you are trying to build up in the story.

End the misconception that misbelieving main characters equals a plot with stakes.  Have all the characters engage in the plot with the protagonist and craft something that could become even more addictive to read for the audience.  The power of internal and external conflict could direct your story in new wonderful ways that can make your horror story be unique from the rest.