Making text scary through shaders?

I've tried adding a Blur Shader and a Glow Shader to text... it causes a sort of ghostly blur effect. The problem is that it's not -quite- what I'm looking for because for one, it's so subtle that it will look like text that has been pre-created and saved in a lossy image format. And second, it adds to the difficulty of reading text.

Before you recommend that I simply go with a scary font, if that's even possible... I'm trying to do a "ghostly" effect with the text which can't be done through simple texture on the letters. If you've ever played FEAR and seen a sort of ghostly, motion blur effect in the game, this is the kind of look I'm trying to do with text... I'm aware that Construct has its own Motion Blur through the engine or whatever, but it's not the same.

The benefit of using shaders instead of pre-creating the text and altering the look in an image program, is I guess that you don't end up taking a lot of memory with pre-created stuff... which takes a lot of memory because there's now a bunch of detail which costs storage space. If you have a lot of text, it could make megabytes of difference. It's hard to tell if I'm making much sense though, so I think I'm better off asking you what's practical...

Shaders are expensive. Why not just change the opacity and fractional position?

The way I figure, is that I might as well use shaders since most modern computers have graphics card with shader units that aren't even being put to use, so that you might as well add optional shaders.

Anyway... I'm not familiar with the term "fractional position".

A fraction of integer X,Y (like 3.123 pixels puts it between 3th and 4th pixel). The engine's antialiasing runs the show there, you might be able to replicate certain effects by rapidly altering the position so that it looks like blur to the untrained eye.

with the Blur Motion effect, set angle to random(360) and size to random(10).

Do this on every 100 miliseconds or so, adjust to your liking

I've never player F.E.A.R. but why not have the text sort of... flickery?

Simply overlap two of the same text-boxes (give 'em glow or whatever) set their transparency to like 80 each, then make one of them move on an angle then back super fast, but have that event only occur every like... 2 seconds.

Honestly.

http://octavoarte.cl/honestly.cap