When writing horror films, there’s always one character who is never on screen, yet who plays a vital role. It’s not that thing in the cellar, or the boogey man in the shadows.
It’s the audience’s imagination. Hint at a monster or threat, and their imagination sprints ahead of your story telling.
Horror is extreme, crossing the boundaries of taste, decency, morality, culture, ego, psychology, and reaching the very limits of human experience – spiritually, biologically, psychologically, intellectually, morally. It forces you to define your idea of good/bad.
It can be intellectually rigorous e.g. David Cronenberg, moronically stupid but still about morality, or be the worse possible script relying on effects, cuts and the director.
But the best thing about horror is that there’s an insatiable demand for it, especially low budget.
First find your inspiration
Horror is often drawn from folklore and myths - Toderov, Propp, Lacan, Roald Dahl, Philip Pulman. Or literature such as Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, H P Lovecraft, MR James, Stephen King, Clive Barker.
Adapt someone else’s indigenous legends to yours, or draw on your own phobias and dreams.
Use suspense to build the fear
At the start of the story, spend over 10 minutes helping the audience make a connection with the protagonist (and his friends) in a sequence with inferred/implied jeopardy. Or they won’t care what happens to them.
Build suspense writing increasingly short, gasping sentences split into the paragraphs that indicate a cut – much more direction on the page than usual e.g.
He stops. Dead. Daren’t breathe - What was that?
He can’t look.
Scratch. Scratch… getting closer, something drags across the floor, like a dead limb.
He starts to tremble. No way out.
With aching slowness, he turns his head to see….
Oh. My. God….
Make the reader see the movie or they don’t respond well. The best scripts drip feed information and hints at what might be coming.
You need to build up suspense for the best frights, what’s often referred to as the manipulation of the “bus” and the “cat”.
“Bus” was seen in Cat People (1942) when right at a tense climax, a bus cuts into the shot and gives you a jolt. But it’s a red herring. (“Buses” are often not the monster.)
But just as you relax, laugh at your silliness, BAM! you get the real shock (in Cat People, the huge cat pounces). “Shocks” are always the monster.
You should only have one good “bus/cat” in a horror script or you get the law of diminishing return. Use carefully and with caution for maximum effects.
Some horror films work hard building suspense but others are outrageous. Watch the Spanish film The Orphanage and some scares come out of nowhere (what Spielberg describes as the popcorn hurling moment).
Building suspense
There are three types of suspense:
- Mystery: Protagonist sees monster before the audience
- Shock (Startle/bus/cat): Protagonist and audience experience shock at the same time.
- Privileged suspense: Audience sees monster before the character. Dramatic irony in suspense form, but rarely used well.
Horror type: Real Estate
As horror is frequently low budget, an enclosed space is often chosen to make a virtue out of a necessity. Oil rig, lighthouse, house, storage space, trench, cube, bunker, spaceship, cabin. Also high school à la Buffy, holiday camp etc.
Bathrooms are one place in the house where everyone is most vulnerable because of nudity, often at night.
Isolated settings are especially good for Urbanoia (fear of city folk in the wilderness)
e.g Cabin Fever, Cabin in the woods.
Such backwoods locations lure the protagonist(s) away from any real-world assistance, and trap them there. Capitalise on how the setting isolates your protagonist.
Phones that don’t work are often necessities of the plot. But don’t deny your characters of all facilities – allow them, then cut them off e.g. car breaks down.
Make law and order either farcical or incompetent to increase the jeopardy.
Horror type: transgressions
Many horror films feature transgressions. Either these must be punished (as defined by writer/director) or it’s victims are punished often due to the repression of a culture e.g. Sin Eater, Swim Fan.
In common forms, a protagonist is warned not to do something, but does it anyway and bad things happen e.g. Chain Saw Massacre
Horror type: transformations & monsters
Animals to humans (and vice versa), male to female (and vice versa), parasite to human (and vice versa), humans to monsters.
But audiences are getting harder to scare, so be original and create your own – female monsters are rare.
Monsters are irrational, there’s no reasoning with them, unless, as a red herring, you pretend you have struck a deal with one. Monsters can fall in love too.
A protagonist can summon the monster witting or unwittingly, but it must be an original call. Use time to reveal monster’s parameters. Cross all boundaries between real and unreal. Create a physical, spiritual or psychological weakness in the monster. It must be stronger than the protagonist, but it must have a weakness or it cannot be vanquished.
Don’t show the monster until you have to
Keep the unknown hidden for as long as possible. Tease the audience with glimpses, but avoiding showing it.
Once the monster or the threat is known, the fear’s over. It’s like pasta when all the sauce is gone.
The “wrong house”
Here the protagonist thinks they can get help/safety, but a) there’s no help there or b) the situation worsens because (unbeknown) it’s the antagonist’s/monster’s house.
The writer shows the audience this in advance for dramatic irony.
You can also have the wrong house for the antagonist e.g. Last House on the Left/Virgin Spring where the girl who is raped by three baddies. They take refuge in a house that belongs to her family and get murdered in revenge.
Another definition of the “the wrong house” can be a person.
More sleight of hand
Make the audience see an angle on something, but mislead them e.g. with a truck/car/house. It’s rarely done but very effective especially in Act 3. You should believe you’re seeing one set up leading to another but you aren’t.
e.g. The Silence of the Lambs: a SWAT team surround and raid a house. It’s intercut with the baddie at home. You think it’s the same house, but in fact only Clarice approaches the baddie’s house = increased jeopardy.
Foreshadow with red
Use the colour red to foreshadow scares. It’s usually done visually but it can be done with dialogue. Put RED in caps in the script so readers get it.
Make it contextual. The subtler the better, so you foreshadow without giving anything away. Use carefully as a sign of what’s to come - even better give it a double meaning e.g. pizza sauce split on B&W photos. Note for example how many red things you see in The Sixth Sense just before a shock.
Going to extremes
Keep pushing boundaries for thematic, sub-textual or narrative purpose. This could be loss of law and order. But often it’s the protagonist’s own fears, or anxiety for loved ones or home, fear of violence from other people, or the fear of violence by themself (e.g. rape/revenge/vigilante) when pushed to extremes. We must see the breaking point, the hesitation, before they cross the boundary to unconscious passion.
Refer to other horror films
Get to know the history of horror films and refer to them with wit and subtlety in your script e.g. with character names. This honours the past with reference to previous characters, maps and territories. Horror fans love to spot these references.
Narrowing in Act 3
It’s critical to get Act 3 right. Layer up the difficulties and jeopardy. Back your protagonist into a corner. Compress narrative and setting. Make audience believe there’s nowhere for the protagonist to go. Then find an original way out.
A final tip: learn the rules, then subvert and break them.
Recommended additional viewing:
28 Days
28 Days Later
An American Werewolf in London
Blair Witch
Cabin Fever
Cabin in the Woods
Caine
Carrie
Cronos
Deliverance
Darklands
Darkness Falls
Dog Soldiers
Doomwater
End of Days
Fatal Attraction
Ginger Snaps
Hallowe’en
Hannibal
Hardware
Hell Raiser
House of 1000 corpses
Jason X
Jeepers Creepers
Let the Right One In
Misery
Near Dark Nightmare on Elm Street
Night of the Living Dead
Painless
Pan’s Labyrinth
Peeping Tom
Poltergeist
Psycho
Ravenous
Resident Evil
Rosemary’s Baby
Scanners
Scream
Se7en
Shivers
Sinister
Stigmata
Straw Dogs
The Changeling (1971)
The Exorcist
The Evil Dead
The Hills Have Eyes
The Hitcher
The Hole
The Last House on the Left
The last horror movie
The Lighthouse
The Orphanage
The Returned (TV)
The Ring
The Wicker Man
They
Tremors
True Blood
Underworld
Videodrome
Walking Dead
What Lies Beneath
NOW SHOWING: BFI South Bank: The Dark Heart of Film. October & November 2013. A season of horror classics.
Reading: Download Alien from Drews. Walter Hill’s work reads like poetry.
