How To Write A Horror Movie

Neal Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032073088
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619359
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

How to Write a Horror Movie is a close look at an always-popular (but often disrespected) genre. It focuses on the screenplay and acts as a guide to bringing scary ideas to cinematic life using examples from great (and some not-so-great) horror movies.

Author Neal Bell examines how the basic tools of the scriptwriter's trade - including structure, dialogue, humor, mood, characters, and pace – can work together to embody personal fears that will resonate strongly on screen. Screenplay examples include classic works such as 1943's I Walked With A Zombie and recent terrifying films that have given the genre renewed attention like writer/director Jordan Peele's critically acclaimed and financially successful Get Out. Since fear is universal, the book considers films from around the world including the 'found-footage' [REC] from Spain (2007), the Swedish vampire movie, Let The Right One In (2008) and the Persian-language film Under The Shadow (2016).

The book provides insights into the economics of horror-movie making, and the possible future of this versatile genre. It is the ideal text for screenwriting students exploring genre and horror, and aspiring scriptwriters who have an interest in horror screenplays.

1

“Who goes there?”

A brief introduction to horror

The first horror movie to scare the daylights out of me was The Wizard of Oz. It was also the very first movie I saw without the protection of Grown-ups; my older brother (nine, at the time) was given the solemn duty of getting me safe to Oz and back again (within the confines of an old and – my parents thought – ringworm-infested revival house.)

The tornado that opens the movie I managed uneasily, but ok, so far; ditto the threatening trees (“I’d turn back if I were you!”) and the Wicked Witch of the West herself, keeping track of our heroes’ progress in her ominous crystal ball.

But then – when I least expected horror, and all of a sudden, there it was: winged monkeys. I peeped again, through my fingers. Yup, a lot of monkeys. With wings. And, weirder, all of them dressed like bell-hops, plummeting down on our hapless heroes, in flapping simian squadrons. Why were the monkeys dressed like bell-hops? More important – because more horrific – why did they have wings?

How my big brother handled a panicking six-year-old, I no longer recall. I probably spent the rest of the movie under my seat – though I must’ve popped up long enough to see the Wicked Witch melting, at this fiendish movie’s climax. That inexplicable death unnerved me even more than the monkeys. Water can melt you? Bottom line: this movie was full of things (angry trees, flying monkeys, old ladies dissolving) that were plainly and simply wrong (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A Winged Monkey gets his orders from the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton) in The Wizard of Oz.

Which was one of the defining characteristics – I later learned – of horror movies: category confusion, the blurring of boundaries, binaries breaking down. Living/dead, human/non-human, sane/insane – horror movies challenge fundamental distinctions we cling to, trying to make any sense at all of a baffling world. And these provoking confusions were there, from the earliest days of cinema: is Dr. Caligari a medical miracle man, or a raving loon? (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920). Is that giant monster made of clay a savior of the ghetto, or its worst nightmare? (The Golem: How He Came Into The World, 1920.) Does the 1930s Dracula want to make love to us? Or suck our blood? Or both?

In many of the great horror movies, this fundamental uncertainly is expressed as a simple but chilling ‘what if’:

1. What if witches are real, and my fears for my unborn child aren’t paranoia? (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968)
2. What if aliens are replacing the people we love with soul-less look-alikes? (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, four versions so far – beginning in 1956.)
3. What if being stalked and killed by a stranger is some kind of curse that can be passed on, like a supernatural STD? (It Follows, 2014).
4. What if I have the god-like power to bring inanimate matter to life – then learn that I can’t control it? [The Golem (1920), Frankenstein (1931), the computer HAL in 2001 (1968), Ex Machina (2014)].

In a sense, these ‘what ifs’ are all variants of our earliest fears from childhood. What if there is a monster under the bed? Or in the closet? Our parents check out all the hiding places – “nope, no monsters there.” And we’re reassured – momentarily. But the ritual has to be repeated, night after night after night, because – ok, there wasn’t a monster last time… but how do I know it didn’t sneak into the closet, while we were at dinner? ¹

A classic that takes this suspicion and makes it skin-crawlingly real is Poltergeist (1982), a movie that had a great tag-line: “It knows what scares you …” And ‘it’ is happy to show you that you weren’t just imagining Things in the Dark. There is a monster under the bed (a clown-doll, natch), and earlier in the movie, one in the shape of an eerily twisted dead tree (shades of Wizard of Oz) right outside your window…And you can count the seconds, between flash of lightning and rumble of thunder – as the little boy does, in Poltergeist, to try to distract himself from his fear; but while you do, that haunted tree is about to send a branch crashing through your bedroom window, to grab you…

Or – to take a step back to the days of written horror, before the cinema: your sister, who you thought was dead (or you wouldn’t have locked her away in the family tomb, in the mansion’s basement) would seem to be breaking out of her coffin … something’s making that terrible crashing sound! … “Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?…I tell you that she now stands without the door!” (Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 1839).

And indeed, as the heavy doors swing open, Madeleine Usher – once buried alive – is standing there in the doorway:

There was blood upon her white robes … For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold – then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

“The terrors he had anticipated” – Poe’s a master of the worst-case “what if”. So – given the predilection of cinema’s pioneers for horror² – it makes sense that Poe was one of the first great American writers whose works were made into movies. Before the silent era was over, “The Fall of the House of Usher” had already been filmed twice – both in French and American versions (1928).

In his gruesome poem “The Conqueror Worm”, Poe describes life itself as a kind of lurid, nightmarish performance:

With a phantom chased forever more

By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot,

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

And Horror the soul of the plot.

That feeling – of being pursued by some terrible thing, and not ever escaping – is central to many horror films. It’s a visceral (and visual) metaphor for the unwelcome truth: that behind the masquerade of ‘normal life’, Revelation is waiting to pounce. Morality is a sham, madness lurks in us all, and death (often protracted and painful) cancels out whatever meaning our lives may have had. In the middle of the grotesque performance Poe imagines our lives to be,

… A crawling shape intrude[s].

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

It writhes! – it writhes! with mortal pangs

The mimes become its food,

And seraphs sob at vermin fangs,

In human gore imbued.

Horror movies challenge us to examine how we live our lives. The “conqueror Worm” will devour us all – and how to exist, with that knowledge? Live in denial, like Norman Bates, who has to keep forgetting what he knows about his crazed mother? (Psycho, 1960). Face the pain of traumatic loss (2005’s The Descent) by setting oneself a daunting physical challenge? (Hint: if the ‘challenge’ is an unexplored cave system, this will not be a good plan.) Assure your baby-sitting charges there’s no such thing as the boogeyman – though he’s out there, at that very moment, stalking and killing your friends? (Halloween, 1978.)

In the most extreme horror movies, people come face-to-face with annihilation that seems to wipe out everything. They’re defeated, sometimes long before the movie ends – and in the final ‘act’, we’re forced to watch as the characters suffer and die. For example, in the brutal French movie Martyrs (2008), a young woman who was abused as a child seeks out and murders – in very cold blood - the family who had tormented her, before killing herself in despair. Then the childhood friend she’d called to help her discovers that the murdered family was just a part of a larger group of sadists with mystical leanings – who imprison the friend and torture her for the almost-unwatchable final third of the story. There’s no denying the skill with which this movie was made; the tension, in the first half, is almost unbearable. And it has its defenders, who find – in the last victim’s ‘martyrdom’ – some kind of awful transcendence. But, because the woman is utterly helpless, the viewers end up feeling helpless, too.

This is probably why a much more entertaining movie – John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) – failed to find an audience, on its initial release. The movie – set in a desolate research facility in Antarctica – is about a shape-shifting alien that takes on the form of each creature it kills. As the movie goes on and the body-count mounts, the survivors become wholly justified in their paranoid fear and suspicion of who is human and who may not be. (The 1930s sci-fi story on which the movie is based has the very apt title, “Who Goes There?”.) By the movie’s haunting end-game, only two humans are left – or is that one? Our hero MacReady runs out of options; all he can do is blow up the base, knowing he’ll freeze to death along with the other survivor, his colleague Childs – who may or may not be The Thing-in-hiding. So – BLAM! There’s some desolate satisfaction in the explosions that end the movie … but it’s bleak as hell, to have our protagonist saving the world by killing himself. Another sci-fi movie, E.T., which also opened in 1982, grossed $359 million; The Thing took in $19.6 million. Admittedly, apples and oranges; though the differences are suggestive, perhaps, since both are about “close encounters” with an alien intelligence. E.T. was a heart-warming fable about embracing the Unknown; in The Thing, the Unknown kills you.

The Thing is classic horror, with the sturdiest of templates: man meets Monster. Chaos ensues. Order is restored, or it’s not. The threat we clueless humans meet keeps shifting, over time and space – though often enough the threat is a then-current version of the Other: from East Europeans immigrants (in the late-Victorian Dracula), to the maybe-too-friendly white liberals in the recent hit movie Get Out.

And in some of the greatest horror flicks, this confrontation – man vs. monster – builds to a moment of nerve-shredding recognition: that the Other we’re so terrified of meeting isn’t so ‘other’ … In fact, in the brilliant 1950s film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, (#2, on our earlier list of horrific ‘what if’s), the monsters look exactly like your mother, or your Uncle Ira … except they aren’t Uncle Ira or Mom, in some uncanny way you can’t quite explain … you just know. But who the hell are they?

Human beings are being replaced with identical-looking aliens (who we see, in one nightmarish sequence, being ‘born’ – life-sized - from giant pea-like pods in a greenhouse). And this transformation is so suggestive, of so many dreadfully plausible scenarios (are the pod-people brain-washed Communists? or conforming bourgeois Americans?) that the film’s producers – worried about how truly disturbing the movie was – insisted on a new, more hopeful ending. (Not to mention a new voice-over narration that climaxed with the movie’s most risible line [and spoiler alert, by the way]: “I never knew the true meaning of fear … until I kissed Becky …”)

Becky fell asleep – and that’s when she changed: she’s become a pod-person. In the film’s original ending, the protagonist flees the horror of kissing pod-Becky, ending up on a busy freeway, trying to stop the unheeding cars racing by in the night: “You’re next! You’re NEXT!”

But are we? Do we have to be? Before the horror-writer puts a single word down on paper, there’s a basic decision to make, regarding the world of the story she’s building: is this a place where the characters can encounter the monstrous, and live? Or is it a world where the story’s logic closes down on hope like a trap?³

Either way, we need to care about the characters in jeopardy. This is all too often the problem with the ‘body-count’ slasher movie. The victims are barely characterized – the Jock, the Nerd, the Bimbo – and the only thing generating suspense is the manner in which the victims will die. Carried to an absurd extreme, the cruelly ingenious murder becomes the entire point of the popular Final Destination films. So intricate are the ways of death in these movies – like lethal Rube-Goldberg machines – that the ultimate effect is much more comic than horrific.

There is a place for laughter, in horror; often a comic moment gives the audience needed breathing room, a momentary easing of tension before the build-up begins again. (We’ll look more closely at comic aspects of horror – including comedy/horror hybrids like the great Shaun of the Dead - in Chapter 9.) The danger of such a strategy comes when comedy’s at the expense of character; when we’re invited to laugh at, and not with, the characters, we lose that connection that makes us care that the characters’ lives are in danger.

When we talk about creating characters audiences can care about, we’re talking about something more than a simple ‘we like them!’ kind of sympathy. In great horror flicks, the protagonists are often far from perfect. They steal (like Marion Crane, setting the Psycho plot in motion), they fantasize about revenging themselves on their enemies (like the bullied Oskar in Let the Right One In), they rage at their needy, precocious, maddening children (like the harried, haunted mother in The Babad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on transcription of dialogue and screenplay format
• 1. “Who goes there?”: A brief introduction to horror
• 2. What scares you?
• 3. Basic horror movie structure
• 4. Building Act One
• 5. The changed world of Act Two
• 6. Ending and beginning
• 7. Dialogue
• 8. Fearful landscapes
• 9. Humor in horror
• 10. “Beyond this point are monsters” – digging up inspiration
• 11. Politics and global horror
• 12. “Our name is legion” – varieties of horror
• 13. “Dead man’s chest” – the economics of horror
• 14. The future of horror
• Index