Knowing How a Horror Film Works Allows You to Manipulate the Audience into Being Scared but Leaving Happy
Horror
movies
depend on four elements for success, three elements that every person
innately fears and one element that everybody wants. These elements
are (in order) isolation, desolation, lost
cause, redemption. Watch any horror film and you will see these
elements played out and exploited which is why people go see horror
movies, to experience emotions that they would not dare experience in
real life or they can't under normal circumstances experience. Horror
has nothing to do with gore and violence; those are only symptomatic
of a sub-genre of horror films. Adding more gore and violence will
not make your film more horrific, it will only alienate that part of
the audience that either sees it as being purely for visual
eye-candy, or worse yet, see it as lacklustre attempt to make up for
the lack of actual story content.
Horror movies
are not difficult to write if you follow the four elements in the
proper dramatic structure. There are several keys that you should
follow, one of them being that the reason the Hero is in trouble is
that he makes a fatal mistake due to pride, and that mistake causes
the death of someone close to him because they trust him to make the
right decisions. He is then left to question his own intelligence and
view of the world while every thing he has believed in, everything he
feels that will get him out of any harm is used against him.
In
writing a horror script, you begin with isolation. Somehow, some way,
you need to separate the hero physically or mentally from everyone
around him. Physically is easy, put him in the woods (CABIN FEVER),
out in the middle of nowhere (DEAD BIRDS), or in the ocean (OPEN
WATER). Separating the hero mentally is a bit more difficult but it
can be done, one of the best examples would be the movie FALLEN where
Denzel Washington is a cop that begins to have a supernatural
situation that implicates him for murder. Hitchcock also used the
mental separation in the opening of PSYCHO with the hero being
responsible for embezzling money and having to "play it off"
in a room full of people. No matter the reason why, as that depends
on your story, the key is to get your hero isolated because that
removes any aspect of outside help.
The second step is
desperation; the hero must make a run for it, pushing further into
the worse areas in an effort to find a safe place. This is where his
pride will fail him as in the three trials; he is choosing all the
wrong ones, based on how he feels the world operates. Not only is he
taking two steps back, he is not making any steps forward and in
fact, he is tightening the noose around his own neck. In CABIN FEVER
this was seen as they had a choice to get from one side of the
mountain to the other, and chose "the short cut" instead of
waiting the night for the main road to clear. Audience react to this
because they know the short cut is always the wrong path (if not,
there would be no movie) so they are expecting something bad to
happen.
The
third step is lost
cause, where the evil is becoming triumphant, the hero is backed up
against a wall, unwilling to do the one thing that needs to be done
for him to escape, which of course is to sacrifice himself to the
evil. Because the hero is unwilling to do this, the evil doesn't
build so much as it reduces the hero. This is where people start
dying in horror films, first the "secondary characters",
then the Hero's close friends, then the side kick, until the hero has
to stand up and get in front and say "no more" and face the
evil on his own.
This brings us to the final act, where
the hero is redeemed for making his tragic flaw early in the film and
pays for it. Understanding that the hero does not have to die, this
allows you to "transform" the hero, transformation being
the single most important element of any film, any genre, and the
single reason why successful films connect with audiences. In this
last act, the hero is transformed and given a new life (or an
afterlife) and that allows the audience to leave with a good feeling,
even with the physical death of the hero. Consider the recent films
ARMEGGEDDON and POSEIDON'S ADVENTURE, in which both hero characters
died at the end. I know that most people would not consider either of
those films horror in the classic sense, but that's a purely personal
view of what makes horror. Do not limit yourself to thinking within a
box, let your genres cross and mix.
In conclusion, in
writing your horror film, the best thing to remember is let your hero
fall, impossibly far, and keep falling until they realize that they
have to sacrifice themselves to get up. Isolation, Desperation, Lost
Cause, and Redemption are the four steps that allow for any horror
film to be successfully written.
Information originally written by Quito Washington, May 2007
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Tags: horror movie, any horror, movie, horror, write