In the wake of DON'T BREATHE's success, what can we learn about writing horror films?

Horror is a genre that, as a whole, doesn't get a lot of respect. That seems a little unfair when you consider that the misses in that genre probably aren't significantly greater than the misses in any genre. Maybe the disdain has to do with the fact that slasher films have frequently been less highbrow and less polished efforts, while the respectable successes always get gerrymandered into more highbrow categories. Thus, we get the notion that PSYCHO isn't a horror film, it's a "Hitchcockian thriller." SILENCE OF THE LAMBS isn't a horror film, it's a "psychological thriller."

The success of DON'T BREATHE this past weekend should be a reminder of all the virtues of this much maligned genre. Here, in the waning dog days of summer, a new film opened up with $26.1 million. According to Box Office Mojo, that's up 43.5% from the same weekend last year. That fact alone would probably be reason to celebrate, but it gets even better. It was made for less than $10 million, which means it has a FAR shorter road to travel before its in the black and starts making money. And guess what? All of this was achieved with any big name stars.

That's the thing about horror - it's perhaps the one genre left where it's understood the concept is king. The box office proves that audiences don't need that extra nudge to go see something that looks interesting to them. I've always felt that same philosophy was transferable to other genres, but there remains this conviction that a project needs "marketable" names to earn a green light. (And if any of you have ever dealt with foreign financing, you understand how insane it can often be to try to put together a cast that the money men deem worth their investment.)

When I was still working as a reader, horror was probably one of the more frequent genres I read. Sadly, it was probably also the genre where I detected the most laziness on the part of the writers. Too many were seemingly satisfied with being generic. Perhaps it's that old snobbery at work again, it's "just" horror, so why work to make it good, right? Since DON'T BREATHE is likely to provoke another wave of horror writers, I want to pontificate about what I think makes a great horror film.

I took a look at many of the horror releases of the past several years and when you see the profit margin on the low-budget entries, it might inspire you to see how strong your affinity is for that genre. Blumhouse's success with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY has been talked to death at this point. Of the six films in the series, five of them were made for less than $5 million, and until the penultimate release, THE MARKED ONES, worldwide gross was always well over $100 million. Then again, the final film cost $10 million to make and it only made $18 domestically. ($59 million was taken in overseas.)

When you look at the PA numbers, you can see the first dip happened with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4, which is probably not coincidentally the first film in the series where the story really seemed to be treading water. The lack of payoff likely discouraged attendance at the next entry, and by the time the final film rolled around most viewers who had cared were long gone.

Blumhouse's other franchise THE PURGE seems to be holding strong. The first film grossed $64.5 million domestically and each sequel's domestic take has risen. The films keep getting gradually more expensive, but both sequels have taken in over $100 million worldwide. I didn't like the original film at all, but something about this hook really seems to appeal to people.


The INSIDIOUS films are also a huge success with regard to the budget to box office ratio. The first one cost $1.5 million and earned $97 million, and it's the lowest grossing of the three.

Lesson: in a franchise, keep finding new angles within the framework of the concept. Making a horror film cheap isn't enough; having an inventive story and scares matters.

So what kind of horror story do you want to tell? My own interests lean more towards the Hitchcockian end of the spectrum. I like character-driven horror stories. For me, it's always more unsettling when the evil is relatable to something in the real world. This is part of the reason that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was so effective - getting lost in the woods felt like something any of us could have done and the lack of any on-screen visual effects meant that viewers weren't immediately triggered to feel, "Okay, that's clearly fake so I'm now very aware I'm watching a construct.

Great horror stories start with primal emotions and fears. LIGHTS OUT had a supernatural killer, but the film cleverly reveals that her power is that she is strong in darkness and is invisible in the light. She might not be able to hurt you in the light, but you can't stay out of the dark forever. And when that moment comes, she's ready to kill you. It's a smart primal fear to build off of because studies show that fear of darkness is an evolutionary trait, not a learned one. On a visceral, gut level, the average person is likely incapable of NOT being triggered by this film.

A NIGHTMARE OF ELM STREET uses a variation of this, giving the killer power in his victim's nightmares. Everyone has nightmares and surely there are few people who haven't woken from a terrifying dream at some point. Those emotions are what makes Freddy Krueger such an effective bad guy. It also makes for a strong thematic through-line to hang a feature on. This will have to be a story about the heroine confronting her worst fears and surviving.

You can't neglect theme in horror films. Like the primal fears, these will be the elements that resonate with your audience on more than just a superficial way. LIGHTS OUT plays as an allegory for depression, and perhaps specifically trying to deal with a loved one who suffers from it. Any idiot can write a monster leaping out of the darkness and get a momentary scare from the audience. The REAL scare you want is the kind that lingers for days, that becomes a dull buzz in the viewers head even long after the end credits have rolled. You'll find these factors present in both supernatural and non-supernatural films, so no matter the horror subgenre you're working in, you want to be thinking about these questions.

Lesson: Theme matters, so have one. (And it should probably be in your mind as you're breaking the story, not tacked on after everything else is figured out.)

Let's take a look at some recent horror films that were either standalones, or the first in their series:

Supernatural horror
Insidious - $97M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
Sinister - $77M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
Lights Out - $126M worldwide on a $4.9 million budget.
Ouija - $103.5M worldwide on a $5 million budget.
Unfriended - $64M worldwide on a $1 million budget.

For me, Unfriended is the one of the bunch I wish I wrote because it had the most inventive high concept premise (the entire film is told via laptop screen, through Skype calls and chatrooms.) It's a much smaller story than the others, but it understands how to use its limitations to reveal things about the characters. That said, Sinister's pitch-dark ending is the rare horror finale that really, deeply chilled me. It absolutely earns that visceral punch from everything building up to it.

Non-Supernatural Horror
The Purge - $89M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
The Gift - $58.9M worldwide on a $5 million budget.
The Visit - $98.5M worldwide on a $5 million budget.

THE PURGE goes for a less repeatable concept and casts itself in the near future, where the laws have established The Purge, a yearly free-for-all where all laws are suspended and anything goes, including murder. I didn't particularly like this film, nor did I find the premise credible at all. However, that same hook is what drew people into the theaters, wondering, "How will they pull this off?"

Lesson: Sometimes audiences will go for something wildly original even if it's implausible.

THE VISIT, however, is far better at drawing on real-world fears. There are themes of aging and dementia, even invoking our pity for the elder folks and seemingly kindly grandparents, who seem to be succumbing to senility. Seeing that visited upon adults can be very hard on children, though by this point, it's likely a part of most childhoods. There's a twist near the end that's inventive, but might be too clever for its own good. It's something of a knife to the gut, but it's also the point where the film trades any poignant identification for visceral thrills. To be honest, sometimes that can work. It's like when Spielberg was told that blowing up the shark in JAWS was a ludicrous twist. His reply was some version of: "If I've got them in my hand for two hours, they'll believe anything I show them in the last five minutes."

Lesson: Take an experience that one might find unsettling or uncomfortable and amp it up to its possible worst case scenario. The old folks' deterioration lingers far more than the twist the film pulls in its third act.

It's THE GIFT that casts its spell by being grounded from minute one. Simon and his wife Robyn meet Gorod, an old classmate of Simon's who is instantly a little TOO friendly. Simon remembers him as "Gordo the Weirdo," an awkward kid in high school. It's archetypical enough that every viewer will either identify with Gordo, or think of their own "weirdo" they knew in high school. Simon doesn't like Gordo's efforts at becoming a friend, but Simon's wife is more receptive. It's a neat writing trick that makes Robyn empathetic, gets the audience feeling a little bad for Gordo, and makes us wonder if Simon's just being protective, a jerk, or if he's right to be wary of Gordo.

Every twist in this movie comes from pure character, even as it escalates into a stalker thriller. Having written a stalker thriller, I learned that a key rule is to keep the stalker relate-able. In the case of my script, several people said they found themselves on the stalker's side and were hoping he could just explain himself in the end and make everything okay. I like a movie where it's possible to empathize with the bad guy because it usually means the writer has done a good job of making that person a fleshed-out character.

Lesson: Character is king. A good tip is to plot only the character stuff first on its own and see if it holds together without the scares goosing the excitement every 15 minutes.

With supernatural films, when you're using paranormal creatures to personify abstract ideas or fears, you can sometimes get away with a lighter touch on the character work. If your story takes place in the real world, everything MUST have depth to it. That's what makes Hannibal Lector so scary and fascinating at the same time. It's what draws us into Clarice Starling's crusade to capture Buffalo Bill and be taken seriously as a woman in a man's world. Those are Academy Award-winning roles because so much effort was made to make them more than just "the cop" and "the psychopath." If you're writing a movie like this, your standards must be higher

One of my favorite horror films of all time, SCREAM, would not work if there wasn't recognizable human emotion driving the killers' plan. You can argue that their motivations are taken to a severe extreme - people have killed for revenge and notoriety before, but few have probably gone after as many bystanders just to serve the narrative they plan on selling to the cops. Also, the film plays fair with all of its cheats. Every misdirection is clearly motivated and directed so that it makes sense in hindsight.

SCREAM's other strength is that its heroine is at least as interesting as her adversary. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET got this right in the first installment, then forgot it for several subsequent entries. Write the kind of role that could stay interesting across several films. The horror films that get a bad rap tend to have weak, barely developed characters.

Lesson: from a character standpoint, there's really no great distinction between writing a horror film and writing any other genre. Characters shouldn't be two-dimension just because they're eventually canon fodder for the slasher or supernatural threat.

This year has seen a lot of strong horror and thrillers, some low-budget, some not. 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, THE SHALLOWS, and THE INVITATION are three that spring to mind with one thing in common - they're all limited locations. Two of them are confined not just in setting, but in time span too. 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is the exception, spreading its story out over several months, but that also uses the claustrophobia well, like a pressure cooker for inter-character tension. The situations are more extreme, but the intensity can work as a trigger for the viewers own emotions.

Also, I'm a sucker for these sorts of locked-room or limited location thrillers. If you can come up with an original hook to confine a story to a few sets, you might find yourself with some buzz around your story.

Lesson: containing your locations doesn't just have to be a limitation of budget, but can be an asset in forcing tension to a heightened and extreme level. This can be useful with a more heightened premise that doesn't immediately conform to some of the relatability issues I discussed above.

This obviously isn't everything you need to know about writing horror, but give it some thought when working on your next horror script. Do it right and you'll have created the sort of film that critics will keep finding reasons to label as "elevated genre" or "thriller" or whatever "respectable" term they're using for horror that week.

My review of YOU'RE NEXT

This past weekend, I had a reaction to a film that was so counter to the pre-hype that I'm still struggling to understand how I saw the same movie as those who were singing its praises.  For about two years now, You're Next has been hailed as the next big thing in horror.  Critics have been mentioning it in the same breath as Scream, which still stands for me as one of the most ingenious horror-thriller screenplays of all time.

If you've followed my blog for a long time, you know I'm a fan of horror films, or at least good horror.  I also have read a lot of horror scripts over the years, many of them NOT so good.  (That's just the nature of the job. Most of what I've read en total is not very good.)  If you were to audit my Netflix history, you're likely to find an overrepresentation of horror-thrillers there, including a lot of movies that probably were panned upon initial release.  For some reason, I can enjoy doing an autopsy on a bad horror or thriller movie in a way I can't from a drama.

Most internet critics are huge horror guys and I guarantee they've had to sit through a far greater number of bad horror films than I have.  If anything, they should be more disgruntled than I am with all of the cliched elements that crop up all too frequently.  So when the flock says, "This is an amazing horror film," I feel safe trusting that as an informed opinion.

So that's why I don't get how people who've sat through the same bag of tricks time and again can come out of this movie not weary of many reused tropes.  My take on the film is this: It's a midnight movie.  It's not a game changer.  It's got a few inventive kills and the lead heroine is pretty badass.  I'll give the film credit for that - when Sharni Vinson's character really starts cutting loose and taking names about half-way through the film, it's pretty cool to see.

But for me, that's not enough to overcome some of the faults here. You're Next is just loaded with elements that kept ejecting me from the film.  The first act was slow, but when Vinson's character sprung to life, my faith in the film was renewed.  The last act or so really burned a lot of goodwill and over the last two days I've found the more I revisit it, the less impressed I am by it.  I don't even think it's a case of the film being built up so much that nothing could match the expectation.  For me, it's that it includes some elements that really don't work.

What might those be? I'm glad you asked.

Unrelated Kill to Kick off the Film - This one really irks me when I see it in screenplays.  It might be the biggest "bad script cliche" in the horror genre.  Typically, the writer presents a brutal scene with a minor character - in most cases, rarely mentioned again - being offed in gruesome fashion.  Bonus points if bare breasts can be involved somehow.  It's a scene that's often there solely to announce "Hey! This is a Horror film!"

I can almost understand the motivation for including this at the script level.  It's important to grab an exec's attention early, so you might as well include a scene that defines the genre of the film.  What I don't understand is that by the time the movie has been shot and marketed, the audience knows the kind of film they've bought a ticket for.  They're not ignorant of the fact it's a horror film, so why does that have to be spelled out in painstaking detail for them within the first three minutes?

However, a good writer should be able to find a way to find a way to make that scene serve a larger purpose.  In Scream, the opening kill is not only the inciting incident, but it goes a long way to defining the killer and his M.O.  Scream is a completely different movie without that opening.  Most (bad) horror scripts I read treat the inagural dismemberment as completely extraneous.

You're Next falls victim to this.  I can't figure out what larger purpose the opening kills serve.  You could say, "Well, the neighbors had to be killed so that anyone who escapes the house has nowhere to run."  While that's technically true, the creators made a choice to have those neighbors exist in the first place.  It would have been just as easy to set our lead character's home out in the middle of nowhere.  Another issue is that those dead bodies never become relevant.  There isn't a scene where the lead characters explore the first victims' house and get the sense something is up.  We - the audience - know that a killer's out there, but our characters remain blithely unaware of this fact until the first of their number meets the business end of an arrow.

(This also exposes the "You're Next" blood-written warning as a completely extraneous element.  Why do the killers even bother with that at all, let alone for two people who they're offing just as in inconvenience?)

I've heard the vague justification that other neighbors had to be killed in order to give credence to the killers' cover story that this was just a random spree killing.  That's really flimsy and it suggests an insanely high degree of sociopathy on the part of the killers.  Which brings me to...

The killers' motivations and the explanation of them - I've already dumped some spoilers, but an extra warning here - I'm going to be discussing everything about the ending.  Last chance to turn back.

For more than half the film, we know very little about the killers and why they are engaging in this home invasion and murder.  They're personality-less beings behind Halloween masks.  In real life, random, senseless spree killings happen, but in movies we almost always know some aspect of what provokes these killers.  Even if the motives border on pure insanity, it's common convention that the film will attempt at some point to answer the question "why?"

Smarter viewers will realize once the siege is underway that every character we've met is either already dead or among the prospective victims.  Once we're halfway through the film and have not found out anything about the killers, it's a good bet that the killers are going to be revealed as having some connection with at least one seemingly innocent victim.  Someone in that house is going to be revealed as a collaborator, if not a mastermind - and there's little shock when that happens.

Nine times out of ten that collaborator will turn out to be the person who seemingly dies, but who's death remains unconfirmed on-screen.  There's a point where Crispian, who happens to be the boyfriend of our protagonist Erin, decides to make a run for it despite the risks of being taken out by one of the killers.  After that, nothing is heard from him for a while so the characters assume he's dead.  Strange how we don't see him die, right?  Gee, I wonder who might pop up in the third act.

Scream was brilliant because it anticipated how the audience was going to scrutinize the suspects.  It pointed a giant neon figure at the first suspect, then seemingly exonerated him.  It introduced that element of doubt that kept the audience guessing. ("They wouldn't be that obvious, would they?  But maybe that's what they want us to think. Maybe he's a red herring. I'm not going to fall for that.  Or maybe that's what they want me to think!")  The genius of that kind of writing is that it engages the audience so that when the explanation comes, it's like having the final few pieces of a puzzle snap in place.

In contrast, You're Next mostly holds back those puzzle pieces and then dumps them out at once while assembling them.  Sibling Felix and his girlfriend Zee are revealed to be working with the killers stalking their family.  In the second-worst expositional dialogue I've seen in a while, Felix recaps the plan with one of the killers.  It's a scene that mostly exists just as an infodump for the audience.  The sequence lacks the tension necessary to make that reveal anything more than an explanation.

So Felix has concocted this plan to murder his parents and his siblings so that he can inherit the family fortune.  The family's wealth was established earlier, I'll give the film that much.  What's lacking is any sort of rational motivation for going THAT far to get it.  Why now?  And what sort of a person would be party to a violent slaughter that is intended to murder both parents, two siblings, and at least one of the sibling's significant others'?

Unsurprisingly, Crispian turns up alive and as the mastermind of the plan.  Remember how I said the earlier scene was the second-worst bit of exposition dialogue I've seen in a while?  This scene is the worst.  In defense of the writer, the acting and the staging of the scene do this infodump no favors either.  There's kind of an infodump at the end of Scream too, but the audience has been given just enough information that receiving these finally nuggets prompts an "A-ha! That's how it all fits!"  There's not enough foreshadowing to make You're Next's reveal work in the same way.

Here's what I like about Crispian's plan - the notion that Erin was meant to survive and be an unbiased witness to the carnage.  Her role as the Final Girl is essential to the plan working.  That's actually a pretty sly move, and it's effective how Erin's badassery in the situation throws a wrench into the whole scheme.  As much as I complain that there was a lot here I've seen before, that's one thing I don't really recall having been done.

I still can't buy what would possess two brothers to murder their whole family, even for an inheritance.  The film doesn't really hint at any existing tension among the relatives at all, certainly no more than the average family.  For a spree killing that extreme, that brutal, there HAS to be some personal element to it.  This is amplified when you consider TWO siblings had to collude on this plan.  Maybe I could buy one of them being batshit crazy and sociopathic, but two?

(Also, if Erin was meant to be the unbiased witness, what does that mean for Zee?  Was she supposed to be killed?  Is there any element of the plan that doesn't work if Erin was absent and Zee played the role of the Final Girl?  What is Erin's survival going to accomplish that Zee's wouldn't?  Both of them are dating the key surviving conspirators, so if the police suspect an inside job, wouldn't they assume Erin to be a part of it as well?)

You know what might have worked for me?  If the initial plan seemed to be all four siblings plotting the murder of their parents, only to have the plan involve the siblings turn on each other in succession.  Think of it like a long-form version of the bank robbery in The Dark Knight, where the participants are killed by their collaborators after fulfilling their roles.  (Giving the siblings a more concrete motivation for the slaughter would be a must in this situation.  It can't JUST be about the money.)  I might have also gone for a Ladykillers scenario where the collaborators were perpetually taken out by other means too.

For the life of me, I just can't wrap my brain around the motivation for these two to kill everyone else.  We're just not told enough about those relationships where that is comprehensible to me.

On a more minor note, the second act is marred by the character behaving rather stupidly.  There's a point where someone is left alone and murdered in an upstairs bedroom.  When the survivors find out, that should pretty well indicate that the killer is in the house, right?  You wouldn't know it from their behavior, where not even Erin reacts accordingly to the fear that a killer has gotten in.

Tonally it's all over the place.  There's nothing wrong with mixing humor and horror, but the shifts are done randomly at the whims of the director.  The result is that some scenes come off as camp when playing them straight was likely the intent.  The two elements I spent the most time on were the biggest issues for me, but these minor elements still add up.

Maybe this is just one of those films that really thrives at a midnight festival crowd.  It's not totally without merit, but it's not one I think I'm going to feel compelled to revisit again.

A challenge to the producers of V/H/S and S-VHS

If you've been following the news out of Sundance, you probably heard that the found-footage horror sequel S-VHS debuted to strong reviews.  Many proclaimed the sequel to be stronger than the original V/H/S. One reviewer told me via Twitter that it felt like all the filmmakers involved with this installment had watched the Radio Silence segment in the first movie and went, "Got it." 

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'll state outright that I'm good friends with the team Radio Silence, who were responsible for the final segment in the original film. In fact, I interviewed most of them back when they were still called "Chad, Matt & Rob.")

Another viewer echoed that sentiment and said that in addition to S-VHS starting at the level of the Radio Silence short and building on that, there was no "accidental misogyny."  This got my attention, as a frequent topic on this blog is the sexualization of violence in horror films and the often-gratuitous nudity that accompanies that. I have to admit, when I saw V/H/S, I couldn’t help but notice the frequent uses of those tropes to a sometimes exploitative degree.

For those who haven't seen it, the original V/H/S is an anthology found-footage horror film made up of six segments by different directors. Pretty much everything good and bad about found footage can be found here.  Some segments are excellent, others range from terrible to pointless.  Out of those six segments, three feature female nudity – more than one instance of such in two of those segments. Of the remaining three shorts, two of those star male characters behind the camera who attempt to use it to leer at their female targets.

An aside to the teenage boys watching this who now have a reason to get the film on VOD – You’re welcome.

Look, I like boobs. Who doesn’t? I don’t see anything wrong with adding a little visual appeal to a film, and I’m well aware that topless shots add marketability to a project. I’d be lying if I said I never rented a movie to see boobs. When I was a teenager, I didn’t exactly watch Fast Times to see the riveting work of Judge Reinhold and Taylor Negron.

But there’s a certain point where a film contains so much leering it can’t help but feel excessively gratuitous. When two or three consecutive segments indulge in getting their female leads topless it’s not a huge leap to think that the filmmakers are taking as much advantage as their characters are.

Also of note, in all of the segments with female nudity also feature male protagonists whose attitudes range from “douchebag” to outright villainous. The Radio Silence segment is the only one that doesn’t deal with such male leads. In most of the other films, the men are presented as predators who get what’s coming to them. (But they were totally asking for it, amiright ladies?)

We’ve come a long way. It used to be that horror movies would punish the slutty girl for being sexually active. Now, it seems that the men get killed for their hormones, but not before they get an eyeful. (Or in some cases, a handful.)

I’ve seen interviews where the directors defend themselves against the accusation that the female nudity is gratuitous. Their position is that the point of the film is to punish these guys for their sleazy ways, not to celebrate them. Yeah, sure. You guys buy that, right? Maybe if it was a theme in one of the movies, but for five directors to arrive at that exact same message simultaneously? What’s more logical – that a quartet came up with the exact same feminist theme? Or that at least a few of these guys really just wanted some boobies in their short?

Oddly, if these works came from a female director, we could buy that as an intentional statement. But when men put forth that sort of feminist argument, it seems disingenuous. It sounds like some bullshit justification for the nudity. And if it’s not bull, then the message comes across as guys punishing themselves for their own sexual urges, as if they’re ashamed of or embarrassed by them.

Maybe I’m being unfair to some of these guys, many of whom were responsible for entertaining segments in the film. But when five out of six segments all tread on the same theme or very close to the same theme, what conclusion would you draw?

I'm glad to hear that S-VHS seemingly doesn't make this same mistake.  Since the reaction to this sequel almost certainly means that the producers are working on assembling their teams for a third installment, I'd like to issue a challenge to the V/H/S team.  For part three try to involve as many female directors as possible. Seeing six shorts from a group of male directors showcased some of the themes uppermost in their minds. It’d be interesting to see if there was a similar symmetry if the gender politics were completely skewed.

First ten pages - Horror

As I’ve said before, your first ten pages are critical. Agents, managers, readers and producers will often use the first ten pages to gauge how strong you are as a writer. If the first ten pages suck, you probably suck. Ten pages is more than enough space to convey tone, genre, themes and give the characters a good introduction.

I read a lot of bad horror scripts that start off the same – a disposable kill of a barely related supporting character. This makes a little bit of sense. In a horror film, you should establish the threat that’s out there. We need to know there’s a “shark in the water,” as it were.

But there’s more to a good horror opening than just killing a big-breasted babe in her underwear. Bad scripts start off with a throwaway kill, then introduce a new cast of characters and spend the next 25 pages just killing time until the act break. Worse, most of the time, the lead characters are so annoying I start rooting for the killer.

A good horror script doesn’t just kill a character in the first five or ten pages, it teases why this horror/thriller is different from all the others out there. Scream is brilliant because the opening establishes a unique M.O. for the killer – he calls up his victims on the phone and taunts them with movie trivia. Even before the Drew Barrymore character is killed, you know you’re reading something different.

The trick is that since the character introduced in the first scene is also usually dead by the end of that sequence, the audience needs a reason to stick around. That’s why you have to make your antagonist and his methods distinctive. In the case of a sequel, it helps to have a really inventive kill. Scream 2 doesn’t get lazy there either. While an audience watches a “Stab” movie, based on the events of the first Scream, Jada Pinkett Smith is killed in the audience and then bleeds to death standing in front of the screen. That’s a powerful image.

Tone. Genre. Craft. You don’t even need your lead characters to display those three elements. (But it doesn’t hurt.)

So if your story is about Bigfoots killing people out in the woods, make sure your opening is memorable. Don’t just have a generic kill, and don’t think that hyper-violence is the only way to get an audience’s attention. Show me the monster, and then show me why I should care what it does.

Joss Whedon on putting the dread back into horror films

I bought MovieScope magazine just to get the Joss Whedon interview on Cabin in the Woods.  In it, he discusses his disenchantment with the tone of recent horror films:

"Somebody brought up Friday the 13th and to me that was the tipping point of 'Well, now it's just about the kill.'  As opposed to Halloween, which was a classic horror movie where the dread of the thing was the point, and not the act.  But in Friday the 13th, especially by the second one, it really was about 'in what inventive way can we dispose of this person.'  And it really took the fun out of horror films."

Take it from someone who reads a lot of bad horror films - what Joss says might seem elementary, but I have several hundred vehement PASSES that I've given to scripts that are just about the "inventive" kills.  I've honestly seen and read so many ways to kill people that the only way you can really expect to shock me is by going so far over the top to an incredibly depraved level.  (The current leader in that race - the seriously graphic and misogynistic vertical bisection of a terrified woman at the hands of a deranged psychopath.)  And let me tell you, when you reach that level, it's not just a PASS that you get, but a "there should be no need for us to ever review a submission from this writer ever again."

Be about the dread, the suspense.  But if all you bring is the gore, I will END you.

Think I'm kidding?  Try me.

The problem with the third act is the first two acts

Cary left this question on the Facebook page a while ago:

"I'm writing a horror screenplay. In watching a lot of horror movies, I find that so many of them have fantastic setups, but often fall apart in the third act. Any general thoughts on how to avoid that?"

I struggle with this answer a bit because Cary didn't offer any specifics as far as his assessment of "fall[ing] apart in the third act."  Without knowing precisely what I'm responding to, it's hard to come up with an effective course of action.

There's an old joke: "The problem with the third act is the first two acts."  Essentially, the reason an ending might suck is because there's not been an effective set-up for any sort of destination.  A film might have a cool set-up and it might even have some engaging set-pieces to keep things going in the second act, but if it's all smoke and mirrors, it becomes tricky to conclude something that was lacking in depth to begin with.

This is why a lot of guys like me say you need to know your ending before you start writing.  You wouldn't jump in your car and just start driving for days on end without planning your endpoint.  If you don't have a destination, how can you develop any sort of route?  Sure, you might end up somewhere, but without knowing that at the outset, how can you stumble upon the best path to that endpoint?

The horror movies that fall apart in the end are often the movies that don't have much going for them beyond a cool hook.  I think I've complained before about The Unborn, which starts off with a clever idea about a college-aged girl being haunted by the twin she never knew about because the baby died in the womb, strangled by the girl's umbilical cord.  Eventually we learn that the twin's spirit is trying to be born into the world.  Along the way, it terrorizes the girl, killing several people around her and eventually going so far that the girl, played by Odette Yustman, submits to an exorcism.

There's some interesting use of Jewish folklore here and for a while the film holds together.  And then we get to the ending.  Remember - throughout the film, the main girl has been haunted, terrorized, threatened and attacked by this evil spirit.  We're left with the impression he's trying to kill her.  The final scenes involve Odette Yustman's character learning that she's pregnant with twins, presumably from a sexual encounter with her boyfriend shown early in the film.  It's been a while since I saw this, but I remember feeling that there was a pretty clear implication that the spirit was going to be born into one of those babies.

Wait, what?  So this spirit's been doing time in Odette's womb since early in the first act.  Presumably, all it has to do is wait out the next nine months and he can pop out alive.  Maybe - MAYBE - if Odette was considering having an abortion, the spirit might decide drastic measures are needed to sidetrack her, but she doesn't even know about the pregnancy until the film's final minutes.  Given that, why the hell is the spirit pulling all these parlor tricks that will lead Odette on a path to figuring out the truth, and why on several occasions does it all but attack her, placing her life in danger?

I want writer/director David Goyer to explain to me what his thinking was here.  Maybe I misunderstood some critical plot point, but the script leads the audience by the nose in so many other places, I doubt I'm too far off base.  I chalk this one up to Goyer being taken with the idea that the girl not only fails to banish the spirit, but that (in a Twilight Zone-type ending) she'll actually give birth to it.  In this case, the third act falls apart because the writer fell in love with a clever idea that doesn't work within the logic of the film's first two acts.

Overall, the key to not having a third act fall apart in a horror film is the same as not having any film fall apart in the third act: have a story to tell - not just a cool hook or premise.  If the third act sucks, it's often because something in it isn't meshing well with the rest of the script

Tuesday Talkback: Greatest Horror Sequels

It's Halloween week, and usually I ask some variation of "What's your favorite scary movie?"  This year, I'll mix it up a bit.  If you were to program a horror movie marathon made up ONLY of horror sequels, what would you choose?

For the purposes of this discussion, assume "so bad they're good" movies are perfectly acceptable.

Tuesday Talkback: Worst horror sequels

The only thing more fun that listing your favorite horror movies is listing the worst horror sequels you've ever seen. There's no feeling quite like seeing the fourth or fifth instalment of a once-profitable series and asking yourself, "Did they even try to make a good film this time or did they just assemble this from the scenes cut out of the earlier films?"

There are some movies that never needed sequels. The Exorcist probably ranks at the top of that list, but that certainly didn't stop them from making what is supposed to be one of the worst sequels of all time. Psycho also got an unnecessary sequel, but I have to admit I find Psycho 2 somewhat entertaining, if you can get past the blasphemy of making a sequel to a Hitchcock classic.

And I know I'm probably the only one on the planet who thinks this, but I feel like Blair Witch 2 was an interesting experiment. I think had the studio not butchered it in post, it might have been better received. (Also, I think the movie's biggest mistake was to proceed from the premise that the "found footage" from the first film was false. Had it been treated as "real," the revelation of the sequel's own video footage might have carried more weight.)

There are so many terrible horror sequels that it's hard to peg which one is worse. Is Freddy's Dead really significantly worse than Freddy's Revenge? Is Halloween II worse than Halloween II? (God, I love how reboots screw up the numbering system.

So what say you? What horror sequels rank as your all-time worst?

Tuesday Talkback - What scares you?

Playing off of yesterday's topic - what sort of everyday things scare you? You might not see a way to translate them into an entire movie, but what occurrences cause you to fear the worst case scenario?

Imagine all the things that could go wrong if you find yourself in gridlocked traffic, never moving for hours at a time.

Or perhaps you fear slipping in the shower, breaking your neck and slowly drowning as the tub fills up with water.

What are your most primal fears? What truly scares you?

If you don't feel comfortable sharing that, let me know which films you feel do a good job of playing off the same sorts of fears that Frozen, Open Water and Awake do.

Adam Green's Frozen: The key to good horror is relatability

A couple of weeks ago I caught the movie Frozen on DVD. In a nutshell, the premise is that three college kids manage to bribe their way onto a ski resort without buying lift tickets, only to find themselves stuck on the lift halfway up the mountain when the resort closes early for the week due to an incoming storm. See, since they're not part of the official head count, no one in charge even knows they're missing.

So there they are - stuck on the stopped ski lift, dangling fifty feet from the ground. A major storm is coming in and since this is Sunday night the resort is closed all week until Friday. They have three choices: wait, jump, or try to climb on the wire until they get to a tower and then climb down. Waiting means freezing to death, jumping is sure to cause serious injury, and it's almost impossible to climb on those metal wires, to say nothing of the upper body strength needed.

I really don't want to spoil what happens because this is one of those films that really makes good use of tension. Giving away anything else might spoil some of that for first time viewers and this is a film that really needs to be experienced fresh. Director Adam Green also gets in several vertigo-inducing shots that remind us just how high up these guys are and there are several moments that are very difficult to watch. It's not that the violence is exceptionally graphic, but the situation and the peril are very intense in places.

These are probably my favorite kind of thrillers - the ones that play on everyday fears. These are the stories that spring from the "what if one little thing went wrong?" voice in the back of your mind. "What if I went scuba diving and the boat accidentally left me in the middle of nowhere?" (Open Water) "What if I go in for surgery and the anastetic only paralyzes me but doesn't knock me out?" (Awake) "What if I ran into a shark while swimming near the beach?" (Jaws).

Who hasn't been on a ski lift or a roller coaster and found themselves wondering "What happens if this thing breaks right when we get to the highest point?"

To me, those sort of everyday fears are a thousand times more scarier than demonic possession, alien invasions and deformed slashers who stalk women in their underwear. (The women are the ones in their underwear, obviously. A deformed slasher in his underwear might be almost as scary as being stuck on a ski lift.)

That's the root of all horror: "It could happen to me." Remember that when you craft your own horror/thrillers.

Movies by hacks about people who get hacked (up)

I've read more than a few slasher flicks lately and most of them have unfortunately been crap. I enjoy a good horror film as much as the next guy, but the problem with a lot of horror specs is that they get so formulaic when they involve a slasher killer. Here are a few of the more common tropes that pop up in the first acts of the weaker, more generic specs.

A disposable kill to start the film - Usually the writers in question are sharp enough to know that a good horror film has to start with a bang. The problem is that this early kill - which serves the purpose of establishing for the audience that there's a madman on the loose - rarely exhibits much imagination on the part of the writer. Most of the time it involves a cannon fodder character wandering around in the film's main setting. (For example: If we're dealing with one of those films where the killer stalks a bunch of campers in the woods, then the first scene has our walking target walking through the woods before getting killed.)

The most common mistake made in amateur scripts is that usually this victim has little to no connection to any of the other characters, and in bad scripts, this death isn't integral to the plot at all. It's just there to tell the audience "Killer on the loose." It's always better if you can make this scene motivate the story, and somehow set the plot into motion. For instance, Scream avoids this problem by using Drew Barrymore's murder as the catalyst for the police questioning everyone at school, establishing how Drew's character and her boyfriend are connected to the main cast, and setting up the motif of the killer. (In bad scripts, the slasher merely jumps out of the shadows and kills.)

20 pages of boredom - The hack writer assumes that since they've spent the first 5 pages setting up the killer, that they can spend the next 20 pages slowly introducing their large cast of characters as they go about their mundane lives before setting up the next kill around page 30. The worst script I read recently had one group of four teens killed while skinny dipping on the first ten pages. Then they introduced another group of six teens heading out for another camping trip. This involved five pages of the teens assembling for their trip. Ten pages of them on their road trip, which mostly consisted of smoking pot and arguing over pop culture, and then ten pages of them setting up camp - seven of which were preoccupied with the girls stripping down and skinny-dipping.

How much of that turned out to be essential to the story? None. Zero. Zilch. The only point that had any significance was that Prude Girl hadn't yet slept with Nice Guy and that neither of them were sure it was a good idea to do it on this trip. Naturally Slutty Girl and Tool Guy were advocating this hookup, while Soon-to-be-Topless Girl and Dead Guy #1 (spoiler alert) don't understand why they just didn't do it in the Jeep on the way out to the woods.

I know... I'm bored too. Just imagine twenty pages of this drivel.

Anyway, my point is that the movie could have just as easily started with Dead Guy #1's death rather than Anonymous Cannon Fodder's death and the impact on the script would have been zero, save for the fact that it would now be twenty pages shorter.

So take this lesson. Act One's are not the place to kill time. The story starts on p. 1 - not on p. 30

Lessons from Wes Craven & Kevin Williamson's Scream

When it comes to slasher films, I only have a few favorites. I've seem dozens of them and I don't boycott the genre by any means (I save that venom for torture porn and Saw ripoffs. If you like that shit, don't try to defend it. I don't want to hear it.), but there are many, many more bad slasher films than good ones. Among the best, is 1996's Scream, written by Kevin Williamson, and directed by horror legend Wes Craven - whose A Nightmare on Elm Street is also on my "favorite slasher movies" list.

Scream pretty much single-handedly revived the teen horror genres after years when it was well out of favor. For the first time in a long time, horror was smart, scary and funny again. If it wasn't for that resurgence, you have to wonder what sort of movies the teen stars of the WB and CW would have ended up making during their hiatuses. I've read a lot of bad horror scripts that were trying to be like Scream, but few of them seem to have really deconstructed the film and made note of what really made it work. Here's what Scream really gets right:

A killer opening sequence: Granted, Craven's directing has a lot to do with this, and having a director that skilled isn't something a writer can always count on. Putting that aside, there's a lot here that's on target. A lot of horror scripts start with a three or four page kill scene that doesn't do much beyond setting up a victim and killing them off immediately. It's usually treated as a disposable scene that's just there to grab the audience and then give the writer license to spend the following 25-30 pages slowly killing time until the killer jumps out of the shadows and guts the next lowest billed character (who nine times out of ten will be the female character whom the script introduces at least a full two lines after her breasts.)

Scream's opening is a bit longer than that, and it doesn't just give us a victim and a killer. It has them interact via phone and we see the killer's MO established with clever dialogue. He asks his victims to name their favorite scary movie, setting an important tone for the killer and the movie in general - this is a movie about people who have actually seen scary movies and know all the conventions and cliches. It's a way of announcing to the audience "This isn't a film that's going to just cynically recycle the cliches - it's gonna subvert them!" (Now, whether this sort of meta humor is always a good thing is probably a topic for another column.)

As many, many reviews have been written about Scream's self-aware tone, I won't waste much more time on it. My point is that the opening sequence isn't a throwaway kill. It's crucial to the fabric of the movie beyond being a scene that shows a killer is out there.

Sharp dialogue - Here's where you probably either love Williamson or hate him. I'm firmly in the former category. The characters - especially Jamie Kennedy's Randy - are constantly referencing movies, both in terms of the horror setting and in other scenes. (In one example, a character laments that his relationship with his girlfriend is like a horror movie "edited for television" - all the good parts have come out. Every character has a distinct voice. A Randy line doesn't sound like a Billy line. Nor does a Sydney line sound like a Tatum line. I've suffered through many a horror script where Jack's lines seemed interchangeable with Ryan's, or even Jennifer's. I've also read a lot of scripts that try to imitate the Williamson (or Joss Whedon) penchant for pop culture references and you know what? Every character talks exactly the same. It's not enough to make your characters witty - they need to be distinctively witty.

(Now, sometimes the actors will make this harder for you. I remember loving Scream's dialogue, but feeling that some of Williamson's dialogue in early Dawson's Creek sounded rather clunky. Revisiting Scream post-Dawson's actually left me feeling that there wasn't THAT much difference in the dialogue, stylistically. If you listen to some of the lines in Scream, you can clearly pick up on cadences and rhythms that turn up on the TV series. So why does Dawson's sound more forced? To be blunt, the actors seem a lot less comfortable with it - especially early on. Neve Campbell and company took Williamson's words and were able to deliver them organically. In contrast, James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes appeared to have memorized their dialogue phonetically at times.)

Great use of red herrings - Scream is a solid example of using the audiences expectations against them. From the moment it's clear that this is a whodunit, the audience is naturally going to try to outguess the film. Thus, Williamson is smart enough to not just thrown in red herrings, but use those as red herrings for further red herrings.

For example, boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is virtually the only suspect the film points a finger at early on. Thus Mr. Smarter-Than-Everyone-Else Moviegoer is going to say, "They want me to think he's the killer, but since it's still the first half-hour of the movie, he's clearly not going to turn out to be the killer. It would be too obvious... unless that's what they want me to think. So, when Billy is arrested and then seemingly cleared, it can't be taken at face value... unless they want us to think that he's still the most likely suspect so that we won't notice it's someone else...."

That was basically my internal monologue during the entire film the first time I saw it, "It's so obvious that it can't be true, unless they're counting on me NOT to suspect the most obvious suspect!"

And don't even get me started on the debate about which glass had the iocane powder....

Anyway, I kept vacillating about the killer's identity - still casting a suspicious eye towards Billy right up until the point he got gutted in the bedroom. At that point, the audience's reaction is probably something along the lines of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!" as they try to outguess the movie again. Even later, when Billy turned up still alive, I remember not suspecting him. After all, we saw him and the killer at the same time, right? Which leads to...

Using the audience's knowledge of the genre against them - I'm sure there are obscure counterexamples, but I can't recall a slasher film with two killers working together. Williamson knew that the audience would assume that there's only one killer to be unmasked, and because the script doesn't tip it's hand on this until the very end, certain characters seem to be accounted for at the same time the killer is shown. We're used to getting one psycho with one convoluted motivation - so most viewers were likely totally blindsided when the ending hinged on two killers working in concert with each other.

I'm not even sure if this counts as misdirection so much as it is knowing how the audience is going to interpret the unspoken clues. The best mysteries hide their solutions in plain sight. They rely not so much on deception as the audience putting themselves and their logic in a box. In this case, the "box" is "There is only one killer." We were never told this - the movie just gambled we'd assume it. Thus, Craven and Williamson haven't deceived us so much as WE have deceived ourselves. That's a lot more subtle than simply cheating by lying to the audience about what they were shown, and that's the sort of twist that keeps people talking. (See also The Sixth Sense.) A weak mystery plays out exactly how you'd expect, in the precise manner you'd expect.

So if you have never seen Scream, slip it into your movie marathons this weekend. You won't be disappointed. Yeah, I kinda blew the ending for you, but there's more than enough to keep you entertained even with that.

Plus after that, you can watch Scream 2 completely fresh. (Scream 3 isn't as strong a script, in part because Williamson is replaced by Ehren Kruger. I'd love to know what Williamson's original plan for the trilogy closer was.)