It’s Horror Month here at Scriptshadow. Sometimes the horror is in a finely crafted scary script. Sometimes it’s in my harsh analysis. And sometimes it’s in how badly a script is written. Whichever way you twist it, we’re getting our horror fix.
I wanted to focus today’s article on what writing tool gives you the most bang for you buck in the horror genre. Does anyone know? Does anyone want to venture a guess? Are there any brave souls who want to give their answer in the comment section before they read on then NOT EDIT their answer? Go ahead. We’ll only kind of make fun of you.
Before we get to this most important of horror screenwriting tools, let’s talk about a few of the other big ones. First, you want to put your hero in a situation that’s hard to get out of. The harder it is to get out of, the better. Take one of my favorite horror films, The Others. Our characters are stuck inside a haunted house but unfortunately they can’t leave because the two children suffer from a rare disease whereby they can’t be exposed to the sun.
Or, if you want to go with a more straight-forward example – someone’s stuck on an island, like spec screenplays, Beast, and Don’t Go in the Water, both of which sold.
This issue was my big beef with IT 2 compared to IT 1. In IT 1, they were kids. They were stuck in this town whether they liked it or not. In IT 2, they could drive away whenever they wanted with only the vague threat of “something bad happening” if they did. The more impossible the situation is to get out of, the more fear we’ll have for your characters. So make sure you have that plot point squared away.
Next, the more effort you put into your characters, the more you get out of them. Horror is a genre where if you come up with a clever premise (It Follows) or execute a basic premise strongly (The Conjuring), you don’t need to create great characters. As long as audiences are scared, they’ll feel like they got their money’s worth. But if you want to write a horror script that has a way better chance of getting noticed, put more effort into your characters.
Let me explain why this is. Say you read a news article about a crazy killer who captured and tortured people on some remote hiking path in Washington. You might find that story disturbing but, ultimately, forget about it next week. Now let’s say you personally knew one of the victims of this man. That story becomes a whole different ball of wax. It’s much more intense. It’s much more real. The thoughts of what happened to your friend won’t ever go away.
That’s what you’re trying to do as a writer. You’re trying to create characters who people empathize and sympathize with to such an extreme that it feels like someone they know. That means making us like them in an early scene. It means giving them flaws and fears and insecurities that people can relate to. It means creating unresolved conflict between them and the other characters which we can also relate to. It means giving us tons of insight into what makes this person unique so as to create a persona that’s original and therefore REAL.
Think of your characters as a meter. The more you fill the meter up, the more we care about them. Full meters pay huge dividends later on when that character is in trouble because now we want them to live just as much as we’d want a friend to live. One of the reasons I only kind of liked yesterday’s script was that I never felt connected to any of the characters, particularly because they were such downers. They were all negative. There was nothing about them to like. And as much crap as screenwriting teachers get for harping on character likability? It pays major dividends when you do it well.
Moving on, let’s talk about the second most important screenwriting tool in the horror shed, and that would be BUILDING A SENSE OF DREAD – both in the movie, and in individual scenes. Most beginner horror writers think that the best scares are jump scares. But jump scares are empty. The more important tool you should be implementing is the BUILD UP. You want to put your character in a perilous situation and then build towards the climax of that situation.
A basic example of this would be to put a child at the end of a long hallway in a scary house. At the end of that hallway are the stairs down to the front door, his escape. But should even a single deranged killer/ghost/monster/zombie hear him, they could pop out of one of the hallway doors and R.I.P. this poor little nitwit who should’ve known better than to enter a scary house in the first place. You could build an entire five minute scene around this scenario, him tie-toeing down the hallway slowly, trying not to make any noise.
Or, for a real movie example, check out Midsommar. An entire 10 minute scene revolves around everyone gathering together, waiting for two older characters to slowwwwwly make their way up to the cliff to speak, only for them to finally jump to their deaths. This scene doesn’t work nearly as well without the build. The build is the fun. It’s what creates anticipation in the audience making them curious for the scene’s conclusion.
And that finally brings us to the most important tool in horror. Has anybody figured it out yet? It’s… drumroll please…………. Duhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduhduh………. DRAMATIC IRONY! Dramatic irony is when we, the audience, know something the protagonist does not. And while you should be using dramatic irony in every genre, the reason it works so well in horror is because the best dramatic irony is the kind where we know our heroes are in danger but they do not.
Dramatic Irony was used extensively in yesterday’s script, River. We start the movie off seeing this man kill a fisherman. However, the children who then come up to grieve their father’s death don’t know he was killed. They were told it was an accident. So the second they show up, we see a POV of someone watching them from the woods. And now we know they’re screwed. I believe the writer waited an entire 20 pages before he revealed to the characters that someone was after them. But that 20 pages is still entertaining because we the audience were worried the whole time that they were being hunted and didn’t know it.
You can use dramatic irony at ANY point in the screenplay. It doesn’t just have to be in the setup. Silence of the Lambs famously uses it in its final scene where Clarice enters Buffalo Bill’s house but has no idea he’s Buffalo Bill. WE DO. But she doesn’t. And that’s what makes the scene so riveting.
So if you’re ever at a loss for a good horror scene, throw one of these in your script. They’re almost guaranteed to work. Not only is it an extremely simple way to draw the audience in, but it allows you to cover lots of pages since these scenarios are most effective when they’re drawn out.
Bonus Horror Month Question: What’s the scariest scene you’ve seen in the last couple of years and what was it specifically about the writing that made it so effective?
