Atomic Nerds

In the spirit of an earlier post on what makes comic book movies successful versus what makes them fail, and the season in general: how to make a horror movie work. (Or fail.)

1. Use characters that are relatable. Contrary to the belief of many writers and studio executives, making the characters they intend you to care most about white twenty-something virgins does not actually make them all that relatable. Audiences will relate better to someone of a different gender, class, or race if they act like normal humans would in the situation you intend to put them in; fear of being eaten by monsters is amazingly easy to empathize with across cultural lines as long as the viewers are able to recognize something of themselves in the characters. Asshole frat kids who drive out to $threateningly rural place for ostensibly recreational reasons and react to being picked off one by one by splitting up individually to shine a flashlight on the threat are not relatable. Families who react to being brutally threatened by supernatural beings by moving somewhere apparently safer are. For that matter, real asshole frat kids looking for a place to drink and have sex are far more likely to stay in the city than decamp to the woods in West Virginia; you can’t make a liquor run at oh dark thirty at Throatcutter Lake. The characters don’t need to be perfect or even be heroic, they just need to be reasonably rational and have reasonably believable emotional reactions. Making us spend twenty minutes watching them bitch at each other first is not a substitute for these things.

2. Don’t cheat your audience with cheap or gotcha scares. Having the audience jump three feet out of their seats because a squirrel jumped onto the back deck to hysterical soundtrack reaction may goose their adrenals but it only annoys them in the end; having them twitch because a barely glimpsed demonic entity just jogged up the stairs in the background, behind the main character, will raise their tension levels and keep them there. You can get an amazing amount of mileage out of this without needing to actually do much, let alone spend much on effects- just make sure that anything meant to startle the audience is actually something worth being alarmed about.

3. No budget? No problem. Spend what you have on uknown but talented actors and let them, and your script, be the workhorses. Make everything just a little bit off and leave plenty of loose ends to tug at scattered around, and work whatever setting you have available, and you shouldn’t need much of anything in the way of effects. The original Wicker Man is a monument to this principle. There are all sorts of reasons the remake was no improvement despite a much bigger budget.

4. Do not have a twist ending simply for the sake of having a twist ending. If you’re going to do a twist successfully, the movie needs to be essentially two entirely different films, scene by scene, depending on whether you know what’s going on yet or not. If the movie doesn’t read completely differently, in both the acting and the writing, before and after the revelation, then you have failed and should never have tried for it in the first place. Lots of good horror movies are perfectly good with no twists whatsoever, and the ones that have them depend on them heavily to work their spook. A failed twist will do nothing other than piss off your audience. See Haunted or Shutter Island for examples of how to do twists properly.

5. Throw the sorting algorithm of mortality out the window, then throw a can of gas and a match out after it. This is related to point one, because writers and studios have a tendency to kill characters off in rough order of how much they think their presumed young, white, and male audience member will either feel they want to have sex with them, or simply how well they identify with them. Audiences over the age of twelve have all caught on and it creates just as much suspense as waiting for rain in the Amazon. If you plan to mow down large portions of your cast, let who is likely to live and who is not be completely unpredictable; your killer has no reason to care about the race or sexuality of your characters and neither should you. Killing off characters in order of likability may have some sense of justice satisfied, but it is not scary; having people die regardless of how likable or assholish they are is.

6. Having people be helpless because the situation they are in is completely over their heads is scary. Having people be helpless because they are complete morons is very, very boring.

7. You have two endpoints of Killer Motivation Effectiveness: completely motiveless (complete monster, which is in itself frightening because it’s unreasoning and completely unpredictable), and elaborate development and motivation. Midpoints, in which the killer kills for superficial or ad-hoc reasons, are vastly less effective than either of these extremes. If you have the time to spend on motivation and the villain/monster is the most interesting feature of the movie, do, otherwise treat the monster as a force of nature rather than a character.

8. Using foreign motifs can be very creepy if your audience is totally unfamiliar with them. Using foreign stereotypes that the audience is very familiar with is much more likely to be awful rather than effective. Either may amuse the living hell out of the culture you borrow from.

9. Related to point 2, your soundtrack can only enhance whatever mood you’ve already created, not create it by itself. If your soundtrack is having hysterics because some leaves are blowing in the dark but nothing else is really happening, the effect is dissonant in the confusing way, not the creepy way.

10. In order for your audience to buy what you’re selling, you need actors who can actually sell it. One character actor who can look believably terrified and cover a range of fear-related emotions is worth ten actors whose primary skill is being good-looking and whose emotive range can be distilled to vacant, confused, angry, orgasm, and scream.

11. The buttons that humans have usually exist for good but mundane reasons. We’re freaked out by dolls and puppets and masks and distortions to the face because we’re programmed to carefully search faces, and abnormal patterns ring atavistic alarm bells. The dark, dense forests, caves, and cramped quarters are frightening because we’re visual animals and not being able to see where we’re going or what might be coming is likewise intrinsically scary. We’re freaked out by the possibility of injuries to the eyes and hands because those are our two primary points of contact with the world. Adult-like children and child-like adults are likewise inversions of very old biological and cultural scripts. You can get a lot of extra mileage out of your scary thing by first asking why it should scare anyone, and then if you have some good reasons, pushing those buttons as hard as you can.

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