The term “scary movie” is used very loosely. Typically, it refers to all films of the horror genre in general, which may or may not have lots of gore and attempted jumps but aren’t necessarily “scary.” It might sound like I’m making myself out to be “a  tough guy who can’t get scared by puny horror movies,” but I’ll be honest with you, I’m a pansy when it comes to scary movies. When something truly scares me, I’ll lose sleep over it, but it takes more than just a couple of scares to get me to that point.  When the entire film makes me fear what will happen next, even if it only has a couple of “jumps,” that is when the film has really gotten to my head!

With that in mind, I decided to compile a list of rules or guidelines for horror screenwriters to consider when working on a project. These are based off things I want to see as an audience member. Typically, I want to a movie that is not only scary, it has to be advertised with a legit warning stating “This film is not for the weak of heart and can lead to heart attacks!” Here is how I think you can deliver such a movie!

Make It Relatable! Usually the scariest situations are the ones that happen in the most mundane of situations. Taking a character and putting them out in the middle of nowhere might be scary, but it’s even scarier when it happens right outside your door! For example, there are a lot of rural areas and beat up roads near where I live, but when I stop at the gas stations at night, they are still franchise owned gas stations like Shell and Speedway. While the third shift attendant might be weird, they aren’t Deliverance weird! So, it’s sometimes hard to relate to that particular cliche, especially since it’s overused in the horror genre.

The Characters Have to be Smart! If it’s one thing I’m tired of seeing in horror movies, it’s dumb teenage party characters. It’s not scary when a drunk kid who can’t walk in a straight line is killed by a machete wielding maniac. Anybody could sneak up on that kid!

I remember a scene in The Hills Have Eyes II where the characters even knew they were being picked off one by one and yet one of them still went off by themselves to urinate and gets killed. Is privacy really that major of an issue when evil, inbred mutants are out to kill you? The thing is, in most horror movies, the only way the killer can get you is if you go off by yourself. Five people can easily take one guy, but if one killer could effortlessly get you even in a group, that’s even scarier. The bad guy needs to be smarter than the good guys, but the good guys need some credibility as well. They need to come across as natural people, not the deliverers of the R rated content.

Gore is Gross, Not Scary! There is a common belief in the horror community that seeing someone force-fed their intestines is scary. It’s disgusting! It’s shocking! It’s also over the top, pointless, and unbelievable! I’m not talking just about blood. I personally don’t consider the use of blood as gore. It’s when an internal organ becomes an external organ when gore becomes a factor. Gore can be used to make the situation seem grim, but there has to be more than gore. If something completely awful happens to a character and they don’t bleed, that makes it unbelievable, but when the camera lingers on the open guts, it becomes overkill.

Most horror movies are all about the excessive use of sex, drugs, and gore. The funny thing is they are rarely used logically! Probably one of the dumbest, and most unbelievable kills I’ve seen is when Michael Myers effortlessly chopped a girls head off with a kitchen knife in Halloween Resurrection. I’m not an expert, nor do I hope to be, but I do believe it takes a lot more work to clear a head off with a simple kitchen knife. One that is even dumber is when Jason literally punched a guys head off in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhatten.

Use Psychology! A little bit of advice in storytelling, the main character is usually a fictional vessel that the audience can relate to when watching a movie. The audience needs to feel like they are there with the characters or else they probably aren’t going to take anything from it. Going back to relatability, the audience needs to be playing a fear dance in their minds. They need to be worrying about what is going to happen next, whether or not their favorite characters are going to get axed, what possible places the next scare is going to occur, and how they are going to get to some sleep at the end of the night.

Typically, this utilizes both conscious and subconscious methods, especially the latter! If you are a horror screenwriter/filmmaker, you need to understand that the audience has already seen a hundred scary movies. They may not be consciously aware of the tricks, but they will know when something is going to happen. This goes as far as shot construction. In a scene where a “jump” happens, there is usually that one shot that is a dead giveaway that something is about to pop out. In fact, you can usually countdown to when it happens! So what is the best way to solve that problem? Make every shot in that scene look as if something is going to pop out at you! That’s how you mess with somebody’s head!

Make it Relentless and Play With the Formula! This is one of the problems I had with Paranormal Activity. Having one “jump” every 5 to 10 minutes is not good enough. As I mentioned in the review for that movie, it’s a general rule of thumb that if there is a time that the individual audience member needs to feel safe, it needs to be within the first 10 minutes.

At some point, usually after the first or second scare, a line needs to be drawn and once crossed, scares need to rack up!  Each scare should be worse than the previous one, and the film needs to be constantly building up, getting scarier and scarier and scarier, with more and more things happening as time progresses. Easier said then done. Going back to psychology, people probably know what is going to happen, which is why you have to change the formula on them,  and you have to keep doing so over and over again. Remember those potential “all scare” shots I was talking about? Well, the next time you use it, try going back to the obvious shot and then placing the scare in the least obvious, or doing the “all four possible scare shots” but then not delivering one at that particular moment, but that will only work when you are constantly delivering the scares.

A lot of movies stick to either “soft scares,” like things appearing in the peripheral portion of the background,  and “loud scares,” which are scares that are up front and center and usually announced by a loud noisy music cue. Try constantly using both “soft” and “loud” scares and try to stick as much content as you possibly can into the action of the story without making the film far too obnoxious for the audience’s tastes.

So there you have it! These aren’t rules as much as they are guidelines, but I think they are important things to consider if you are in fact looking to make a scary movie.

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