Alright, so last night I thought I’d celebrate “Aasif” getting published by watching a scary movie (if you have no idea what I just said, please head to the last post). What movie did I watch? Candyman, a horror film involving a guy with a hook who appears when you call his name Bloody Mary-style. Did I enjoy it? Not really; there were so many things just wrong with it. This has led me to this post, where I will go over things from the point-of-views of both a fan of horror and a writer of horror and say what I think you should do when you’re making a horror film.
So, for those readers not really interested in horror, so very sorry that this post isn’t aimed at your interests. For those of you who are fans of horror, please take notes and let me know if I missed anything, so that i can do a follow-up post if necessary. Alright, on we go. Here’s some things you should avoid if you’re making a horror film:
1. Don’t go crazy on the sequels: Yes, I know I’ve already had time to complain about the nauseating amount of sequels out there these days, but horror movies are the worst offenders, and as the number of the films gets higher, the quality of the films get lower, which is why most of these films end up becoming direct-to-DVD after a while. Seriously, after a few films, you gotta know when to stop. After all, movies aren’t like novels; you can only pack so much into an hour-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hour show, especially if you’re doing a slasher, where it’s heavily reliant on blood and guts to scare your audience and less about character development.
2. Make it believable: I once read an interview in which a fantasy writer was asked what makes a good setting. His answer (and I’m paraphrasing a bit): “You have to make it believable. You can’t write a story and say, ‘I’m going to have a world where everyone has guns but nobody uses them’. It just doesn’t make sense.” The same can be said of just about anything in storytelling: make it believable. That’s what’ll keep people interested in your work. Otherwise you’ll have a lousy time at the box office. A good example of this is Priest, which came out last year if I remember right. The problem was, if your species is being eradicated by a bunch of monsters, you wouldn’t put the monsters on reservations, would you? I don’t think so, and that’s why the movie failed.
Another example is the movie Leprechaun, whose titular character was too comical to be scary (and I still have no idea why there was five sequels). That was a major reason why that movie was panned by critics. And Candyman also had some trouble in the scary villain department. Our killer ghost looks like a well-dressed African-American man in nice clothes, so even with the hook on his arm he doesn’t seem all that intimidating. It’s only until you see what’s underneath his clothes that you start to get why he’s a monster, but you’re still not scared. Honestly, would it have killed the filmmakers to give him some scary contact lenses to accentuate his ghostliness? Even better, make his face swollen and covered in honey, because after all he died by bee sting.
3. Motive: This goes back to the “make it believable” thing, and was something I thought a lot about while watching Candyman last night. Our villain seems preoccupied with making sure people fear him. Why? That’s not explained very well. I I were the ghost of a man who was murdered by racists who cut off my arm and caused a hive of bees to attack me, I’d be more into getting revenge…on anyone I can get my hands on. Yet Candyman still wants people to recognize him. Okay, but what’s the purpose of that?
Point of the story is, make sure you have a motive that people can understand, and if you don’t, explain it, or do what Prometheus did and make it so that even if you don’t know the motive, it doesn’t matter, there’s other stuff going on right now.
4. Know what your audience has come to see: This was my biggest problem with the remake of Friday the 13th. We all went to that film to see Jason tear up the screen anew. What we got was more like a bunch of hypersexualized co-eds parading around naked while a serial killer watched and picked them off every few minutes. Yes, the Friday the 13th films are famous for their sexiness, but that’s supposed to be an added bonus, not the main attraction. What we come for is to get scared. If the filmmakers had focused more on building tension and making the deaths more dramatic and less time on filming bare-breasted girls, I think we’d hear me rant less on this film.
5. Recycling is bad: Boy, that sounds bad out of context. However it’s important to keep coming up with new stuff. You can’t expect people to be satisfied with the old chase-and-kill scenario twelve times in each film. You’ve got to make each film unique so that the moviegoers can gush about an individual scene afterwards. Take Scream 2 for example: there was that moment where Sidney and her best friend were trapped in a police car with an unconscious Ghostface and the only way out was to crawl over him. That scene scared the heck out of me! That’s why the second film in that series was better than the first. However, the filmmakers didn’t seem to do that four films 3 and 4, and that’s why I don’t like those films.
So don’t recycle. And if you have to, try to make it look like it’s not.
6. It’s not about the kill, it’s how you film it: Too many times have I seen a character attacked and murdered and not been freaked. Why? Because the lead-up to it and the way it was filmed wasn’t terrifying in the least! There are brilliant scenes in movies like Final Destination and The Woman in Black that you didn’t know was going to happen until it happened, and that’s what made them scary. This can also be applied to just building up for a small scare, such as in the Paranormal Activity films. If you study those films and see what they did, you can scare so much more easily.
Otherwise, you may make a film like some others I know where everybody’s like, “Oh, she’s gonna get it, it’s coming soon…she’s dead. Oh well.”
That’s all I have for now. Got any other ideas? Let me know, I’ll write another post on this subject.
Rami Ungar The Writer 