Three More Horror Films for Screenwriters’ Halloween
It’s easy enough to take potshots at modern would-be “hommage” horror films.
The reason for this is because they don’t offer anything new. They actually just give us the same concept as something else: a bunch of young people in a remote farmhouse stalked by a demented killer; a book made of human skin from which people simply insist on reading out loud; a killer with a dumb-looking mask stabbing horny teenagers; etc., etc.
The best of these, e.g. Scream–a metatextual classic among horror films for screenwriters–can give us a wink-wink, nudge-nudge read of the film’s obviousness. The worst of them try to plaster over the cracks with eye-roll psychology and “oh, she plays the old woman, too!” latex shenanigans.
Honestly, however, there’s little point in horror unless there’s something clever and fresh about the concept: a dead child-killer stalks people in their dreams; chanting in front of the mirror really does bring the Candyman; white-bread progressives might hew closer to their oppressive roots than they let on.
The difficulty is that after the pitch we still need a decent story. We have to keep people interested and not just play the same games over and over. The movies that really stick with us are the ones where the structure of the writing–not just the concept–stand out. As such, good horror films for screenwriters aren’t actually as easy to come by as you might imagine.
That said, there have been few of these in recent history, so let’s pick three examples to examine what makes these films interesting from a screenwriter’s perspective.
(Hat tip to my esteemed colleague Charlotte Saunter of Bloody Good Time Films for suggesting Hereditary and A Quiet Place.)
Hereditary (2018) d.,w., Ari Aster
Ari Aster is one of those filmmakers whom I appreciate because he’s so unashamedly imperfect.
None of his stories necessarily mesh “properly” by writing standards, and there are often more loose ends than I’d like in his films. Crucially, however, I have never had the sense want to rewrite his films to be more tight or specific.
(Given that rewriting in my head is basically a reflex action at this point, this is saying something.)
In short, Aster has something to say and he’s not afraid to say it in his way–even if there is the occasional stumble along the way. There was a long period in the cold where filmmakers–at least outside the cheapest indies–were hardly willing to take such risks in story structure and plotting, so Aster (along with contemporaries such as David Robert Mitchell) deserve credit for breathing life back into film writing, one cat left dangling at a time.
So what is interesting about Hereditary that we can take away?
First, follow the protagonists’ arcs: toward the beginning of the film, Annie is generally the center of attention, although we get scenes from the perspective of Peter, Charlie, and even a couple for Steve.
This is enough to think the film might be a three-hander, where we get full stories for Annie, Peter, and Charlie, until Charlie’s arc is (ahem) severed at the Act II break. From this, things go a bit strange.
From this point onward, Peter becomes more prominent–to the point where we get the impression he and Annie are struggling with each other to stay in the audience’s eye, or perhaps who will first succumb to the would-be family curse. This continues until Steve’s death in the middle of the third act, after which Annie’s possession renders her essentially non-agentic.
For the final 15 minutes of the film, then, we have only Peter as the protagonist. However, by this point, the wheels are in motion and Peter doesn’t really have any say in what’s going on. Essentially, by this point, everything is preordained.
This is one of those cases where you could make the argument that shifting, and ultimately collapsing, narrative arc is suggestive of the family’s collapse. The fact that Peter has no control by the point that he is the sole protagonist is a reflection of the fact that the happenings are, of course, hereditary–and thereby beyond agentic control.
I often find such arguments specious; that is, more Theory pocket pool, self-gratifying by pointing out what is more often than not simply poor, lazy, or slipshod writing.
Nevertheless, Eddington’s structure works similarly to bolster its core message so we have multiple data points to suggest intentional behavior on Aster’s part. Furthermore, I’ve learned enough about Aster’s thought process through interviews to realize he actually does consider things on this level. So in this case, I will confidently credit him with an intelligent choice.
The question then becomes: can you change how the audience relates to the protagonist, or even which protagonist the audience relates to, to mirror the obvious on-screen effect?
That is, the family falls apart, experiences internecine conflicts, and ultimately loses control to the coven–but can that be underscored by the audience losing control of its avatar within the film, or watching two potential avatars face off as in the dinner table scene?
Second, Hereditary is viciously human at the expense of having a tidy story.
This is a throughline in much of Aster’s work: life is not always easy or tidy, and out motivations are not always clear, least of all to ourselves. To show difficult-to-justify behavior, however, is another thing entirely.
Writers tend to be so afraid of producers’ or script readers’ probing questions that everything needs to be tidy and tie together and everyone needs to have a rational reason for her behavior. People need to behave in a way that “makes sense.”
News flash: Homo sapiens–”wise man”–is a misnomer. Wisdom, much less rationality, is hardly in great supply among the hairless ape contingent. That is, much to the chagrin of economists worldwide, the human being is not a rational actor.
Aster, however, groks that. He approaches this in two major ways.
First, sometimes we do shit because that seems like the thing to do at the moment. Take one major example: stoned out of your gourd and don’t want to face your parents to tell them that your sister’s headless corpse is staining the back seat of the Volvo? Probably not worth waking everyone up over. Mom will figure it out in the morning.
It’s not that it’s the best plot device–or really adds anything to the story except a heavy dose of fucked-upness–but it’s precisely what a stoned teenager would do.
Second, note foreshadowing that appears heavy-handed, yet rings untrue from a practical perspective. For example, the ever-missing epi pen despite Charlie’s severe allergy. It is mentioned as early as the first scene, but unless a family is thoroughly useless at life–which is often true in reality, but rarely in films–then this sort of thing doesn’t happen.
Cue also Peter’s interest in staring at the girl in his class while the teacher discusses Heracles’ fatal flaw of “refusing to look at all the signs being handed to him.” Again, this seems a bit much, but perhaps all of these fails add up to–as is a common interpretation of the film–a situation where the family ignores obvious signs because it’s sleepwalking (like Annie) into its own destruction. To wit, such manipulations of plant and payoff only seem unrealistic until you understand the broader arc of the family’s capture by Paimon.
Both of these types of unreality, or perhaps hyperreality, occur enough that it’s fair to assume that Aster knew what he was doing. Consider how you, too, can make use of these techniques:
>Where is a situation that you can apply realistic behavior, even if it doesn’t fit cleanly into the plot, to amp up the film’s intensity?
>How can you manipulate a tired dramatic structure like plant and payoff to make a subtler point about your dramatic arc?
The third and final point I want to make here about Hereditary is relatively simple, and one we discussed before with respect to An American Werewolf in London: tidy exposition.
Exposition is usually an easy way to separate the good writer from the bad. Any time you roll your eyes because someone’s telling you what you need to know, you’re taken out of the story. That’s the bad way to do it, if not clear.
However, sometimes you’re told exactly what you need to know but it’s in a way that seems perfectly attuned to the story.
A perfect example is the conceit of the group meeting that Annie attends. When she tells the story of her family, it basically sounds like a difficult family with a hefty dose of mental illness running through it.
Be that as it may, what we don’t realize until later, however, is that Annie’s story isn’t just about mental illness: her brother complaining that the mother was “trying to put people inside him” just as likely means she was actually doing this: what else is trying to find a host for Paimon but trying to put someone inside someone else?
The beautiful thing about this is that Annie is telling the story literally, but it sounds so bonkers on the surface that, at least at this point in the film, we assume that she’s merely describing her brother’s delusional ravings.
For your own work, consider how you can spell something out in obvious, glaring detail yet not let the film’s narrative catch up with that until later; that is, for the moment, it just seems like the ravings of a mad person.
Hereditary has definitely earned its place in the modern horror canon for good reason. I have the odd reservation about the film, but to be fair, I probably have more fundamental issues with The Exorcist, so that’s saying something.
NB One rather odd feature of Hereditary is somewhat extradiegetic: my friend who actually knows his Goetia rather well claims Paimon is fairly chill, at least as far as disembodied demons go. Apparently Paimon is actually “a really nice guy.” So interesting choice on Aster’s part, but there you go.
A Quiet Place (2018), d. John Krasinski, w. Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, Krasinski
This film is a bit simpler to deal with simply by virtue of the fact that the film itself is a bit simpler.
It’s well put together and its intense scenes have a substantial emotional impact. The creation of the horror environment is substantially good enough to plaster over a few cracks in terms of minor suspension of disbelief–we can take the alien threat for granted, but it’s the little things that nag, like “what a clean nail that is poking out of the stair” or “I just had a baby with its cord cut and a diaper put on after 20 minutes of labor.”
That’s not to mock. I quite like this film and the breath-hold intensity of individual scenes routinely outstrips those for Hereditary. Let’s talk about what makes this film work.
First, it allows the audience to participate in the horror.
The idea that something basic, normal, and essentially unavoidable–making sound–is deadly is a new one. The whole time watching the film I find myself holding my breath, putting my glass down gently, playing along with the injunction not to make a sound. Even getting up after the credits roll, the viewer wants to be as silent as possible.
In short, we buy in to the premise because it’s something unavoidable. If the idea was “the aliens will eat you if you repeatedly punch yourself in the face,” then we’d have fewer problems because most people don’t tend to do that.
But when it’s something that you do without even thinking about it, it becomes a new level of threat.
So think about what you can do in your own film to 1) make the problem unavoidable and linked to something we do naturally, unthinkingly, or have little conscious control over, and 2) link it to something that makes the audience play along during the film.
Second, while this film and Hereditary can both be read as family dramas with a supernatural twist, A Quiet Place does more to filter the inciting incident–the accidental death of the younger son–through the supernatural threat. The boy’s death is our first glimpse of a catastrophic failure to obey the story rules, and the echoes of this trauma ring throughout the remainder of the film.
Much like The Babadook, the supernatural aspect essentially externalizes the trauma within the family in a way that is merely incidental in Hereditary. Normally, such dramas have little staying power, even when they’re well made. When the continued survival of the family literally (not figuratively) hinges on its ability to process the trauma, the audience is fully engaged.
Ordinary People this is not.
*Having another child at this point seems like a terrible fucking idea in numerous ways. Why?
Third, run the objective and subjective stories on two different tracks.
While the two obviously must be related–after all, it’s a little bit silly to propose character change without that having at least something to do with the outside plot–there’s an art to making the changes as tangentially as possible while still core to the idea of the terror.
In the case of A Quiet Place, this works to some degree, but it could definitely be improved. Perhaps it’s up to you to do it better. Basically, we have the father and the daughter* clashing because of her remorse over the death of her youngest brother. This is compounded by the fact that she perceives her father’s distance as him blaming her for the brother’s death.
This could be painted a lot better as time goes on; we learn it all through expository conversations between Regan and her surviving brother, Marcus, plus the one spoken conversation between Lee and Marcus at the waterfall. There’s very little shown, not told, indication of this relationship problem. That seems ironic given the film’s premise, but so be it.
Even if it’s done in a clunky and cack-handed way, the film at least creates an appropriate structure, calling back the concern multiple times during the film. It is better than some vague, half-assed slasheroo that decides to shoehorn some sort of totally unrelated emotional subplot in just to claim it’s “elevated.”
(Cf. the latest Evil Dead reboot. Among the litany of problems I have with this film, having a main character find out she’s pregnant at the beginning of the film doesn’t make the film better if you basically never reference it again. And how does killing a bunch of undead make one less terrified of single parenthood?)
The key thing to note here is that the brother’s death is related to the crisis, but the daughter taking on the guilt is not, at least not directly. What you’re seeing is a problem that is created at the beginning of the film, not a “ghost” that haunts the family from some time before the film begins (again, Ordinary People). She carries this burden throughout the film, its resolution only coming at the climax.
So consider what you can do to make your film blend the emotional and the practical–the subjective and objective story–and how you can pay this resolution off by the climax. Bonus points if it’s precisely at the climax.
Horror is almost always efficient and self-contained**; it doesn’t have time for messy backstory and exposition. If you want people to get the feelies, do your best to keep that shit within the runtime.
Talk to Me (2022), d. Danny and Michael Philippou, w. Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson
Outside the very competent and often stomach-turning scares and directorial flare of Talk to Me sits a very competent screenplay. In certain ways, particularly emotionally, it might actually bite off more than it’s able to chew. Nevertheless, it’s a fine example of competent, enjoyable, and gleefully disturbing modern horror.
First, we don’t need to ask any questions because nobody else really knows what’s going on with the embalmed hand or where it comes from. All we know, and all that really matters, is the rules of the party game.
(Contrast how efficient this is with the Philippous’ second effort, Bring Her Back. In that case the supernatural part is delivered in a way that makes us want to know more, but it’s never delivered. Suspension of disbelief is a hard line to walk, and Talk to Me simply does it better.)
Once we get the rules, we’re off to the races. We know how the possession works from a practical standpoint and it’s clear very early on that the 50-second rule is about to be violated.
(It’s worth noting that the 50-second rule is great because 50 is an easy number to remember, but awkward for timekeeping (why not 60 seconds?). The fact that it is slightly eccentric makes it stick in the mind a little bit better, just like, for example, 88 miles per hour in Back to the Future.)
The brilliance of this setup is that the party game gives us expository rules without prompting an eye roll or beating us over the head with it. This is precisely what would happen for a real party game, which makes it seem all the more realistic. This is precisely the sort of dumb shit teenagers do (we’ve all been there), except ideally without the possession business. The world-building seems eminently realistic, which gives the sense that all the supernatural shit could actually happen to you if you ended up at the wrong house party.
With this in mind, consider how you can make the rules simple and effective and present them diegetically–a game, a work task, a “team-building exercise”–allowing the viewer to learn at the same time as the characters.
Second, the film does an excellent job of silently mocking teenagers’ obsession with filming every asinine fucking thing they do and posting it online. No one ever actually says that this is a problem, but we see from the get-go that the filming and sharing of the possessions are driving the plot forward.
If someone in the film were actually to complain about how social media is putting fuel on the fire, this would likely just sound like an old person criticizing a youth culture she doesn’t understand.*
The way it’s played, however, we see the tangible effects of the group dynamic, digital peer pressure, and the endless race for more and more extreme content. There’s no point in posting if you can’t get more likes than the last video, after all.
While it’s always tempting for the writer to philosophize about the state of the world (and by “state” I mean “fuckedness”), this is better done through narrative and situation than through exposition. That is, make the bad situation part of the plot mechanics and you don’t have to give the eye-roll explanation.
With this in mind, set up your social commentary so that it is central to the movement of the plot. Fucksake–we get it. You don’t have to spell it out.
*OK, Millennial.
Third, the “ghost” here really is a ghost (in the Ordinary People sense), dead before the script begins. The clever bit here is that we’re never really sure whether it’s something random and diabolical talking to her or whether it is simply her mother’s spirit (being diabolical, naturally). Certainly, we never get an answer.
What’s so interesting about this is that the plot ghost effectively becomes the literal ghost driving the story forward. It manifests physically. Now this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a horror film, to be fair, given that almost any good horror is about physically manifesting psychological fears. This situation, however, is subtly different.
Classically, we could assume that the monster would be indirectly related to the character’s flaw. Its presence would kick the protagonist into gear and overcoming the monster would bring psychological growth.
Talk to Me turns this on its head by essentially making a monster out of the hope of closure with respect to Mia’s mother’s death–was it actually accidental? Notice how actually pursuing the psychological closure is what propels Mia further and further into insanity and mayhem.
We want her just to give up and get out, essentially finding yourself yelling at the screen as you would with a some shitty horror– “what kind of idiot goes into a dark room when there’s a monster in the house?”–but for excellent reason: because you understand her greatest desire is to reconnect with her mother.
To top it all off, as we begin to acknowledge the monkey’s paw aspect to Mia’s relationship with her mother, Mia is confronted with her mother’s suicide note. Not her preferred outcome, perhaps, but a definite one: the perfect opportunity to wake the fuck up and stop the insanity. If only…
This turn is admittedly hard to do, but just as with the monkey’s paw or a genie’s sideways, all-too-literal interpretation of a wish, it has a long precedent in story.
With this in mind, consider how you can externalize your character’s psychological flaw–literally or metaphorically turn it into a monster–and then make the actual journey toward fixing that flaw in fact the root of your character’s undoing?
Conclusion
The best thing about horror being effectively the only way for new filmmakers to get a film made these days is that there are so many coming out.
There are bound to be a few good ones, and only time will tell whether these become enduring classics. None of them are absolutely flawless, but that’s not to say any film should be (except The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). Just go back and look at early efforts of established directors, (say, The Last House on the Left) and you’ll realize that everyone has to start somewhere.
Look at character and plot in even canonical horror like Friday the 13th and you’ll realize that we are stumbling toward a more sophisticated, human understanding of horror. We’re starting to get real themes and sophistication in the realm of horror, which is rapidly moving beyond tired tropes like “the ‘slutty girl’ gets stabbed first while the virgin escapes.”
The good news is that this means there’s more room for actual writing in horror. Given that it remains low-budget and shaky, it’s a great place to flex your muscles–this is particularly true in terms of building your chops with metaphor, whether in terms of monster, plotting, or even flaw.
Hopefully this set of horror films for screenwriters has given you a bit more insight into how you can write your own terrifying masterpiece.
Now go out and scare people.
Exercise 1 – Collapse the Arc
Experiment with shifting or collapsing protagonist perspective to mirror thematic decay.
First, choose a theme—something that implies loss of control (e.g., addiction, family curse, systemic breakdown).
Next, write a 3-scene outline in which the apparent protagonist gradually loses agency to another character.
>Scene 1: The protagonist clearly drives the story.
>Scene 2: A secondary character begins to act as a rival “story engine.”
>Scene 3: The rival character becomes the focus while the first protagonist fades or fails.
How does this shift express your story’s core idea–in this case, fate and inevitability? Does this unnerve the audience? What happens emotionally to the audience as the narrative rug is pulled? What emotions arise when the audience loses its narrative anchor?
Alternatively, rewrite an existing short scene from your script so that a supporting character wrests control of the story halfway through.
Exercise 2 – The Unavoidable Rule
Horror comes from unavoidable behavior: this forces the audience to participate.
First, think about three to five actions that you cannot–at least reasonably–NOT DO: breathing, blinking, swallowing, scratching an itch.
Second, consider how doing one of these could lead to your death.
Third, write two pages where the character must withhold from that action for at least 60 second.
As you write, focus on sensation–how would the viewer react, physically, to this restriction. Think about how to make the viewer tense up, stop from blinking, hold her breath, etc.
If you can do this, you get it.
Exercise 3 – The Flaw Becomes the Monster
Here we work on turning a character’s deepest psychological need into an externalized, destructive force.
First, write down one of your protagonist’s unresolved desires (e.g. the wish to reconnect with a dead relative, the need to be liked, the need to be valued).
Second, consider how this might physically manifest–and begin hunting your character.
Third, write 1-2 pages that describe the moment where this desire turns from emotional to supernatural: a voice answers back, the mirror image takes on a life of its own, etc.
Consider the point where the character realizes that fulfilling this desire will in fact mean self-destruction. Then consider–painful as the outcome might be–what she in fact chooses to do at this point.
Horror films for screenwriters is getting repeated again, oh my!