How to Write a Horror Movie - the Four Core Concepts

Horror movies depend on four elements for success, three elements that every person innately fears and one element that everybody wants. These elements are (in order) isolation, desolation, lost cause, redemption. Watch any horror film and you will see these elements played out and exploited which is why people go see horror movies, to experience emotions that they would not dare experience in real life or they can't under normal circumstances experience. Horror has nothing to do with gore and violence; those are only symptomatic of a sub-genre of horror films. Adding more gore and violence will not make your film more horrific, it will only alienate that part of the audience that either sees it as being purely for visual eye-candy, or worse yet, see it as lacklustre attempt to make up for the lack of actual story content.

Horror movies are not difficult to write if you follow the four elements in the proper dramatic structure. There are several keys that you should follow, one of them being that the reason the Hero is in trouble is that he makes a fatal mistake due to pride, and that mistake causes the death of someone close to him because they trust him to make the right decisions. He is then left to question his own intelligence and view of the world while every thing he has believed in, everything he feels that will get him out of any harm is used against him.

In writing a horror script, you begin with isolation. Somehow, some way, you need to separate the hero physically or mentally from everyone around him. Physically is easy, put him in the woods (CABIN FEVER), out in the middle of nowhere (DEAD BIRDS), or in the ocean (OPEN WATER). Separating the hero mentally is a bit more difficult but it can be done, one of the best examples would be the movie FALLEN where Denzel Washington is a cop that begins to have a supernatural situation that implicates him for murder. Hitchcock also used the mental separation in the opening of PSYCHO with the hero being responsible for embezzling money and having to "play it off" in a room full of people. No matter the reason why, as that depends on your story, the key is to get your hero isolated because that removes any aspect of outside help.

The second step is desperation; the hero must make a run for it, pushing further into the worse areas in an effort to find a safe place. This is where his pride will fail him as in the three trials; he is choosing all the wrong ones, based on how he feels the world operates. Not only is he taking two steps back, he is not making any steps forward and in fact, he is tightening the noose around his own neck. In CABIN FEVER this was seen as they had a choice to get from one side of the mountain to the other, and chose "the short cut" instead of waiting the night for the main road to clear. Audience react to this because they know the short cut is always the wrong path (if not, there would be no movie) so they are expecting something bad to happen.

The third step is lost cause, where the evil is becoming triumphant, the hero is backed up against a wall, unwilling to do the one thing that needs to be done for him to escape, which of course is to sacrifice himself to the evil. Because the hero is unwilling to do this, the evil doesn't build so much as it reduces the hero. This is where people start dying in horror films, first the "secondary characters", then the Hero's close friends, then the side kick, until the hero has to stand up and get in front and say "no more" and face the evil on his own.

This brings us to the final act, where the hero is redeemed for making his tragic flaw early in the film and pays for it. Understanding that the hero does not have to die, this allows you to "transform" the hero, transformation being the single most important element of any film, any genre, and the single reason why successful films connect with audiences. In this last act, the hero is transformed and given a new life (or an afterlife) and that allows the audience to leave with a good feeling, even with the physical death of the hero. Consider the recent films ARMEGGEDDON and POSEIDON'S ADVENTURE, in which both hero characters died at the end. I know that most people would not consider either of those films horror in the classic sense, but that's a purely personal view of what makes horror. Do not limit yourself to thinking within a box, let your genres cross and mix.

In conclusion, in writing your horror film, the best thing to remember is let your hero fall, impossibly far, and keep falling until they realize that they have to sacrifice themselves to get up. Isolation, Desperation, Lost Cause, and Redemption are the four steps that allow for any horror film to be successfully written.