Tips on Writing a Horror Movie Script

You want a quick way into Hollywood as a screenwriter? Write a horror script. Easy enough? Well, it may be harder than you think. Writing a great horror script takes more than just an uncanny knack for being creepy. That helps, but you also need to master your pace. This article will tell you how to do that with a few well known examples.

I was given a screenplay to critique recently and I can honestly say that the author has a 60-page horror classic on her hands. Unfortunately her script is 95 pages long.

The middle 60 pages, Act 2 essentially, are taut, suspenseful, page-turning and chilling. In short, they're phenomenal. But what makes the whole script fall shy of classic are the bookends. Acts 1 and 3. Both acts of this script are not bad, but they do not reach the level of the middle. They're not even close. I won't go into the problems of the final act here, but I'd like to discuss the approach and technique of the opening.

As the author and I discussed in emails, her first 20 to 25 pages are a "slow build". The chills are delayed in order to, first, establish a contrast between the normality of the first act and the horror of the second act and, second, to build a sense of foreboding that pays off later. Her script does both of these things. But intrinsic to these two surface goals is what makes or breaks a slow-build horror opening: story connection. The mundane activities of the characters during the slow-build must connect directly to the horror later, otherwise a slow-build first act becomes almost an unrelated prequel to acts 2 and 3. The classic horror films with slow-build intros -- The Exorcist, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, etc. -- intimately connect the mundanity of act 1 to the horror of acts 2 and 3.

Let's begin with The Exorcist.

When we first meet the MacNeil family -- mother, Chris, and daughter, Regan -- Chris is up late reading when she hears a scratching noise come from the walls. In the hall, as she passes the door to the attic, the scratching is heard again, but louder. An early creepy moment in the movie, this gets the sense of foreboding underway, but the occurrence is treated innocuously by Chris who tells her butler to pick up some rat traps the next morning. By act 2, the ephemeral noises prove to be the first physical manifestation of the demon that terrorizes the MacNeils.

In the next scene, we are introduced to Father Damien Karras who is in the crowd at Chris' film-shoot at Georgetown. Two of the main characters have now laid eyes on each other, but more importantly, on the way home, Chris overhears Karras talking about feeling like a fraud. Mundane? Seemingly so. Pivotal? Absolutely. We've begun to see the doubts that come to define Karras' character. This trait carries over in a crucial fashion into the horrific acts 2 and 3 because, in order to defeat Regan's demon, Karras must, at all cost, overcome this doubt.

A few scenes later, Karras goes to visit his sick mother in New York City. They chat a little. She calls him Dimmy -- short for Damien. He suggests that she might be better off in a retirement home. She insists that she's not leaving her flat, her real home. All very banal. But again, there are connections here to the horror of later. Karras' guilt over his mother connects to the inner struggle with his faith. He wonders how a man of the cloth can be so willing to leave the old woman alone. But he does. Karras is a tightly-wound spool of inner turmoil. It unfurls in act 2 when the demon speaks to him in his mothers voice, calling him Dimmy. The mundane mirrored in the horrific.

Next we have Regan and Chris in the house basement. Regan shows her mother the ouija board she likes to play with and introduces her to "Captain Howdy". This scene, while initially mundane ends with a bit of tension as Captain Howdy insults Chris. Not exactly the typical play of a 12 year-old girl and certainly, by act 2 we know who this Captain Howdy really is. One of the more obvious bridges in the slow-build to horror.

After a few scenes to embellish the MacNeil's familial situation, Regan tells her mother that her bed is shaking. On their way to investigate, the noises from the attic return. The sense of foreboding builds. Something now seems eerily off kilter in the lives of these til-now domestic drama characters. More scenes like this follow. The tension builds. More story connections are made. Meanwhile, Karras' mother becomes hospitalized and dies. The young priest's inner struggle is mounting towards its crest.

At this point, Regan, the sweet and innocent 12 year-old we've come to know begins to exhibit a drastic behavioral change, culminating in her peeing on the carpet at her mother's party. She tells one of the guests that he will "die up there". The same night, the mundane comes to an end as Chris witnesses Regan's bed levitate and shake on its own. The horror of the demonic possession builds rapidly from here as we enter act 2.

In many ways the pace and tone of The Exorcist's
slow-build continues in act 2. But the mood becomes more urgent as the events of the possession become stranger and more horrific. We learn that Chris has her own reservations and skepticism about religion, but as the scientific community proves unable to help her daughter, she turns for help to the young Jesuit with his own faith issues. This weaves the ultimate thematic thread of The Exorcist
through act 1 and into act 2. This theme -- defeat of evil comes from faith in good -- now envelops two main characters and will carry on into the climax of the movie. Acts 1 and 2 are therefore inextricably linked.

Now lets look at The Shining.

The film begins with Jack Torrance interviewing for the winter caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains. This is cut by a quick scene with Jack's wife Wendy and son Danny at their home having lunch. Both scenes are innocuous enough, but they are each closely connected to the horrors of acts 2 and 3, Jack's interview scene particularly so.

On a tour of the hotel, Jack is told the run-of-the-mill duties he will have to perform as caretaker. Typical new job stuff. Jack asks why the hotel needs to be shut down during the winter and his employer explains that the location of the hotel was chosen for its beauty and remoteness and that the only road leading in is too expensive to clear of snow. He goes on to tell Jack that the only thing physically strenuous about the job is coping with the isolation. Jack shrugs this off saying that he's looking forward to the quiet in order to outline his new book. A very mundane conversation, however, in Act 2 we find out just how well Jack really is able to cope with cabin fever and it's, well, not pretty.

Of course, like all great horror classics The Shining's
sense of foreboding comes early on, as the interview scene ends with the employer's grisly tale of a winter caretaker who, ten years earlier, murdered his family with an axe before killing himself with a shotgun. It's an ominous moment in the midst of heightened mundanity, a juxtaposition at which Kubrick is a master.

The intercut scene of Wendy and Danny shows the boy having a conversation with an imaginary friend named Tony. Like Captain Howdy in The Exorcist, Tony is a disagreeable spirit and when Danny presses him over why he opposes their staying at the Overlook, Tony delivers him a clairvoyant image of elevators opening like floodgates to a torrent of blood. This, of course, really freaks Danny out and such images will continue to haunt him well into act 2.

Kubrick pulls no punches with the creep factor, but the slow-build approach to act 1 and much of act 2 continues with excruciating methodology, lacing clues of what's to come throughout. Such is the case in the next scene when Wendy has Danny checked by a doctor for going temporarily catatonic. In this scene we discover that Danny's imaginary friend has been with him for quite some time and also that Jack has had a drinking problem and is prone to violence. The significance of all this comes to light amidst the horrors of act 2.

The next few segments cover the Torrances getting settled in at the Overlook. Very innocuous aside from the occasional clairvoyant episode for Danny. We are also introduced to the head chef, Dick Halloran who, incidentally, is also clairvoyant. He talks to Danny about their shared ability, telling him that his grandmother used to call it "shining". He reveals that the Overlook Hotel itself also has the ability to shine. It's a rather pleasant, down-home conversation punctuated with a foreboding only when Danny asks what happened in Room 237. Halloran refuses to talk about it. Again, this simple conversation provides clues of what's to come.

A month into the caretaking job, Jack and his family have gotten very comfortable with the big, empty hotel, but Jack is becoming more and more agitated and Danny continues to see disturbing images of the ghosts that haunt the place. This is pretty much the beginning of act 2. The connectivity here to act 1 is so well laid that by the time we get to the scene of Wendy discovering Jack's compulsively-typed pages, we know, far better than she does, that she and Danny are in for a precarious winter, the least of which will come from the actual weather.

In both scripts, the surface functions of act 1 are handled masterfully. The Torrances and the MacNeils are painted with such realism that the innocuous scenes in which they inhabit seem as though they came straight out of our own bland lives, yet, peppered within, are strong elements of foreboding. There's something clearly amiss in these vignettes of normalcy. But most importantly, these first acts contain the links to the horrors of acts 2 and 3 that simply cannot be removed or the story won't make sense.

This is the key element that makes for a complete horror classic. Act 1 must be as much a part of acts 2 and 3 as it is a part of itself. The problem with my friend's script is that, normalcy and foreboding plus solid writing and crisp dialogue aside, you could really lop off the first act with little sacrifice to the story of act 2. The first acts of The Exorcist and The Shining are thoroughfares into the heart of the story. My friend's first act is a pleasant little side road that happens to bump into the story of his act 2.

Connectivity of story elements is one of the easiest problems to fix in screenwriting. You simply ask what motivates the horror and what combats it. In The Shining, the horror is motivated by the isolation of the hotel, its haunted spirits and the fringe-teetering psyche of Jack Torrance. What combats the horror is simply Wendy's instinct for survival for herself and her son. That part is only loosely connected to act 1, but the horror motivators (the more important aspect) is rooted solidly in the first act. In The Exorcist, the horror is motivated by Regan MacNeil's vulnerability and her willingness to communicate with the occult. What combats the horror is the notion that belief in good can defeat evil. Both aspects are firmly planted in act 1.

So to produce an effective slow-build horror script, the rule of thumb is to fill us in on the hows and whys of the horror whilst doing so in the midst of scenes we can recognize from our own lives. Because, while we all occasionally seek a thrill in one form or another, our greatest fear, really, is that the mundanity of our everyday lives will be unexpectedly breached. For bad or for good.