A Monster Problem
How do you scare an audience who knows what's lurking around the corner?
I have an idea for a slasher. If you make it to the bottom of this article, you can read it. I don’t like withholding–it’s one of the reasons I prefer movies to TV—but in this case, it’s motivated: if I told you this idea outright, you might think me a monster, a cretin at best, and vow never to read my work again. But as I am still in the ‘ascending’ phase of my career, and must captivate you for as long as I can, I’ll explain my thinking before I risk it all. That is how not-nice the idea is.
Its content would be upsetting to most, and the exploitation of its context seen as reprehensible. Nevertheless, I earnestly believe it would make an important movie, perhaps even a franchise, for its foray into relatively untrodden territory for the subgenre. By the time you are done reading this, it will feel unfortunate but inevitable, necessary even. Unfortunate because what we’re afraid of reflects who we are. Necessary because slashers have nowhere else to go.
Such is (unfortunately) the case for the genre as a whole: it may be the fastest-growing genre at the box office1, but if horror filmmakers refuse to build on its momentum by evolving its concepts, it won’t be—at least not for too much longer. The popularity of horror movies comes with a cost: the more we watch them, the more familiar we become with their contents. The more familiar their monsters, tropes, violence, and so on, the less scary they become. And the less scary they are, the less we’ll want them.
Thus it behooves the humble frightener—though no more nor less than any filmmaker—to remain in pursuit of the new. If not in form, then in content, and if neither permits, at the very least, in the way one thinks about it. Herein lies the challenge: how do you scare an audience who knows what's lurking around the corner? Consider the vampire: a fearsome creature no doubt, but less so when we know they want, where they lurk, and most importantly, what kills them. The character who must deal with them either knows this lore already or must be forced into believing it, making their arc of discovery simply a matter of timing or, worse, withholding, and one becomes either alienated from the character who ventures alone into the dark of night, or acutely aware of their status as trap-setter or bait, diminishing the suspense.
In the wake of Nosferatu, which retells the creature’s best-known appearance, few options are available upon which a new writer might sharpen their own fangs. One who wishes to remain original can’t change the setting to Alaska where it’s always dark (30 Days of Night), make the vampires children (Let the Right One In), place them in the future (Daybreakers), give them buddies (Near Dark), or make the lone hero a self-hating vampire-hunter (Blade, Underworld). Vampirism can’t be a disease (The Last Man on Earth), or a curse (Interview with the Vampire), or the generic foundation upon which a hybrid story is told, be it a moribund drama (Only Lovers Left Alive), a teen romance (Twilight), an ironic comedy (Vampire’s Kiss), or a musical (Sinners). The challenge is profound: the more we do vampires, the less we can do with them, and the more “novel” approaches to vampirism require mining either a diminishing pile of unused, lesser-known vampire lore, like Carmilla (the lesbian vampire yarn that came out 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula), which is already the inspiration for at least 14 movies but none of them that famous, or devising some completely left-field concoction that doesn’t appear to make any sense but attracts audiences for novelty’s sake (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). I’m not saying you can’t write anything new in the vampire realm, but it helps to engage in a lengthy bit of research beforehand, so as not to spend your precious spec-script writing time focusing your story on the ill-fated ship that brings Dracula to London (The Last Voyage of the Demeter).
Nevertheless, I do not believe that everything has been done before, nor do I believe that originality is the sole marker of quality (which is how well a story is told), nor still do I believe that “everything is a remix”: there are ways to keep old things scary, and ways to make sure new ones stay that way. Here are a few ways to approach doing so, with examples:
A spin on something familiar
Take something you know and do something different with it. You want to write about zombies? I wouldn’t!2 But consider what else their common origins, like lab leaks, chemical gas, or fallen satellites, might say about their respective creations, like mistrust of institutions (28 Days Later), unchecked military experimentation (The Return of the Living Dead), or the recklessness of the Space Race (the original Night of the Living Dead). Consider their biology, be it man (The Serpent and the Rainbow) or mutant (I Am Legend) and how it might diminish their motility (City of the Living Dead) or enhance it (Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead). Maybe zombies are funny (Dawn of the Dead), or you find coming back from the dead romantic (Warm Bodies). While I didn’t like In a Violent Nature, for reasons you can explore here:
The Back of Your Head Is Ridiculous
Why the worst shot in cinematography is becoming its most popular.
… I did think it was interesting how the film (almost) fully commits to telling the story from a different point of view—that of its monster. The most novel approach I can think of involves changing the meaning of zombies altogether: Joe Dante’s Bush-era satire, Homecoming (part of the underappreciated Masters of Horror anthology series) envisions a scenario where soldiers start coming back from the dead to take revenge on the politicians who sent them to die in various wars. Subtle? Elegant? No! But instead of using zombies to reflect the fraying social fabric (duh) or fuel the prepper fantasy of killing your neighbors (bo-ring!), its reincarnated heroes sniff out who the bad guys really are. In a world where the real villains are often in cahoots with the very same guys who make blockbuster movies3, that’s always going to be fresh meat.
The thing you’ve never seen before
I know I said that new isn’t always best, but I’m a fan of it. Give me a monster I’ve never seen before, and make me figure out—in tandem with the characters—what the hell it is and how to survive it. Lately, meaning the last ten years or so, this has been far stronger in sci-fi than horror. That’s understandable, as horror tends to “unknown knowns” (clowns, killers, demons) and sci-fi is generally a more appropriate realm for the “unknown-unknowns.”4 What rules does an alien race abide by? Shit, who knows?
Here’s where horror screenwriters should take note: just because a monster may be earthbound doesn’t mean it can’t bend physics (Edge of Tomorrow), transcend language (Arrival), or defy explanation (Annihilation). Perhaps they emerge from a child’s dream (The Babadook), merely a freaky image (Smile), or, like my favorite horror movie of recent memory, just seem to do a scary thing (It Follows). These nightmares are effective precisely because they don’t follow proscribed rules or established movie logic. It might seem like my advice here is as helpful as just saying “be original,” sure, but what I’m really suggesting is that you let your monster emerge from the fear, and not vice versa. Be honest about what you’re afraid of, whether it’s aging (vamps), others (zombs), or, I don’t know, losing your culture, and fertilize that idea until it turns into a monster, like the white people in Get Out. As blunt as it may seem in hindsight, Jordan Peele and company used a very contemporary anxiety as the basis for a monster family who many had never seen before—at least not on screen—and it worked.
The “definitive” version
This one’s a little harder because if you’re reading this, chances are you don’t have access to the same resources as Robert Eggers (Nosferatu), Guillermo del Toro (the upcoming Frankenstein), or Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow), so it’s not as easy for you to make the classic version of an age-old scary story. But it’s not impossible, and you might be surprised to find how much remains buried by the sands of time, awaiting you to surface it. According to Wikipedia, one of the oldest ghost stories, Mostellaria, dates back to the 3rd Century B.C. Ghosts and ghoulies abound in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and while you might not be at the stage in your career where your work can command a mythological budget like Christopher Nolan to make the definitive Odyssey, lil’ old American history overflows with legendary tales of psychos, drifters, and disappearances that you can make your own. “Western horror” remains a woefully under-served subgenre, and if you’re not from the USA, lucky you—I’d bet the farm that whatever nation or culture you’re from is full of boogiemen (my preferred spelling) the US Domestic Box Office has never seen before, to say little of Public Domain properties, deep-cut mythology, books that have never been translated, short stories in magazines you can get the rights to for cheap because no one else has asked about them for fifty years. “Dracula,” in the “I vant to suck your blood” vein, didn’t make his appearance until 1931, some 34 years after Bram Stoker’s book. He isn’t the same Count Orlok of either 1922’s or 2024’s Nosferatu, but up until Werner Herzog revived the OG silhouette in 1977, the coiffed and caped count was the mould. Find the right source material and carve your own.
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The no-show
This may fly in the face of every screenwriting guru who, for generations, has made it expressly clear that anything even remotely drawing from the storied tradition of experimental cinema is an indulgent, pretentious, and unmarketable waste of time, but I don’t think horror movies need explanations.
I won’t go so far as to try and convince you, with the same revolutionary spirit that has my parents-in-law convinced I’m a flag-burning anarchist, that I don’t think movies need explanations (I don’t), but think about it like this: most nightmares are abstract, and they’re scarier than most horror movies. Many things that we can conceptualize, like serial killers or wild animals, are scary, but perhaps even more so are the things we can’t understand. Explosions of violence, sudden changes in mood, decisions that defy logic, freak accidents; not only do these things keep us up at night, they happen all the time.
The randomness and unpredictability of a chaotic and seemingly indifferent universe might be the scariest things anyone can think of, more terrifying even than death itself, but few horror movies are so bold as to leave you wondering. Once again, I’m not advocating for withholding, as in, writing a movie-monster and then just not telling anyone what it is… but even writing that sentence, the prospect excites me. I haven’t seen it executed with aplomb!
What I will say is, screenwriting gurus be damned, you could do a lot worse than David Lynch, or Cure, or Possession, and they don’t get much scarier. Ever seen Begotten? Try explaining this:
Endings
I set out to write this article in response to back-to-back-to-back convos with erstwhile horror fans that ended the same way: “It was scary until the monster showed up.” To horror writers and filmmakers alike, this should be what keeps you up at night.
I will admit that I haven’t read enough on the experience of story, nor do I know if there’s any way to prove this, but I would venture to guess it’s because once you have an explanation, a movie is no longer really even horror anymore. Horror ultimately comes from our fears of the unknown. Generally that’s death, but it’s also misfortune, bad luck, grievous bodily harm (all of which still come back to the unknown ie. what happens when we die? what if something goes wrong? how will I live with one arm?). Myths and fairy tales, on the other hand, gives us explanations for that unknown, so while myths may have frightening things in them, by the time a myth becomes a cautionary tale, there’s been a re-stabilizing effect: don’t want hubris? Have Theseus, a hero without it, slay the Minotaur. People no longer fear God? Have Father Dyer, Lieutenant Kinderman, and Chris MacNeil harness the power of prayer to deliver Regan (The Exorcist).
Most of what we think of as horror becomes a thriller, survival, or action by the 3rd Act, largely because industry advice cautions us against sticking with the unpleasant, but also because we ourselves may be afraid of the uncanny feelings that come from not having a clear, sense-making resolution. We “enjoy” horror because the feelings of terror are ultimately brought to rest safely back in the realms of the known. But are we really supposed to enjoy it? I think about the stories that scared me most as a kid, how they made me feel sick and alone, how often I needed a parent’s reassurance that no one was hiding in the shadows waiting to maim me. That’s the kind of horror we should be after, the kind that will keep horror alive.
Taake
I realize now that writing all this only to end on a movie idea of my own, might end up feeling like an advertorial. So much for withholding! But no, I’m not trying to sell you a screenplay I haven’t written yet. Consider this a proof, a horror thought experiment designed to make you feel, well, scared.
TW: if you’re sensitive to discussion of sexual assault, stop reading right now.
Ok.
Taake is an attempt to reconsolidate the slasher with something (two things) that genuinely scare us today: rape and the American prison system.
As it stands, the great American slasher villains are Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Chucky, and now, I’d say, Art the Clown. The first four have become so familiar as to be folksy, friendly even. The latter is on the ascent thanks to creator Damien Leone’s commitment to extreme graphic violence, the kind that pushes past anything seen in the films of the former. He’s still scary because he’s unpredictable, his capacity for creative kills evolving with each successive film. Nevertheless, there is an upper limit to all five, which is the destruction of the human body. Add to their legion Jigsaw, who represents the fearful choice of death or permanent bodily harm, but the limit remains: these are killers who destroy the body.
The titular antagonist, the mononymous, hulking, 7-plus-foot tall incarceree walks out of a supermax one day amidst a deadly prison break, and into an unsuspecting civilian population. Born in secret in the heart of America’s most violent prison complex, Taake knows no kindness, shows no mercy, and as his name suggests, knows only one thing: violation. Taake is after the mind.
Are you suggesting the next great horror villain is a giant psycho rapist?
In a matter of speaking, yes.
I’m not gonna bore you with statistics like how the United States has the largest prison population in the world, or the highest prison population rate per 100,000 people—you probably already know!
Less considered is the idea that for many of us in the United States, life in prison isn’t punishment enough. Consider how often you’ve heard—maybe even thought yourself—about what happens in prison being the real justice. Consider how the supermax system isn’t designed for rehabilitation, it’s for indefinite detainment.5 Then think about this: what’s scarier than a place where the most terrifying criminals in the country are essentially gestating their own hierarchies based around one’s own capacity for violence, much of it sexual?
That would be: the hypothetical worst prisoner breaking out.
I’m not saying you should let me make this idea. I doubt financiers would risk the controversy, I’m not sure audiences could stomach it, and the last thing the victims of a flawed and corrupt justice system need is the kind of stigma that comes from the Hollywood treatment, like Jaws did to sharks.6 I’m just saying there is clearly an opportunity to raise (lower?) the bar for horror by anthropomorphizing a very real, modern, present, and heretofore un-broached source of fear. It would be the “definitive” version of something you’ve never seen before, that is both unexplainable and also a spin on something familiar.
You may not like it. In fact, you shouldn’t.
But if the idea of capitalizing on society’s worst fears isn’t appetizing to you, maybe you shouldn’t be writing horror.