Researching Horror - An Introduction

     Having already decided the genre in my previous post, I was thinking up of different plots for my horror movie. Many horror movies have the main conflict of the story revolve around supernatural forces, urban legends, characters brought up from an evil origin, or simply monsters. Due to the low budget this film is going to have, as well as the resources I have at my disposable, making a film with my antagonist being some sort of supernatural being or monster is out of the picture. I need to build a story around a character who had a bad childhood which resulted in them turning into someone malicious or simply have them be born evil, like the infamous Michael Myers.

    Generally, horror films use multiple methods within the piece to induce fear and suspense among the audience. In the openings of many horror films, at least one method is used to immerse the audience into the story and get them immediately hooked on the story. Usually, this is done by quickly introducing the antagonist in a fast-paced chase mixed in with some slow-paced sequences with a random person who more often than not, falls victim to the villain. Other times, the villain is introduced by only having a slow-paced shots, where the main subject (soon-to-be-victim) is slowly wandering around their environment, fearfully looking around the area, creating anticipation and anxiety within the audience that something is going to happen shortly. An example of this would be the opening to The Ring. The story starts off with the victim getting creepy messages and hints that she will die, which creates tension among the viewers. As the subject begins experiencing odd events at her house, they slowly walk around the house trying to return understand what is happening, before the girl from the tape walks out of the television and presumably kills the subject.

OVERVIEW

    All horror movies tend to follow a specific plot, and in this case, I want to have one that falls under a low budget and is easy to produce. Some of the basic plots in this genre are when the main character (MC) moves into a new house and experiences supernatural events, the MC moves into a rural area and everyone living their turns the MC's life into an abyss of fear, an aggressive creature or alien of some kind begins terrorizing the area that MC lives in, or an ancient person or thing (such as a mummy, vampire, etc.) comes back from being dead and starts committing terrible acts. Many of these basic stories all follow the same formula where characters surrounding the MC are picked off one by one until only the MC remains by the end of the story. Furthermore, in many stories where the MC manages to beat the villain in the "finale", there is a little twist in the story where it is revealed that they are not defeated yet, and the MC, along with any remaining people, must do one final battle against the antagonist. Also, because the story is a horror, there are many films in this genre where the MC fails at the end of the story or it simply ends in an open-ended way. In other words, the audience has to decide for themselves whether the villain is able to return sometime or if they were beaten for good.

    To create a story such as the ones explained above and increase the heart rates of the people watching, different techniques are used to manipulate the audience into giving some sort of reaction out of them. One such method that is used in many movies that I need to be sure to incorporate into my own piece is called negative space. In this technique, the frames of certain scenes remain still for a prolonged period of time, causing the audience to focus their attention on anything they see, such as a wall or an area completely submerged in darkness. This type of method where peoples' attention are focused on specific details of the setting makes them believe that something will come out of the area and scare them, which is what I need to emulate in my own piece. A great example of this technique being used would be in the original Blair Witch Project. Although we never see the witch in the film, the audience was glued to their seats in suspense as the main characters are terrorized by it throughout the piece. In the clip below, the main characters are wondering how a bunch of piled rocks arrived to their location, and the camera panning to random tree branches and bushes in the forest, which forced the audience to scan the area as well because in the back of their mind, there was a chance that the witch would suddenly appear in front of them.

    Another technique used often would be the jump scare. This method is has been done in all the classic horror movies. A quick and abrupt change in the scene occurs, with a loud or creepy sound commonly accompanying it. They also appear when the scene in the film is completely silent and the audience has little to no expectation that anything scary could possibly happen, until it is too late. While many believe this style of horror to be lazy method of scaring the people watching, there have been films that effectively use it. An example would be James Wan's The Conjuring. In the clip below, James Wan creates a scene filled with silence and makes the audience know that something frightening will occur, yet executes the jump scare so successfully that people are still left surprised and shocked when it does appear.

    If I am going to make a horror film opening, I need to utilize at least one of the above techniques to grab the viewer's attention, or else it would not be much of a scary movie.