Category: Horror

July 21, 2012

Hour of the Wolf

Sorry, still running behind.
I’d hoped to do something a little bigger for the ranty blog’s 200th post. Ah, well. We’ll have to celebrate #250.

Here’s one more huge interview with a pro to tide you over until I get my act back together. This time it’s David Self, the screenwriter behind Thirteen Days, Road to Perdition, and The Haunting, among other films. Last I heard, he was working on the adaptation of the God of War videogame.

I got to chat with David for an hour or so about working on The Wolfman, the big-budget reimagining of the classic Universal Monster movie. It was definitley a passion project for him (as you’ll see), and he was a lot of fun to speak with. Alas, monster movies don’t do that well these days because too many people go in expecting horror and then blame the film for these expectations.

A few points I’ve mentioned before. I’m the one in bold, asking the questions. Also, a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it. A long line of dashes (————-) means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article. Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply David Self endorsed any of the ideas here on the ranty blog. It’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar I’ve said. And by the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here (although I did cut out one big one). If you haven’t seen the film yet, check it out. It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this discussion.

Also, this is one of the rare cases where I didn’t get to see the fim before my interview (considering I was generally doing interviews two or three months before the films were released). My questions are based off one of David’s earlier drafts I got to read, so you’ll see some back and forth as we establish what does and doesn’t happen in the movie, and why some changes were made.

Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

===================================

You work in a lot of different genres as a screenwriter. Horror, drama, political, you’re doing Deathlok for Marvel, I heard… How do you keep from getting pigeonholed?

That’s just IMDb (laughs). I haven’t been working on Deathlok in quite a long time. I did a rewrite on Deathlok.

I guess I actively try to avoid boredom. I want to find new intellectual arenas to challenge myself in. I try to find projects that are different, have a different hue to them, work in different genres. I make an effort to do that. That’s my short answer, and I guess people buy it. (laughs)

How did you end up on The Wolfman?

This came to me from a good friend of mine, a producer, Scott Stuber. I worked with Scott a long time ago. He brought me actually three scripts. Andy’s script, a script by Paul Attanasio, and one Mark Romanek himself had been working on. Kind of in the fall of 2007, just before the strike. Actually, August, late summer.

So there were three actual scripts?

At that point Andy had done what was the main draft. Then they’d hired Paul to do a rewrite. He got about halfway through and didn’t continue. Mark Romanek started to work on it himself. Paul, I think, was working at Mark’s direction at that time, and Mark got halfway through the script as well. So they had two half-scripts and Andy’s script. When I came in I really wanted to work off Andy’s script because it was the most coherent and consistent one. It was a complete script so it was the easiest to start from.

Were you all that familiar with the original?

Oh, yeah. I love the original. The original film is a landmark. It was my dad’s favorite film and I used to watch it with him when I was a kid and knew it well. So there was a little trepidation in going back and trying to come up with a 2010 version of it.

Was it tough shifting the story to a modern day interpretation? Were these things you were dealing with or had Andy dealt with a lot of them already?

Andy had really introduced a lot of the new elements that are in our version of the film. In terms of the father-son dynamic and also, well… (David and I talked about a bunch of spoilerish stuff here that I’m not going to repeat for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet) …That’s a major change from the original, obviously. That idea was an idea Andy introduced. Going back to your question— that was dramatically the biggest adjustment.

So what were some of the issues they brought you in to address? Was it director requests, studio requests, straight script problems?

I think one of the things… In keeping with the original, Andy did well preserving the werewolf lore that the original film introduced to our sense of werewolves. Changing at the full moon, being bitten. Some of the rules we take for granted now. Silver bullets killing werewolves. There were a couple older films… you’d have to do your filmography… that this film all pulled together. Those elements Andy was very particular in preserving, which I think was really important.

Among those things that was challenging is that the whole transforming at the full moon really limits…is a real structural issue that we struggled with for a long time. How to make the plot advance quickly and turn our characters into a werewolf quickly when you’re dealing with this rule of having the full moon.

Yeah, you get four weeks between each action scene.

Exactly (chuckles). So by nature, the earlier drafts of the script had a very extended amount of time before you got to see Benicio del Toro turn into the wolfman. That was really the largest issue that I was brought in to solve–how to speed things up a bit. It was still a very challenging thing, given the rules of our film. That was the largest note that I had to contend with coming into it.

Let me bug you with a couple of process questions before we dive into any more specifics about the film. How do you normally approach a script? Are you an outline guy, a notecard guy?

I generally like to outline, and I try to do the outline in one sitting, so it feels organic, to one moment and impulse. The length of it can vary from a page to ten pages, depending on how much detail I’m seeing right off the bat in my head. I just try to catch the organic impulse of the movie in one moment. And then it mutates from there.

Now was it a lot different for you when you’re coming onto with an existing script, rather than starting from scratch?

Yeah, this is a very different process. It’s a film that is sort of a flashing green light to go. There’s a lot more collaboration. You’re working with a director, a producer, a studio, that all have things they need to achieve to get to where they’re confortable making the film.

Was everyone attached?

Benecio was attached and Mark Romanek was attached. They attached Tony and Emily Blunt after the draft I did in November. And Hugo Weaving. Those guys all came on after. Although Benicio was just sort of… he wasn’t actively involved in development at that point, he was just waiting for us to do our job. ———– I turned in my draft the night before the strike started and that was what they cast off of. And then I was out on the lines

Do you have a lot of writing habits? Do you write so many hours a day or only in the morning?

I’ve become more nocturnal with the advent of four of my children in the past couple years. Prior to that I was more of a workday type of guy. I sort of now have a patched together day, where I work half of the day-day, and then after supper in the eveneing, after the kids go to bed, I have another work period where I tend to be pretty productive. It was different when I was younger.

Do you have a page count you’re trying to hit each day?

More of a scene or sequence objective I set for myself. Not so much a page count. One of the other things I like to do… I get slower as I get closer to the end of the script, because basically I read the script from page one again every day before I start writing again, so I can get everything in my head. It helps me with consistencey issues and voice issues. I don’t have as much reading to do on day two or three, but when I’m getting down to the end I’m spending an hour and a half reading befoe I start writing new stuff.

So was this more of a page one rewrite or a scene-by-scene?

Several scenes, like the sequence in the asylum, I just loved those. There were pieces of Andrew’s writing that I just loved that I just cut and pasted those into the script I was writing. I would tweak a word or two just so it made sense with what came around it. I did start with an empty script when I started rewriting, but I had his sitting next to me the whole time as a reference.

Now, Lawrence would be kind of a grim, haunted figure in this even if he wasn’t bitten by a werewolf. Why change him so much?

Yeah. It’s interesting, the character Andy —– along was a haunted guy who had this sort of gothic, dark back story that preceded the film and becomes uncovered during the course of the film. So he definitely structured that sort of psychological drama in that mode. It was an important decision. It’ll be interesting to see how it translates in the final version of the film, but the notion was this was a guy who had lost himself in theater and burned himself out. He was a guy waiting to be saved.

In the original, Lawrence Talbot is an astronomer, now he’s an actor. Why the change?

That was Andy. He was a guy who was haunted, who lost himself, was estranged from his family and has to come to home. He’s taken on the least manly profession (laughs) in contrast to his father, this big-game hunter, depraved nobility kind of guy.

Was Ben’s murder in the beginning an added scene? Why?

Yeah, we had several different versions of that. I think it was challenging because—— A lot of that changed because of the physicality of the location that we had to work with. There were a couple different versions which we had worked out, given the contingencies of the set. This is the one Joe settled on at the end of the day.

Right in the beginning of this story you’ve got the old man on the train with the silver cane. Why this odd device of a complete stranger who never figures into the story again?

Yeah, that version hasn’t made it into the final film. We had a notion that this was not just an old guy, but there was this sort of implication that the creepy old guy could be Satan passing the cane along. It didn’t make it (laugh), he just has the cane in the current film. I thought it was just a good idea, it’s just his from the start now. With the 2010 kicker of it being a sword.——I definitely tried to find a few places of connection for little spiritual totems of the original.

What about the connection between Aberline and Jack the Ripper?

Yeah (laughs). Aberline was introduced in Paul’s draft as a pursuing character that then we fleshed out. He chose the name Aberline. I didn’t really connect that with that notion when I first read it, but then I looked up the name and said ‘Oh, this is the guy from In Hell!’ (laughs) We thought that was a fun grace note to have.

——-No. I mean, Paul didn’t bring it up that he’d been involved in the Ripper case previously. We added that dimension to it.

Benicio Del Toro has been known to rewrite a script or two. Did he have a lot of notes for you?

(laughs). No, he didn’t. Not the script. Benny is sort of… the process in independent films is a little bit different than this sort of film. He didn’t rewrite anything but we had lots of conversations about his dialogue. He certainly wanted to plumb his lines and stuff like that. Not rewriting per se, but he had a lot of ‘Could I say it this way…?’ He’s a real professional.

Without giving too much away for the readers… there’s a big switch in how Lawrence becomes the werewolf.

I think as soon as you see Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are both in this film… (laughs). I think the audience gets some satisfaction about having their suspiciions confirmed. I think his sense of betrayal is a good thing. Rather than it just being (chuckles) Bela Legosi, just some guy who randomly bites him. I thought this was a good, meaningful melodrama.

Is it tough to do spoiler-dependent films these days?

Knowing that you’re going to be outed? (chuckles). Yes and no. I think it’d be much harder to pull off a Sixth Sense-style film these days that really depended upon that surprise. I think that would be very difficult to pull off now. On the other hand, if you’re creating enough engagement and suspense in the moment, you can know the outcome of a film. Something like Thirteen Days. You’re sitting in the theater so you know the world hasn’t blown up. But you can create tensions and suspense, and if you’re doing your job, in the moment people will forget that fact. ——–

—That’s the magic of it, that you can suspend disbelief there. Watching something that’s well-told you can forget that you already know certain aspects of it. There’s something anthropologically gratifyying about that to me. The yarn-weaving and the storytelling is the social, fun experience, not the knowledge itself.

Would you say this film is horror or more of an action-adventure story?

I think it’s a classic Universal monster movie. I think there’s a little bit of difference between a horror film and a monster movie. This has got that broader pallate that you’re talking about. I think it straddles that. It’s got horror elements in a bigger action-adventure film.

Last question. I know this sounds silly but… why one word? The original Chaney is two, The Wolf Man. Is that just some oddity that cropped up?

By the production! I’m so furious! (laughs) Every single draft and every single email I write to this day, I still write two words,”Wolf Man,” because I just can’t accept the fact that they’ve condensed the title. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know where it happened. It just was a spiral thing that began, I think, in the production. Somebody compressed it and I’ve fought against it. It’s not a silly question, it’s my pet jihad!

CS Horror interview screenwriting Self Wolf Man

October 28, 2011 / 4 Comments

Blaming the Victim

I’ve finally switched over to the new Blogger format. A bit torn on it, myself. Please let me know if you like it or not, because I can duplicate the old style, it just takes a bit of work.

Halloween is upon us, which means it’s time for me to do something horror-related here on the ranty blog. It’s a topic I’ve touched on once or thrice before. This time I thought I’d put a slightly different spin on it.

As some of you know, I spent last weekend up at ZomBCon in Seattle. It was eye-opening in several ways, and one of those ways (like any decent convention) was the people in costume. There were a lot of fantastic zombies and related beasties, but there were also a lot of zombie fighters—people with miniguns and machetes and body armor. Heck, one of my fellow Permuted Press authors, Eloise J. Knapp, showed up dressed to kill. Not in the fun way.

A lot of horror tends to focus on the enemy. My zombies are different from your zombies. Your vampires are different than my vampires. Neither of our axe-wielding, demonically-possessed psychopaths are like her axe-wielding, demonically-possessed psychopath. Horror can be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like sci-fi, comedy, or other art forms like sculpting or painting. Being labeled “horror” doesn’t mean Frankenstein is anything like The Descent, and neither of them resembles Paranormal Activity VII.

What I want to talk about, though, are the victims. Different types of antagonists define a story, true, but the same holds for the protagonist. While A vs. B makes one type of story, A vs. C is something different and D vs. G is another world altogether. So recognizing what type of characters I’m writing about can help me define what kind of story I’m writing, which helps me market it. If I tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. At the worst, they’ll remember me as “that idiot” when my next piece of work crosses their desk—even if I’ve fixed my mistakes since then.

Here’s a few types of horror stories and the people you often find in them.

Supernatural stories

Not talking about the television show, mind you.

The characters tend to be average folks in most supernatural stories. They’re not idiots, but they’re not millionaire Nobel winners or retired assassins. Almost universally, the main character of a supernatural story rarely comes to harm. They’ll need clean underwear, maybe have to dye their hair back to its natural color, and they probably won’t sleep well for a few months or years. Physically, however, they tend to come out okay. There might be some mental scarring, but that’s about it. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or a supporting character. Often, though, people have died in the past.

Slasher stories

These tales feature teenagers and young adults as their victim of choice. Lots of teenagers, out of which two at most might survive. A few people over the age of twenty-five may catch a machete, but ever since John Carpenter made the original Halloween (and it was horribly misunderstood and copied by dozens of filmmakers) it’s pretty much set in stone who the victims are in this sub-genre.

A key difference between slashers and torture porn stories (see below) is that the victims here have a chance to escape. It’s rare for the victim to die without hope or warning in a slasher film. There’s often a chase or at least a struggle. We get the sense that if Phoebe didn’t trip over that tree root or if Wakko hadn’t stopped to “deal with this guy” they might’ve gotten away. Heck if Dot just could’ve run a little faster she would’ve made it to the car and relative safety.

Monster stories

A monster story is about an unstoppable creature. Godzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so is Freddy Kruger (in his later films), a zombie horde, and the alien in Alien. I think the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that the filmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the ones before it.

As such, the focus of a monster story is usually to get away from the threat. Yeah, most horror movies involve running away. In a monster story, though, it’s immediately self-evident this is the best choice of action. Monster stories can have a lot of survivors because the monster, by its nature, is kind of attacking randomly. It never gets personal for them. The characters in a monster story are almost bystanders, swept up in the events and sometimes just left to watch from the sidelines.

Giant Evil stories

In these stories the characters are usually pathetic pawns at best, helpless victims at worst (well, from their point of view). Giant evil stories are close to monster stories in that the antagonistis just overwhelming. There are two big differences, though. One is there’s no way for characters to escape giant evil. It’s everywhere. Two is that giant evil rarely has a face. It may have minions or manifestations, but often it isn’t something characters can “find,” if that makes sense.

The characters in giant evil stories tend to be older and smarter. They’re not hormone-crazed teens, but very educated adults with a bit of life-wisdom under their belts. In my opinion, it’s because a large part of the horror here is realizing just how overwhelming the force against them is. It’s something a younger character usually isn’t quite up to grasping because they don’t have as much of a world to overturn.

Thrillers

Thrillers tend to focus on just one or two characters rather than a larger cast, so when people die they tend to be supporting characters or nameless folks in the background. A thriller is about what could happen, not what does happen, so the big threats have to stay looming. While characters in a thriller tend to be more active in a general sense, for the most part they’re reacting to the sinister plots and machinations going on around them.

Adventure Horror stories

To paraphrase from Hellboy, adventure horror is where the good guys bump back. While these stories may use a lot of tropes from the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the characters aren’t victims—they’re actively fighting back from the start. Not in a dumb, facing-off-against-Jason-Voorhees-with-a-baseball-bat way, but in a heavily-armed-armored-and-prepared way that has a degree of success.

It can still go bad for them (and often does), but these characters get to inflict some damage and live to tell the tale. For a while, anyway.

Torture porn

A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. By the time the characters know what’s going on (no matter how obvious it is to the reader) they’re already bound and drugged. They’re completely alone or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film (see above) there’s no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away. That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.

Torture porn walks a delicate line with its characters. If they’re bland and interchangeable, what happens to them is kind of meaningless. When was the last time you shed a tear for that broken chair in your back alley? However if we know these characters too well then their torture really does become truly unbearable and horrific to the point that it isn’t remotely entertaining. We cheer when people get killed in the Saw movies, but not when they’re killed in Schindler’s List.

I’ll also make the observation that characters tend to be one type or the other. It’s very rare to see such a dramatic character shift that Phoebe goes from being the complete victim to completely kick-ass. As has been said to death, the seeds are always there. Ripley may not gear up until the end of Aliens, but there are plenty of reminders all through it that she’s just as capable and resilient as any of the Colonial Marines—including the fact that she’s the only survivor of the first movie. When someone changes too much without any motivation they become inconsistent, and an inconsistent character’s a sure way to end up in that big pile on the left.

So, dwell on these points while you’re munching on the ill-gotten gains you score while trick-or-treating with your candy beard. Yeah, all of you with kids, you know what I’m talking about.

Next time, I’ve been going back and forth about what I want to do. I might just give a random quick tip. Or maybe I’ll talk about going back and forth.
Have a Happy Halloween. Don’t forget to write.

character Horror motives

October 14, 2011 / 4 Comments

God is My Co-Writer

So, a few years back one of my friends read for a religious-themed screenplay contest. And, when it got to the point that he was pulling his hair out, I pitched in and read a few scripts for him (I owed him money, anyway). It exposed me to a lot of stories about God, Jesus, various members of the heavenly host, and—to be terribly honest—a lot of really bigoted, small-minded people. Not all of them, by a long shot, but enough that it’s worth mentioning, unfortunately.

Two weeks back I asked for ideas, and one fellow (stand up and wave, Matthew) suggested the idea of approaching God, or any god, in a story. How can you do it without annoying readers while still doing justice to your chosen almighty?

And then, by yet another odd coincidence, on one of my favorite message boards, a few of us were recently batting around the film The Adjustment Bureau, which, in the big picture, is about… well, guess.

First off, a few grammar and spelling points. If we’re talking about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic deity, it’s always God. Capital G. This also holds if you choose to call him the Lord. It doesn’t matter if you or your character are an atheist or agnostic or whatever—this isn’t a religious point, it’s just standard, accepted spelling. This deity is considered the definitive article and as such his (if I may be so presumptuous) name is always capitalized. It’s a proper noun. The same goes for the Bible. If you’re referring to the religious text that encompasses the old and new testament, it’s the Bible. You only use lower case when you’re speaking about a generic book of absolute fact, like if I tell you that Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is my bible.

And, really, if you’re going to write about Biblical-era tales, check out the MLA Handbook, because there are a bunch of unique grammar and spelling rules that apply to these names.

All of which leads to point two. I’m not talking specifically about God in this week’s rant, because a lot of the folks reading this are just as interested in Greek gods, Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Chinese demons, and cosmic entities from beyond time. But when it comes to stories, they all deal with a lot of the same issues.

Now, speaking of definitive articles, I’d like to start with an analogy…

In Danse Macabre, King tells a wonderful story about hearing William F. Nolan (the writer behind Logan’s Run and the legendary Trilogy of Terror films) talk at a convention. Nolan explained horror in terms of a closet at the end of the hall in a creepy, old house. Maybe the hero or heroine can hear something bumping around in there from anywhere in the house, and every now and then it thumps as whatever it is in there knocks an item off a hanger or tips a box off a shelf. As he or she gets closer, perhaps they can hear it scratching on the inside of the closet door. Endless scratching, scratching, scratching…

Finally, despite all our silent urgings, the character reaches out, turns the knob, and yanks open the door to reveal a ten-foot tall cockroach!!!

Thing is, even with the screams and the hissing and the mood music blaring, it’s kind of a relief to see that oversized bug. A ten-foot cockroach is pretty scary, no question about it, but a twenty-foot cockroach… man, I don’t know about you but that’d make me wet my pants pretty quick. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. Once I know what X is, I can imagine a scarier Y and X is reduced by comparison.

In the same way that naming the unknown horror lessens it, deities are lessened by defining them. When a writer tries to explain or show the scope of a god’s power, more often than not they’re really just establishing the god’s limits. If you tell me your god burns with the light of a hundred suns, I can say mine burns with the light of a thousand. If yours is a thousand feet tall and moves mountains, mine is ten-thousand feet tall and moves continents. The more the writer tries to show me, the easier it is for me to imagine something bigger and better (or nastier).

A great example of this is The Omen. No, the original. We shall not mention the remake here. Without giving away too much (although, why don’t you know this story already?), The Omen is about a diplomat who adopts a little boy. The boy, Damien, might be the Antichrist. I say “might” because… well, the movie actually makes you wonder. There are definitely people who think he’s the Antichrist. There sure are a lot of accidents and disturbing events that circle around the little boy. But the thing is… he never does anything. His eyes never glow, he never speaks in a deep, stentorian voice, he doesn’t shoot flames or lightning from his hands. Damien comes across as nigh-omnipotent because it seems completely effortless for him to get to anyone, anywhere—and that what makes him all the more terrifying. Because he doesn’t actively do anything, how’s anyone supposed to stop him? And what will happen when he does start being active?

Y’see, Timmy, defining something in any way automatically minimizes it, because the moment it’s been defined we can think of something bigger. Think of the little kid who yells, “infinity” and immediately gets countered with “infinity-plus-one!”

That’s why it’s always best to leave such omnipotent beings in the shadows rather than dragging them out into the light. By their very nature, they’re vast, undefinable beings. Thus, the moment they get any sort of definition they’re being lessened.

So, here’s a few quick thoughts for including a deity in your story.

Don’t—The simplest thing to do. Is a personal appearance really required for this story to work? The members of Congress have a big effect on my life, but I’ve never seen a single one of them in person. Heck, the only messages I’ve gotten from them have been spam emails and robocalls. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t there influencing aspects of my existence, and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be impressed if one of their aides gave me a call to chat about something. Which leads nicely to…

Minions—Gods of any type are impossible to fight, so including them on either side of the story equation really unbalances things. But I believe someone could beat cultists or demons or maybe even an angel. These are the beings my characters should be encountering. Remember, you can almost never get to the CEO because there’s a wall of flunkies, advisors, junior execs, and bodyguards in the way.

Silence is Golden—They used this one way back in It’s A Wonderful Life, when Clarence the angel would have one-sided conversations with the sky. Neil Gaiman did it in both The Sandman and the wonderful Good Omens (with Terry Prachett). Kevin Smith did it in Dogma. Mere mortals can’t hear the voice of God and expect to survive, so the Lord speaks through a number of mediums… or not at all. Keep in mind, to pull this off—especially the one sided conversation—your dialogue needs to be sharp and you can’t fall back on clumsy devices like repeating everything the silent person says just to make it clear what your god hates.

Comedy—People are a lot more willing to accept divine intervention (of one kind or another) if it has a comedy element. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because when the writer’s not taking the matter seriously, it’s hard for people to have serious complaints. That’s why George Burns and Christopher Moore get away with mocking the man upstairs and The Last Temptation of Christ gets months of picketing. But this tone has to spread through your whole story. You can’t have your deity be the only source of comedy, because then you’re mocking him or her in the bad way.

Minimal Miracles—D’you ever hear the old saying about being so tough you don’t need to fight to prove it? More to the point, have you ever watched a movie where the bad-ass hero just fights and fights and fights and fights and fights? It gets boring, no matter how often he wins. Your omnipotent beings shouldn’t be expressing their power just to prove they can, because that power will start to get boring and take all the challenge out of the story one way or another. If everybody who dies gets brought back to life, what are people even fighting for?

Simply put… gods are the ultimate “less is more” when it comes to writing. The more a god—or demon, or cosmic entity—gets defined, the easier it is to name god-plus-one.

Next week… well, I’m going to miss next week. I’m one of the guests at ZomBCon up in Seattle. But when I come back, I’m sure I’ll have all sorts of scary and horrific things to talk about.

Until then, go write.

God Horror king nolan omen tips

October 29, 2010 / 1 Comment

The Fear-O-Meter

Hello, kiddies! Thanks for tuning in to my latest blog post-mortem!! Hehehehehheheeeee!!

Pop culture again. Ahhh, those were the days…

So, last year at this time I talked about a couple of the subgenres horror can be broken down into. It’s important to know which group your tale of terror sits best with so you know how to approach the different elements and the way they mesh together. Knowing this also helps to sell it and promote it.

By the same token, when you sit down to write something “scary,” it can help to know just what you’re hoping to accomplish. People get their heads cut off in the Saw movies, in Attack of the Clones, in The Man in the Iron Mask, and in A Mighty Heart, but these decapitations are all received in very different ways because of how their particular stories are being told. In the same way, Freddy Kruger has been a slasher, a monster, and a plain old villain, even though the character has barely changed at all. How, exactly, do you intend to scare your readers with this moment as opposed to that one? Or are they supposed to evoke the same kind of fear?

You can nitpick back and forth, but I think fear, as a sensation, generally breaks down into three basic categories. There’s a couple different names people use for them, but for our purposes today, let’s call them the shocker, the gross out, and dread. These three form the food pyramid of fear, if you will, which means using and combining them in the right ways can make a variety of tasty seasonal treats.

…starting to sound like a cooking blog…

Anyway…

The Shocker– This is when something unexpected happens and makes the audience jump. It’s the fear of what’s happening right at this moment. If you’ve ever watched someone read and seen their eyes bug, they probably just hit a shocker. Ever been in a theater when most everyone screams? Same thing. When someone walks around the camp cabin and Jason buries his machete in their skull, that’ll make you jump even watching a movie where you know people are going to get machetes in the skull. When Michael suddenly shoots Ana Lusia on LOST, that’s a shocker, too. Individual shocks can be stretched out a bit–especially on film– with lots of shouting and chaos and a few smaller shocks to keep it going, but really a shock is a short-lived thing.

The shocker is powerful, but it’s important for writers to remember it can’t stand on its own for long. As I’ve mentioned before, a good way to think of shocks is like exclamation points. You can use them! You can use a lot of them!!! But after a while, there needs to be something that actually requires emphasis! If not the shocks will start to lose power and your readers or audience will start to get bored!! Shocks eventually need something solid and lasting to support them.

The Gross-Out – As named by the King himself. It’s when things are just disgusting. This is when the writer’s trying to tap into the reader’s sense of revulsion and maybe even induce some nausea. It’s when we spend two or three pages on someone getting their limbs sawed off or just eating a peanut butter and maggot sandwich, where the little sour-milk colored larva are eating their own paths through the spread before getting crushed against the roof of the mouth by someone’s tongue. The gross out usually differs from the shocker because of duration. While a shock gets weak the longer the writer tries to prolong it, a gross out can actually gain strength as it goes on and on (and thus, torture porn was born). Go too long or too frequently, though, and audiences will get bored with the gross out just like anything else.

An interesting point is that the audience often (but not always) knows the gross out is coming. We don’t linger on it, but it rarely comes out of nowhere.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of gross-out stuff moves closer to dread when it isn’t described at length. Speaking of Stephen King, we all remember the lovely “hobbling” scene in Misery, yes? What’s happening almost takes second place to Annie calmly explaining what she’s doing and why she’s doing it… even in the middle of the procedure.

Dread – This is when something doesn’t happen, but we know it could. It’s fear of potential events, if that makes sense. You could also call this suspense or perhaps terror (if you wanted to nitpick). We’re waiting and waiting because we know something’s going to reach out from under the bed or crawl out of the closet and the fact that it hasn’t yet is giving us the chills. Pennywise the Clown gives us anxiety because we know he isn’t just a clown and it’s very wrong for him to be down in those sewer drains. Hannibal Lecter is creepy just sitting in his cell talking about the things he’s done in the past. And the zombie Julie Walker is kind of hot, but you also know she’s on that razor’s edge of probably eating everyone in the room (and not in the fun way). Dread works well in larger tales because there’s space for eerie backstories, but a good writer can also make it function in tighter spaces.

There’s two catches that come with dread. One is that it relies on the writer having a very solid grasp of how the audience is going to react and what they’re going to know. If I tell you there’s a Strigori knocking at the front door, most of you are going to shrug your shoulders and open up. Likewise, I may find ketchup disturbing, but I shouldn’t assume everyone’s skin is going to crawl at the sight of it. Paint the creepy stuff on too thin or to vague and the audience just won’t get it and they’ll be bored. Paint it to thick and they’ll be angry you assumed they weren’t going to get it. If the shocker is a hammer, suspense is the scalpel of fear.

Tying back to that, dread also relies on the audience having… well, not to sound crass, but it depends on a certain level of intelligence and involvement. If you try explaining climate change to a chimpanzee, you’ll notice they don’t get too worried about it–assuming they sit there for your whole lecture. It makes me sound old, I know, but part of the challenge with dread these days is the shortening of people’s attention spans. If people keep switching channels, walking away, twitting, or texting, they’re not getting involved in the story. Without that involvement, it’s very hard to build a sense of dread.

Also worth noting that dread needs good characters more than the other two types. We need to be able to identify with what a character’s going through. If we can’t, this is a news report, not a story.

Once you know just what you’re trying to do, it’s easy to see how each one works and how they can work with each other. Campfire stories are often little suspense tales that build to a shock in the same way jokes build to a punchline. A lot of the ‘80s slasher films would start with a touch of suspense, jump to shock, and then dive headfirst into the gross-out. Alfred Hitchcock could drag suspense out for ages, but knew a good shock or two could make a film unforgettable.

(mother, please. I’m trying to work on my blog. No mother, it’s not one of those websites, it’s for good people…)

Anyway…

Next time is mostly for the budding screenwriters. Some of you found out last week that you didn’t get one of the 2010 Nicholl Fellowships, yes? I’m willing to bet that no one reading this did, but I’m also sure some of you didn’t try for one. Let’s talk about why you didn’t get one.

Until then, go hand out candy. Oh, and write between trick or treaters.

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