Writing Horror is Scary Business

For my summer semester, which will complete my additional screenwriting emphasis for my M.F.A. in Creative Writing, it was left up to me to decide what project I would like to work on, either feature film or television series. Since it is my final semester and I’ve already written both, it’s kind of a “whatever you want to do next” scenario. I’ve written a spec television script, for The Odd Couple, created an original television series, Unhappily Ever After, and written the pilot episode for it, as well as written two full features, one action, Across the Border, and one bio-pic, Bonnie. I’ve tried my hand at writing comedy with the television scripts, and I’ve delved into a couple of different genres in film. Now, I want to try my hand at horror. I’ve loved horror films since I was a kid. This summer, I want to write a monster in the house that will keep viewers awake until the wee hours of the morning.

If you’re writing a comedy, you write jokes and hope somebody laughs at them. But, how does one write scary? I think it is as much of a challenge as trying to make people laugh. The movie was pretty lame, but if you’ve read the book, The Blair Witch Project, you know that the story is actually pretty scary. When I read it, it left me with an eerie feeling that brought it back to the forefront of my thoughts for several days after. They had a good story, but they didn’t do it justice on the screen. That’s when I started thinking about how I might write a screenplay that would leave viewers with that same eerie feeling.

Robin Conley, who shares writing tips here, in her “Weekly Writing Memo”, did a three post series on writing horror on her own blog, Author the World. In her first post, The 3 Acts of Horror Stories, she talks about introducing the monster, increasing the threat, and the final face-off. No matter what kind of horror story you are writing, there must be some kind of monster, even if it’s the human kind, or the spectral kind. The bigger and meaner and scarier the monster is, the greater the threat for the characters. I definitely want a monster that will keep the tension ratcheted up and keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

In his book, Save the Cat Goes to the Movies, Blake Snyder points out that our monsters must be “evil” and the more that is at stake for our characters the scarier the monster must be. He suggests, “This is also why the tiny spiders in Arachnophobia, or the ones that can be dispatched with a baseball bat in Signs or die of the sniffles in War of the Worlds, are so unsatisfying.”¹ And, I must admit, he’ got a point. Although I have always had a fear of spiders, in Arachnophobia it’s hard to be too worried about the characters, because this is a monster which can be easily escaped. The characters could get up and leave, or just step on the damn spiders, or buy a can of Raid™, for heaven’s sake.

I will definitely make my monster bigger than a spider. My monster will be of the supernatural, other worldly type, because they leave more to the imagination. Supernatural monsters can appear in many different forms, so you have open possibilities for making them really scary.

In her second post on writing horror, 4 Elements of Horror, Robin talks about how setting, senses, contrast, and imagination are important elements in horror, making your scarier by increasing tension and creating anticipation. It’s easy to see how the setting affects tone and sets expectations. A graveyard is definitely a scarier setting than a botanical garden. Although you could make a botanical garden scary by placing scary stuff within, a graveyard comes scary and you don’t have to anything to create a scary atmosphere and tone.

Blake Synder says, “the more cramped the space – the more isolated our heroes – the better.”² That’s what the term he coined for this type of movie, Monster in the House, is all about. The characters must be trapped with the monster in some defined space, be it a house, or an island, or an isolated cabin in the woods. In The Shining, it’s a secluded hotel. In Cabin in the Woods, it’s, you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s an area surrounding the house and extends to include the whole town. Going back to the example of Arachnophobia, if the characters can just get up and walk away from the monster, there isn’t much of a challenge.

One of the scariest movies to me, when I was young, was Legend of Hill House, and later there was Amityville Horror and Rose Red. To me these were even scarier than the slasher movies, like Halloween or Scream. Since my monster is of the supernatural kind, it seems only natural that my setting would be a haunted house. In haunted house movies, the setting becomes a character, in fact it becomes your antagonist. It’s not easy to battle against a house, or a ghost in a house for that matter.

Robin also mentions using the senses to create tension. Screenwriting is a visual medium, and certainly characters can see things which are scary, but you can also use other senses to your advantage. It’s not hard to see how scary sounds could be worked in to your story, but there are also ways to work in the other senses, and is a good trick if you can pull it off. Obviously, you cannot make the audience smell the scent of freshly dug earth, but you can have a character comment on the odor and, thus clue the viewers into the fact that such a smell is present. Ditto with the sense of touch. If you are clever, there are ways to do this.

This will come in handy for me, because spectral monsters may not always be visible, but their presence can often be detected by a smell or odor that accompanies them. If you’ve ever walked through a room and detected the faint odor of perfume or pipe tobacco for just a moment, and then it was gone, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s as if someone just walked through the room, but when no one did, it’s kind of creepy. Feelings, such as chills or cold spots in a room are also known to often accompany specters.

Robin talks about balancing the horror elements, presentation and the stakes, in her third post, 3 More Elements of Horror. Not only do you need to have all the elements Robin mentions in her posts in a horror story, but you need to present them in a way that will give the audience the urge to hide their eyes, yet be unable to resist peeking through their fingers because even though it’s scary, they need to see what happens.

This is accomplished, I think, by having the right combination of horror elements and lulls in the storm, and by starting out small and building the tension and increasing the stakes in increments. At first, your characters may not take the threat seriously, but as more and more things happen and the severity of each event increases methodically, it forces them to eventually admit that something is amiss. You can even throw in some false alarms in the beginning to make it feel like there’s danger before there really is, but be cautious with this one. You want to build tension, but too many disappointments may cause viewers to lose interest before the real fun begins.

In her first post, Robin talks about having a death in the first act, perhaps as a catalyst to send your hero on his journey into the second act, where his normal life will be turned upside-down. She mentions that you want to do this in screenplays where the monster is of the serial killer kind and the threat needs to be established right up front, but I feel this puts the writer at a disadvantage, because there’s no bigger threat to build up to. Maybe this is an advantage of the supernatural monsters. There are so many little things you can do to build up tension and increase the threat little by little.

Blake Snyder also says that there must be some kind of sin, committed by at least one of the characters, which brings the monster down upon them. In a lot of horror movies, it is greed, a lust for money, which prompts them to go where they don’t belong or awakens the monster. In Friday the 13^th, it is sex. The councilors were off doing the wild thing when Jason drowned, and the new councilors’ presence arouse his mother’s anger just by being at the camp. In Witchboard, the characters play around with the Ouija board and summon the monster, and in Nightmare on Elm Street, the kids get to pay for the sins of their parents. I plan to fall back on the good old dependable sins, greed and ambition, for my screenplay.

I don’t think you need a lot of blood and violence for a movie to be scary. I believe that if I play on the primal fears of my viewers, I can make a movie so scary, they’ll be wetting their pants. But I guess I won’t know until I write the darn thing, so I’d better get to work, and we’ll see if I can succeed in my goal to make a good old fashioned scary movie for modern times.

1. Save the Cat Goes to the Movies. Synder, Blake. McNaughton & Gunn, Inc. 2007. p. 3

       2. Save the Cat Goes to the Movies. Synder, Blake. McNaughton & Gunn, Inc. 2007. p. 3

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Writing Comedy for the Screen is a Risky Proposition

You read that headline right. Writing comedy for the screen is a scary business in this day and age, when every time you open your mouth, or your characters’ mouths, you risk offending someone, somewhere. Seriously.

Last semester, for my original pilot series, I created a series that takes place in a backwards fairytale land, where the fairytales are all wrong, called Unhappily Ever After. My main character, Cassandra, who is stuck there, tries to fix the fairytales in hopes that by doing so, she will find a way to get home. In my pitch, I listed ideas for several more episodes to show my idea could be sustained for thirteen episodes, or at least one season. In the notes my instructor sent back, he pointed out that I could be in trouble with my idea for my second episode, where one of the things that must be fixed is that a prince falls for Cass’s geeky sidekick and she has to find a way to make him fall in love with his princess, so the story can end with its happily ever after.

My instructor felt that I would be portraying a gay relationship as something that “needed fixing”, and that it might be offensive, although it would be clear that the reason it was “wrong” in the episode wasn’t that they were gay or bi, but that the prince and princess must marry, because that’s the way the fairytale goes. It’s funny, but it’s not intended to make fun of gays, or saying anything negative about being gay.

The episode ideas I listed flowed from one episode to the next and this second episode was designed to follow off the story line from the pilot episode, picking up right where we left off the week before, and the third episode would pick up from the second episode. To change that one idea would be to change the entire series story line, and I didn’t want to change it. My response to him was that no matter what you say these days, someone will be offended.

And I meant it. It’s true.

Not long after that, I saw a t-shirt advertised on Facebook that said, “You find it offensive, but I just think it’s funny”, and I realized that shirt summarizes the whole problem. I grew up with blonde jokes, and I loved them. Does that mean I believe the stereotype about blondes being lower on the IQ? No. I like blonde jokes because I find them to be funny. Now days if I tell a blonde joke, it’s almost certain that somewhere out there, there will be a blonde who will be offended, and then watch out. And half of those who are offended are likely to be bleached blonde, but they’ll identify as blonde and be offended, just the same.

In the past, bigoted characters like Archie Bunker endured because he was funny. You didn’t have to agree with his character to laugh at his jokes. Archie’s humor may even have helped to break down many stereotypes and biased thinking, because the Archie Bunker character was so extreme, that the ridiculousness of the opinions he expressed was apparent. Today, they broadcast things on television that would make my grandparents cringe, but when it comes to humor, you have to walk a thin line, for fear of being offensive.

In Hollywood, we’re hearing cries for more diversity in the industry, but as a writer, I hesitate to create a diverse character, for fear that when I reference them, it will be politically incorrect, especially when the politically correct terms change from day to day. When I was growing up, those with darker coloring were called Negros. In my twenties, the term to use was black. Now, I think it’s African American, but it may have changed again and I just haven’t got the memo. I’ve never been much for political correctness anyway. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’ve always been a bit of a rebel. According to my instructor, that needs to change or I won’t sell my script. The studios may not be willing to take a chance on something that might be offensive.

My point is that, no matter what term I use or how I portray my character, there’s no offense meant.  It may be easier to write comedy for a stand-up routine than it is to write comedy for television, because stand-up comedians can poke fun at themselves and that’s okay. Nobody will be offended if a Jewish guy gets up on stage and jokes about what it was like to grow up in a Jewish household, or a Latino woman pokes fun at the Cinco de Mayo festival. If I go by that rule, I can only poke fun at poor white trash and starving artists.

The thing about writing for television though, is the audience can’t tell if the writer of the low rider joke is Latino, and therefore immune to public scrutiny. Where I might use it to my advantage is in writing diverse characters. When the Asian characters of Fresh Off the Boat fun at Asian culture, or the African American characters of Black-ish joke about being “brothers”, no one gets offended. It’s okay for Max and Caroline to make jokes about the female anatomy because they’re female, even though the persons writing the jokes may not be. We don’t see the writers, so it doesn’t matter. The humor is funny, so we give ourselves permission to laugh. The characters are joking about themselves, so it’s okay.

It seems to me the basic problem here, is we, as a society have become so over-sensitive about stereotypes, that we are now limited as to what it is acceptable to laugh at. For a culture that prides ourselves with open mindedness and acceptance of other cultures, it seems to me that we’re pretty uptight. In order to embrace our differences, don’t we have to be able to laugh at them, and ourselves?

I think, as writers, we have to realize something. No matter what you write or what your characters say, somebody somewhere is going to be offended. Unfortunately, the people in the business who make the decisions about which shows get made and which don’t need to realize this, too. Right now, they are all so afraid of offending, that they may be passing up shows, like mine, which may be genuinely funny. As a society, we need to lighten up and give ourselves permission to laugh again, at ourselves and at each other. We need to get our collective sense of humor back.

A Writer’s Life is No Bowl of Cherries

So, you want to be a writer.

This is something I’ve aspired to for years. With the emergence of the Internet, things shifted radically, and today, there are more opportunities for writers than ever before and submitting your work is often as simple as a few keystrokes and an attachment. This is good for me, the aspiring writer, right? Well… maybe. The thing is, as I look around today, as I browse social media sights and check out Facebook groups, I find I’m not the only one trying to take advantage of all the new and emerging possibilities out there. Everybody andtheir brother seems to be calling themselves a writer and they’re all trying to take advantage of the numerous ways which are now available to get their words into print. After completing a M.F.A. program in Creative Writing and learning a few things about the business, I have to ask myself, why? Why does anyone want to be a writer? Why do I want to be a writer?

It certainly isn’t because I think I’m going to become rich and famous from the crafting of words. Only a select few ever become a household name from their books, and if there’s one thing I learned while going through my graduate coursework, it’s how the world of traditional publishing works. If I’m ever lucky enough to have a publisher pick up one of my books, I’d better hope for one that gives an advance, and many don’t, because unless my work goes viral and sells a million copies, that’s probably all the money I will ever see from it. What I didn’t realize before I got my graduate degree was how the system really works. With enough royalties, a person could theoretically, live comfortably for years to come, but what a lot of people don’t realize, what I didn’t realize, was that you don’t see any royalties from your book until you have sold enough copies to pay off whatever advance you receive. That means your book must do really, really well in order for you to see any profit. So, the chances of getting rich from your writing through traditional publishing avenues are quite slim.

With the emergence of the Internet came the self-publishing boom. It started with vanity presses and P.O.D. publishers, like Lulu, and progressed with the birth of the e-book through Amazon and Smashwords, to name only two of the many e-publishers out there today. Amazon makes self-publishing in electronic format look very tempting, offering a much higher percentage of royalties than traditional publishers. Surely, if you’re making 70% on every book you sell, you have to come out better than the minute percentages traditional publishers offer, right? Not necessarily. I’ve asked several of the independent authors who I know, and most are making very little off their books. You see, the book has to sell before you can make any money of it, and with the market swarming with new titles and more coming out every day, independent publishing is a tough road to take. Independent authors can’t rely on their publisher to promote their work and develop marketing strategies for their book, because they don’t have one. They are writer, publisher and agent for their work. They must fill all these roles themselves, and it is both difficult and time consuming work to get the word out about your book. Certainly for some it pays off, but the majority of independent authors are lucky to sell even twenty copies.

Of course, part of the appeal of being a writer is the idea of being your own boss, making your own schedule, working from home in your pajamas if you choose. But, I believe most writers today, whether traditionally or independently published, live the life of the starving artist, scrambling for work, or for a publisher, or for an agent to get them a publisher. I certainly am. I try and try, shrugging off one rejection letter, or e-mail, after another, always holding out hope that the next one I open will be an acceptance. Occasionally, my perseverance pays off and I do get something published, an article or short story, or maybe a poem. But I still have to ask myself why I endeavor to persevere if not for the money?

I think many of us who strive to become writers do so because there exists a creative force within us that needs to be expressed, a story that must be told. We are creatives, and when an idea or image takes hold of us, there is no pushing it to the side until we pound it out on our keyboards, or scribble it out on a notepad, or a napkin, or whatever is at hand. The urge to create is a part of who we are. It’s as much a part of our beings as are our preferences in music or favorite foods. And a large part of the appeal of being a writer is the desire to share our creations with others. Why else would we keep pounding away at our keyboards, submitting our work in the face of repeated rejections, and laying our souls on the line?

I’m not saying it isn’t possible to make a living from your writing. Certainly there are authors out there who do. But, it isn’t the stereotypical write in your p.j.s, make your own schedule, and party until the early morning hours that we may have come to believe a writer’s life is. No, my friends. It is hard work. It is writing until you can’t see the words on the page, hustling to meet deadlines, selling yourself and your work at every opportunity, continuing to submit in the face of rejection, and searching your soul to make every word you put on the page ring true. That’s the life of a writer, and it’s no bowl of cherries, but it’s what we want more than anything, because the words must flow out of us onto the page. I say that’s why we write. What about you? Why do you write?

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