WARNING – THERE MAY BE SOME SPOILERS IN THIS POST
Horror is one of the few genres named after the effect it wants to have on you. A romance does not promise to make you fall in love. Horror, by contrast, announces its intentions in its name. Week two of Writing in Different Genres was about how a writer goes about keeping that promise.
In week one, Phil Parker’s model defined horror as a story about avoiding death or mental torture. I spent the intervening week watching the 1933 King Kong, reading Conor McPherson’s The Weir, and quietly muttering that the definition was too broad. Avoiding death is the engine of every war film and disaster movie ever made, and neither genre sends you home checking the stairs.
Pleasingly, the session opened by widening the frame. Horror is about surviving death and annihilation, yes, but it is equally about the audience and their fear. The genre’s job is to frighten the people in the seats as well as the people on the screen. Stephen King’s formulation was offered as the brief: make us feel terrified, horrified or grossed out. Fear is primal, and horror goes straight for the amygdala, the brain’s danger sensor, with its four responses of fight, flight, freeze and fawn. A horror writer is, in effect, writing for an organ that predates language.
The lineage is old. Medusa was doing horror long before cinema, but much of the genre’s modern furniture is Victorian: Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula gave us the creature, the corrupted portrait, the divided self and the thing at the window. Vengeful persecution, imprisonment and murder have been on the menu ever since.
The horror writer’s toolkit
The bulk of the session laid out the core elements of a horror story, and it read like a parts list for a machine designed to manufacture dread.
The opening usually establishes a normal world we recognise and feel safe in, so that its corruption registers. Some stories skip this and start strange, as Shaun of the Dead and Prevenge do. The journey then takes us from the safe place to the dark one, and the monster comes from somewhere beyond: a mystical place, a broken mind, another dimension. The journey can also run in reverse, with the monster invited in. Vampires are famously fussy about this.
Ominous signs do the quiet work. There is the wise peasant or slightly odd local who issues a warning nobody heeds, and a pervasive sense that the world is out of sorts. These signs are what make the climax believable when it arrives. The scary place exploits our perverse attraction to danger, and the most effective ones are often domestic: the cellar, the stairs, the child’s bedroom.
Then come the creatures and the people who fight them. The monster can live inside a character, as in body horror, and it need not look frightening at all. Norman Bates is a charming young man who runs a motel. Children’s toys turn up so often because childhood is where our first fears are formed. The expert arrives to help defeat the monster but can become a burden, as Van Helsing and the priests of The Exorcist both demonstrate. The chase belongs to the final act, either at full sprint or at an unstoppable walking pace, with the point of view switching between monster and victim. The final girl earns our protectiveness and usually outwits the threat, a lineage that runs back to Little Red Riding Hood. And the exorcism supplies the ritual, since most horror is, in one form or another, a fight with the devil.
Where the writer stops
The most useful thread for me was a running distinction between the writer’s job and the director’s. Lighting, camera and score carry much of horror’s atmosphere, and a screenwriter who starts dictating them has overstepped the line. The writer’s clues must be planted through character and world.
Sound is the clearest case. Writers should think about sound in every script: the sounds of the environment and the sounds characters make. What they should not write is the musical underscore or the effects track. Silence, we were reminded, is just as important as noise. The jump scare is similar. It breaks a moment of suspense with something frightening, but it does not alter the story, which is why directors often add them in. A writer can still design one, and dream sequences are a natural home for it.
The principle underneath all of this is rhythm. Sustained fear is unmanageable, and an audience held at maximum tension for too long simply switches off. The craft is in building many moments of suspense, often by planting a doubt about whether the danger is real at all, and releasing them at the right intervals. It is closer to signal processing than I expected: the scare is only as loud as the quiet that precedes it.
A story is a question with an answer
The second half turned from genre to structure, using King Kong as the specimen. The framing was simple and, I think, right: a story is a series of questions and answers, and the ending reveals what the story was about all along.
The three-act anatomy runs as follows. The opening ten minutes introduce the main characters, the world, the genre, the theme and an opening story question that the ending must answer. The inciting incident creates the central problem the climax will solve. A plan of action carries the characters to the end of Act 1, where a turning point complicates things and reveals what the story is really about. The midpoint can change direction, or show the protagonist glimpsing the true problem and choosing to ignore it. The end of Act 2 is the emotional low point, from which a new plan emerges. The climax solves the central problem, and in a character-driven story it dramatises how the protagonist has changed in order to do so. A final revelation and a resolution then answer the opening question and tie off the threads.
One observation struck the physicist in me: the inciting incident and the climax sit at the same distance from the beginning and the end of the film. That distance varies from story to story, but the symmetry holds. It is a conservation law of sorts.
Here is how the two homework texts map onto that anatomy, as discussed in class:
| Beat | King Kong (1933) | The Weir (1997) |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | The ship, Denham and his secretive next film, and the mini-story of how he finds and casts Ann | The bar is set up; talk of the summer “Germans”; exposition about Finbar and the woman renting Maura’s house |
| Opening question | What is the Beast, and will Beauty conquer it? | Will the ghost stories ruin their friendship? |
| Inciting incident | Denham reveals where they are going, and the legend of Kong | Finbar arrives with Valerie, about twelve minutes in on the radio version |
| Central problem | Bringing back the picture, and then Ann (my reading) | How to entertain and impress the new guest |
| End of Act 1 | Ann taken and offered to Kong (my placement) | Jack teases Finbar into telling his story |
| Act 2 | The rescue party goes after Ann; the midpoint comes on the lake with the first dinosaur | Finbar’s story, then Jim’s, each with more drink and more turf on the fire; then Valerie’s |
| Low point | Kong breaks loose in Manhattan (my reading) | Valerie’s story: the darkest moment of the evening |
| Climax and resolution | Men rescue Ann and Driscoll; humans defeat Kong | Finbar leaves, Jim with him; Jack tells his true story; life goes on, the Germans are coming |
The tutor also pointed to a romance subplot running in its own three acts through King Kong, which is a reminder that a subplot is a full story wearing a smaller coat.
Desire, or why we open the door
My own contribution to the discussion was an argument that horror is fundamentally sensual, in two senses: it works through the senses, and in some cases it could erotic, bound up with the desire to stay young and live forever for example. Having slept on it, I think the instinct was right and the formulation was loose.
The first half needs sharpening. Every film works through the senses, so that alone does not make horror distinctive. What does is that horror turns the senses against the audience. It withholds, with darkness, silence and the thing just off-screen. It distorts, as in the tilted world of Caligari. It overloads, as Suspiria does. The Weir is almost entirely aural: knocking low on a door, wind under it, a voice on a phone line. The fear lives in hearing without seeing.
The sexual half is strong for a good many films. Vampires are seduction. Cat People makes arousal itself the monster. The slasher punishes desire with almost liturgical regularity, and King Kong has its bride ritual and its “beauty killed the beast”. But zombies, Jaws and The Babadook resist that premise by and large. The stronger thesis is desire, with sex as one case of it:
| Desire | Example | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual | Dracula, Cat People, King Kong | The body is invaded or consumed |
| Appetite | Zombies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre | You become the meal |
| Youth and immortality | Dorian Gray, Eyes Without a Face, Get Out | Someone else’s life |
| Curiosity | Lovecraft, the Ouija board, the forbidden place | Your sanity |
| Love for the dead | Pet Sematary, Valerie in The Weir | The dead return wrong, or not at all |
This reminded me of the Freudian concept to the unheimlich, which is not simply the unfamiliar; it is the homely made strange, the thing that ought to have stayed hidden and has come to light. It is also the return of beliefs we think we have outgrown. We no longer believe the dead come back, but we are not entirely sure, and horror lives in that gap. Read through desire, the genre’s oldest rule makes sense: the monster has to be invited in. Horror makes its victims complicit, and seduction is the mechanism. The audience is complicit too. We pay to go into the house.
The Weir bears this out: the most powerful desire in the play is Valerie’s wish for her daughter to still exist and still need her. She wants the ghost to be real, and that wish is the most frightening thing in the room. King Kong‘s remakes make the same point from the other side. As each successive version strips out the erotic threat, the woman’s terror turns to tenderness, then to companionship, and the films stop being horror.