H!""!R#$"%%&'"()(&*The Nature of Fear

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M I C H A E L W I E S E P R O D U C T I O N S

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!"#$%&'(&)'*!%*!+INTRODUCTION BY SPECIAL EFFECTS ARTIST GENE WITHAM . . . . . . viii

PREFACE: THE EDUCATION OF THE HORROR SCREENWRITER

(AND WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

,-&"&./01%1&!'/2&'(&3%$$ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1Before Jigsaw, Leatherface, Freddy, and Jason, there was Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman. Early horror film masters such as James Whale and William Castle paved the way for Monsters, Atomic Monsters, and the Monster Next Door. Then came Satan, Slashers, and Sequels Galore.

! Get a crash course in the history of horror films from the days of Edison up to the twenty-first century.

! Learn how trends in society and culture shaped films that, in turn, influenced other horror films around the world.

4-&!3%&*"!/2%&'(&(%"2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Besides death and taxes there are a few other universal things in life. Fear is one of those other ones that nobody mentions, like the cousin in prison. In order to scare people, you have to know what creates fear.

! Learn where all fear comes from and what it means to you as a writer.

! Discover what scares you and how to use it in your own stories.

! We’ll start forming our ideas for a story and begin the process of putting it to paper.

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Guns, knives, flamethrowers — all those are well and good. But if you don’t have your trusty writing imple-ment, you can’t write home about how you finished off those hordes of zombies.

! A quick run-down of the types of horror that are out there.

! We nail down what kind of horror story ours is. ! The tools of the screenwriting trade.

;-&$"70*.&1'<*&7'/2&+)%*%+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Horror, suspense, thrills and chills. You’ll need them all to make your scenes engaging and keep the story moving.

! Learn about pacing and how to keep the tension and scares going all the way to the end.

! Avoiding the “talking heads” problem. ! We continue with our story by developing the

first fifteen pages of the script.

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Dialogue in any kind of film is worth having. Find out how you can make it better and make your characters more believable, even while being chased by an axe-wielding maniac through the woods.

! What dialogue is and isn’t in a screenplay and how to use it properly.

! How to say more with less. ! Know when to listen to your characters speak. ! Examples of “before and after” dialogue tweaking

that make the story flow better.

?-&!3%&$0(%&'(&"&3'22'2&)3"2")!%2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Creating a character in a horror script can be as chal-lenging as it is in any other genre — or even more so.

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Here we go through the process of characterization in a horror story.

! Plotting out a character’s lifeline throughout the story.

! Knowing your characters’ places and why horror has disposable ones.

! Understand how plot points are created by or are affected by characters’ actions.

@-&)'96$%!0*.&!3%&(02+!&12"(! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Most screenplays don’t make it because the writer simply stops. Here we discuss how to keep the story alive and fresh, and ways you can adapt these tech-niques into your own routines.

! Avoiding some of the more common pitfalls in screenwriting.

! Adding extra twists and turns. ! Ratcheting up tension and suspense. ! Why getting the first draft done is more impor-

tant than being correct.

A-&%>%27!30*.&%$+%B&!06+&"*1&!20)C+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

All of the general tips and wisdom on screenwriting that can help you in the process.

! Copyrighting your work. ! Getting an agent or manager. ! Know what you’re getting into with

screenwriting. ! How to measure your story’s velocity in a quan-

tifiable manner.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

FILMOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

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C h a p t e r O n e

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#efore Jigsaw, there were Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Before those two were slicing and dicing up teenagers, there were

Michael Myers and Leatherface. And long before either of them, there were Dracula, the Wolfman, Doctor Frankenstein, and his monster. And before all of them, there was Nergal, Lord of Death.

Horror has, among all of the genres in film and written works, one of the longest, most distinguished, and often misunderstood bloodlines in his-tory. It is often overlooked by critics who don’t see anything more than blood and guts on the screen, or a collection of cheap scares. But what is most often missed is its commentary on society and life in general.

This genre also has a unique ability to show, in a frank, explicit manner, the ills of society and be a warning to us if we don’t do something about it. This is where we can get away with showing some of the ugliest, most disgusting things. We can explore that shadowy side of human nature that many people would rather have swept under the rug. And people will pay money to see it!

Before films were invented, the horror genre already had a long history in myth, folklore, short stories, novels, dime novels and just about anything else that could be written, printed, or told on a dark night in front of a fire. But how did anyone ever think of making a horror movie?

The invention of movies by Thomas Edison was seen at first as just a passing fad, nothing that was going to be of importance. After all, pictures and film had been around for a long time. Although Edison had figured out a way to make pictures move — and at first, it was exciting to see a person walk about, do a dance, flex some muscles — those clips became boring really quickly. But soon early filmmakers had the idea to make moving pic-tures tell a story, and Edison created one of the earliest film stories in The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first Western, shot in New Jersey.

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The French fell in love with the invention of the movie camera and almost instantly saw the potential of the machine mixed with the arts. In 1896, the first horror film was shot. It was only three minutes long but it proved that fear could be contained and retold countless times. The Devil’s Castle scared its audience and gave them a taste of what horror films would be in the future.

The art of film progressed, and along with it, horror films were one of the genres that progressed at a good pace.

German Expressionism was an important art movement of the early twentieth century that had a great influence on all film, but especially on the beginnings of horror. Expressionism was an artistic style that depicted subjective emotions rather than objective reality — “through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, vio-lent, or dynamic” way using formal elements.1

One of the most memorable and influential films was the 1920 German silent movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

From Wikipedia, on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 2 —“The film tells the story of the deranged Dr. Caligari and his faith-

ful sleepwalking Cesare and their connection to a string of murders in a German mountain village, Holstenwall. Caligari presents one of the earli-est examples of a motion picture ‘frame story’ in which the body of the plot is presented as a flashback, as told by Francis.

The narrator, Francis, and his friend Alan visit a carnival in the village where they see Dr. Caligari and Cesare, whom the doctor is displaying as an attraction. Caligari brags that Cesare can answer any question he is asked. When Alan asks Cesare how long he has to live, Cesare tells Alan that he will die tomorrow at dawn — a prophecy that turns out to be fulfilled.

Francis, along with his girlfriend Jane, investigates Caligari and Cesare, which eventually leads to Jane’s kidnapping by Cesare. Caligari orders Cesare to kill Jane, but the hypnotized slave relents after her beauty cap-tivates him. He carries Jane out of her house, leading the townsfolk on a lengthy chase. Francis discovers that ‘Caligari’ is actually the head of the local insane asylum, and with the help of his colleagues discovers 1 Encyclopædia Britannica Online Library Edition, “Expressionism,” http://www.library.eb.com/eb/article-9033453 (accessed 10 March 2009).2 Wikipedia, “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Dr._Caligari

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that he is obsessed with the story of a medieval Dr. Caligari, who used a somnambulist to murder people as a traveling act.

Cesare falls to his death during the pursuit and the townsfolk discover that Caligari had created a dummy of Cesare to distract Francis. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari breaks down and reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum.” The pivotal twist ending reveals that Francis’ flashback is instead his fantasy, and the man he claims is Caligari is in fact his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the source of his patient’s delusion, claims to be able to cure him.

Soon after Dr. Caligari, other great European horror films were released, cementing the structure of the genre. In 1921 a Hungarian film called The Death of Dracula, the first vampire movie, was made, the first of many adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel.

In 1922 Nosferatu was produced from an unauthorized film adapta-tion of Stoker’s novel. It was shot on location and because of copyright problems, the vampire was named Nosferatu rather than Dracula and the location was changed from Transylvania to Bremen. In 2000, a film called Shadow of the Vampire was made that explored the question of what would happen if the central character, played by Max Schreck, were a real vampire.

Max Schreck as Graf Orlok in Nosferatu (1922).

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Of course, the legend of Faust was brought into play as a movie in 1913 with Student of Prague. A student makes a pact with the devil for wealth and women. (It sounds like a pact made every week before final exams at any college or university in the United States.)

The Jewish story of the Golem was also used in early monster movies, such as in The Monster of Fate (1914) and the remake in 1917, The Golem and the Dancer. These were interesting stories of a man-like creature made of clay, bought to life by a secret Hebrew prayer placed into its mouth, based on the idea that God, or rather the secret prayer, can create life where there was none. The version of 1920, The Golem, was an expres-sionistic film that had many of the same story components we see later in a more recognizable form in the Frankenstein films.

Okay, now that we’re talking about monsters, in this case the man-made kind: Many people don’t know that the first Frankenstein monster movie was made in the United States in 1910 by, of all people, Edison, in his Edison Studios. It was a 16-minute one-reel film, and there were some differences from the elements of the story as we know it, most notably that the monster was not created from body parts but inside a cauldron of chemicals.

During the early twenties while Hollywood was still learning how to walk but did not talk yet, there were some horror films made with the first American horror film star, Lon Chaney. Chaney had been a stage actor known not just for his performances but also for the transforma-tions of grotesque makeup that he used for his characters. He was known as the “Man of a Thousand Faces.” His 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was considered a classic until the Charles Laughton version. Chaney’s ultimate performance was as the disfigured, deranged Erik inThe Phantom of the Opera in 1925. It was the dark, expressionistic tones that helped set the standard for horror films in the ’30s. The unmasking scene is still a pivotal moment in the genre.

In the U.S., the 1930s were the years where horror films in Hollywood came to the forefront and entered into their Classic Age. Dracula, with Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein with Boris Karloff arrived in American the-aters in 1931. These films marked the beginning of a rush of different horror films.

Dracula was based on the stage play of the same name, in which Bela Lugosi had won great reviews as the Count from Transylvania. Universal bought the rights to it and wanted to cast a known actor as Dracula. The

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actor everyone wanted was Lon Chaney, but, unfortunately, he had passed away in 1930, forcing Hollywood to do something it never really likes to do: hire the stage actor for the film.

Universal had decided to do two films at the same time. Sound was getting popular in the U.S., but most theaters still hadn’t been turned over to sound. However in most of Latin America the theaters were newer and had already been converted, so the studio decided to shoot the English version during the day and the Spanish version at night to save money. Director George Melford was hired to direct the Spanish version, while Tod Browning did the English version with Lugosi.

Melford realized this was an opportunity for him. With his Director of Photography at his side, Melford would watch the dailies shot by the English version unit and try to outdo them with better camera move-ment, lighting, and so forth. To this day many critics consider the Spanish version more impressive visually than the English version.

Now we come to the 1931 version of Frankenstein. This was the famous James Whale adaptation from Mary Shelley’s novel. It became the classic horror film that all monster horror films were measured against for almost fifty years.

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James Whale was born into a working class family in Dudley, England, probably on July 22, 1889. An exact date of birth cannot be determined. Growing up poor deeply affected him, as did the fact that he found little support within his family for his artistic leanings and ambitions. Later in his life he would sometimes give the impression that he was of the British upper class or aristocracy, but he never forgot his humble beginnings.

He first pursued a career as a newspaper cartoonist, but was drafted for service in World War I. During the war Whale earned a commission as Second Lieutenant and was captured by the Germans. While a prisoner of war, he learned to stage plays.

After the war he pursued a career in the theater, first as an actor, then as a set designer, and, finally, as a director. In 1929, Whale won notice for his direction of the R. C. Sheriff play Journey’s End. He was promptly imported to Hollywood in 1930 to direct the screen version. Enthralled by Hollywood and the opportunities it represented, he never left.3 My source for the information about James Whale was Reed Ellis, A Journey Into Darkness: The Art of James Whale’s Horror Films (New York: Arno Press, 1980).

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In addition to his horror classics, Whale also directed refined and intel-ligent films in other genres, usually adaptations from literature or the stage. His films are marked by fluid camera movement, leisurely pace, emphasis on detail, and discriminating restraint. Among his films are the highly regarded Show Boat (1936), perhaps the best version of the musical; a pair of highly sophisticated comedies, Remember Last Night? (1935) and The Great Garrick (1937); and several sharply-crafted melodramas, including Waterloo Bridge (1931) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).

Coming on the heels of Show Boat, The Road Back (1937), his film of Erich Remarque’s sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, was expected to secure his growing reputation as one of Hollywood’s most important directors.

But the Laemmle family, who controlled Universal and previously had given Whale carte blanche, had lost control of the studio by the time production began. When the Nazi government objected to the film’s supposedly anti-German elements, the studio’s new owners took Whale off the project, and “comic relief ” scenes shot by another director were inserted to tone down the elements the Nazis found objectionable. The result was a critical and commercial disaster.

Whale worked out his Universal contract with second-rate material, eventually walked off the set of his last contracted Universal film, and never directed again. Wise investments allowed Whale to retire in comfort. Relieved of the necessity to earn a living, he returned to his first love, painting, occasionally directed plays, and often entertained young men at swimming parties.

In 1929, Whale and David Lewis, a young story editor and later a pro-ducer, began a relationship that lasted more than two decades. Although their sexual relationship was an open secret, they lived rather circumspect lives among the English colony in Hollywood. The sexual component of their relationship ended in the early 1950s, but they remained friends until Whale’s death. In the early 1950s, Whale began a relationship with Pierre Foegel, a Frenchman working as his chauffeur.

After a series of strokes left Whale physically and spiritually depleted, he committed suicide by throwing himself into his swimming pool on May 29, 1957. Because his suicide note was withheld until after Lewis’s death (and first published in James Curtis’ biography of the director), Whale’s death was shrouded in mystery for many years. His note basically said, “The future is just old age and illness and pain...I must have peace and this is the only way.”

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4567."(,'"0)81('*"%1"*'9)*8Due to the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent involvement of major film-producing countries in it, the horror genre was not revisited until the latter half of the 1940s. The Hollywood filmmaking machine had its hands full with making war pictures and documentaries.

The late 1940s gave birth to two interesting forces in world history that shaped horror filmmaking during its time. The latter half of the decade marked the beginning of the Cold War between two former Allies that had beaten Nazi Germany, and the rise of communism as the new enemy of the United States.

The second happened after an incident in the northwestern U.S., where a veteran pilot, while flying his private plane, noticed several unfa-miliar flying objects in the same sky space he was in. He gave them a name, which has stuck ever since, because it described so well what he saw. The term “flying saucers” entered into our vocabulary and hasn’t left since. This began a new form of horror film, which fit in perfectly with the Cold War mentality. The thought that some unknown entity was visiting our planet (without our permission, no less) and flying around almost unstoppable, even by our superior military that had won the war and beaten both the Nazis and the Japanese, was enough to send people for cover.

We had jets. We had atomic bombs. We were the most powerful nation that had ever existed on the face of Earth since the beginning of time. We had broken the sound barrier in 1947, and now we were on the edge of outer space. How could we let unknown beings come here? What were they planning? It couldn’t be any good if they were sneaking around without contacting the authorities of our planet. Paranoia grabbed the nation. Maybe they weren’t really from another planet but from another country here on Earth. Who would have the technology? This was proba-bly something that only Nazi scientists could come up with. Who had just as many Nazi scientists as we did? The Russians. Was this the communist plot of world domination that Senator Joe McCarthy was talking about?

People were going crazy trying to figure it out. Paranoia was run-ning deep in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and Hollywood, as always, was ready to cash in. Soon movies appeared like The Thing from Another World (1951), War Of The Worlds (1953), When Worlds Collide (1951), and the true masterpiece, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951).

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I call that one masterful, not just because it was one of the best of its time but because it was directed by a master director, the last of his breed, Robert Wise. He also directed one of the best (at least in my opinion) horror films in 1963 called The Haunting. Here was brilliance. He took all the things that go bump in the night and put them in a film that had no special effects of any kind, no blood (not even a drop), yet scared the hell out of you by using sound and camera angles.

Hollywood saw gold in them thar’ UFOs.And it still sees gold in them, as evidenced by Steven Spielberg’s E.T.

(1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and the recent remake of War of the Worlds in 2005.

Maybe the space aliens were thinking of taking over our planet and destroying us, but thankfully we had those atomic weapons. If we didn’t take good care of them, they could turn little garden lizards into gigantic monsters or a normal-sized man into a gargantuan or an ordinary woman into one fifty feet tall.

This leads us into another horror favorite of the ’50s and into the ’60s.

(,'"!()0%:"0)81('*"+%-01Okay, now we’ve got all those cool atomic weapons, what if they were to turn on us?

What is all this stuff about radiation? How do you spell mutation? What, me worry about atomic weapons? We’ve got the military handling it, and they are the best. They would never put thousands of American soldiers at risk out in

the middle of the desert in a foxhole and drop an atomic bomb in order to show off how the military handles an atomic explosion. They even created an atomic cannon so the Army and Marines would feel good at having their hands on nuclear weapons instead of the Air Force and Navy always handling that stuff. The military knew what to do and we trusted them.

Mutation? Radiation? What’s that stuff? Oh, it’s how nature goes and creates monsters. It is nature that takes the radiation released by the atomic weapons

that have been dropped off in the desert since 1945 and turns nice little picnic-size black ants into giants that threaten the Los Angeles sewage system and those nice two little boys who love to play in the sewers like

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in Them! (1954). It is nature again that turns a tiny spider into a monster in Tarantula (1955). And it is nature also that turns a full-grown man into a shrinking man for whom everything in our world becomes a danger in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). All we did was just make the bomb. We weren’t responsible for the side effects, as frightening as they were.

Hollywood was making this and that gigantic thing or mutating it. Whatever breathed or walked, could be made to mutate. Even if it lived in a Black Lagoon, it could still be a mutated into a creature that was half man, half fish. Just mutate it and put it on the screen as quickly as possible.

It was also at this time that Japan saw the birth of its own long-lived atomic monster in Godzilla (1954). The real-life horror of the Americans’ dropping the bomb not once, but twice, on the little island nation would now come to haunt the Japanese anew in theaters, as the monster ravaged Tokyo again and again for decades to come.

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I can’t leave this period of horror filmmaking without giving a nod to another of its masters, William Castle. Castle was not only a brilliant filmmaker and television producer, but he was one of the most brilliant marketers who ever worked in the business. We may look back at his films and call them schlock or any other thing we want, but the truth is, he understood and knew his audience. And he gave them what they wanted.

People came to his movies to be scared and no one was ever disap-pointed. At some screening of his movies, people dressed as nurses were hired to be in the hallway of the theater in case you fainted from fright. Castle even made sure some people would jump out of their seats: he had electric wires run to random seats. Then, at the right dramatic moment, the spectators in the wired seats were zapped into jumping up, and every-one else would follow.

Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill (1959) is a classic and has even been remade for modern audiences. Ahead of the crowd, Castle under-stood marketing and knew how to capitalize on it. With the changes that were going on in the business, Mr. Castle would become a film-maker emulated in the future. He was also the basis for the character of 4 My source for the information about William Castle was his autobiography, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America: Memoirs of a B-Movie Mogul (New York: Pharos Books, 1992).

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Lawrence Woolsey in Matinee (1993), an homage not only to Mr. Castle but also to the movies he made.

(,'"-))1'8%8#")+":'81)*1,%;<1"#*%;The 1950s also marked two key events, both coming from the publish-ing world, which would eventually open the door for more explicit and graphic horror films.

In 1955, the first issue of Playboy hit the newsstands. It seemed the nation was heading into a new direction that was more tolerant. Nudity was no longer a taboo to be hidden away in shame. It would not be until the 1960s that Hugh Hefner’s publication would be more commonly accepted, though, and not without fighting much of the establishment along the way.

The other major landmark event was the first printing, publishing, and subsequent obscenity trial for Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961. This particular fight would not end with a definitive judgment until 1964.

Up to this point in time, there were extremely rigid censorship rules in place, not just for film but for television, also. To depict even a realistic gunshot wound on either the big or small screen was anathema. Today, obviously, this is no longer the case, but in that era it was considered not just objectionable material, but even obscene and something that should never be shown to the public.

The end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s opened up a pro-verbial Pandora’s box of ideas that could finally be shown. Many of these ideas would not be realized on celluloid until later, however.

(,'"45=>1."!"8'2"0)81('*Then it happened. In 1960 we found a new monster. One of the scari-est monsters to ever have existed, one that we were familiar with and understood better than any other, was made. This was a new horror. This was everyday horror that could exist right next door to you, mowing the lawn, coming over for dinner parties, and smiling politely.

In that year Alfred Hitchcock created his film Psycho, which opened the door to this new monster known to everyone as — man. This was the film that introduced the world to a new horror, the killer next door. It was, in reality, the first psychological killer film. The very term “psycho” called to mind a medical term, and it was haunting, whenever you thought

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about it. A killer who killed because he liked it (or his mother made him do it) and most frightening of all, he not only liked it, he enjoyed it. There have been other films to follow in Psycho’s footsteps, most of which were merely poor copies. There have also been a few excellent examples that came decades later such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), American Psycho (2000), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Monster (2003).

These are films that are disturbing and they should be. Not just for the subject of murder, but because of the belief that there, but for a brief line of conscience and remorse, go I. Could any one of us become a psychopathic killer? Perhaps we weren’t quite sure. We did know, though, that we could be trained to kill, as ordinary soldiers are trained to do in the military.

One of the urban myths of the 1960s was that returning Vietnam veter-ans were still in the killing mode and people needed to be careful around them. A quiet, glad-to-be-home vet could just wake up in the middle of the night and slaughter his whole neighborhood or take a rifle and climb a tower and shoot twenty or more people without a second thought.

In real life, it didn’t work that way. True, the decompression period from the war zone to the home front was just hours, compared to that of previous wars, where it had taken weeks, even months, for soldiers to return home from the front. Of course, no one seriously considered hold-ing the Vietnam vets for several months, which would have caused more harm than good. Even so, once back in the U.S., for many vets there was a feeling of failure, of not being wanted by the people that they had dreamed for years of coming home to, and other stresses that led to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Naturally, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon to make films of the Vietnam vet gone wild, some of which were more action/thriller, like Rolling Thunder (1977). Let’s also bring in the ultimate film of the Vietnam vet gone half-crazed, First Blood (1982), which kicked off the Rambo series. George Fernandez even made a film about the subject in 1984, Cease Fire.

Hitchcock had hit on something with Psycho. It was so easily accepted, and if he hadn’t been considered a master filmmaker before, he was after Psycho. It opened the door for many more copies to come out of the woodwork. Even today we accept the psychopathic killer as a true mon-ster in every sense of the word. Why? Because when we see the Jeffrey

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Dahmers and the John Wayne Gacys, we realize that even in our seem-ingly quiet world, monsters do exist, and they can break all the taboos that our society has, from murder to cannibalism.

One of the greatest literary and film characters created in recent years was that of Hannibal Lecter. We smirk and cheer at the character so bril-liantly played by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Some audience members have even thought how much fun would it be to invite Hannibal over for dinner, as long as you weren’t the main course or didn’t have your brain fried as an appetizer while you watched.

Even before Psycho had opened the gates to the new monster, modern man, the real world had already seen ample evidence of the inhumanity of modern man, when the Allies had opened the gates of the Nazi con-centration camps at the end of World War II. We had been forced to ask ourselves how human beings could have committed these horrific acts to other human beings and still considered themselves civilized.

Another factor in the growing number of stories of ordinary humans becoming monsters is the way media had shrunk the world we lived in. There had been acts of cannibalism before, but with limited exposure. (There was, for example, the famous Albert Fish of the 1930s — who loved to kill young children and then serve them for dinner. He was thrilled when they gave him the electric chair. He loved the thought of cooking himself one last time.)

As our electronic media has grown, television has brought us to the very places where we could see the killers’ faces when they were being led off for their crimes. Hitchcock had already seen all this, had under-stood the monster within, and had brought him out for all to observe and in some way shudder at the thought of how we could be so horrible.

Recently, reporting the news about Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a commentator said something that I found very interesting and probably very true in our society: “We are only three meals away from chaos.”

Think about it. You’re hungry right now, you go to the fridge or the store or dial for a pizza to be delivered, whatever. Now think about this, there is no food in your house, there is no food in the supermarket, there is no food in the city or the state you live in. What do you do now? If you have a family, what are you going to give your children? How far will you go to survive?

First you go through all the drawers, you search out whatever and you use it. How long before the cats and dogs go, then the neighbor’s animals?

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How soon before you start foraging or hunting? How soon before civi-lization is just a word you knew from the past? How soon before you’re willing to do anything to survive or to have your family survive? How soon before you’re the one performing barbaric acts just to get by?

In 1962, the world was introduced to the first of a series of films with Mondo Cane (Italian for “Dog’s World.”) Mondo, as a subgenre, focused primarily on the idea that the footage was real, showing realistic situations in everyday life in cultures spanning the globe, hence the term for the genre of mondo, meaning “world.”

When it was released, Mondo Cane caused a stir, both negative and pos-itive. It won an Academy Award for Best Song, as well as the Palme d’Or at Cannes. So why is a documentary in a book about horror? Because it was horror, only it was the real thing.

These types of films not only opened the audience’s eyes, it kept them glued open. The documentary approach showed sensational, unaltered scenes of real cultures performing acts that were considered bizarre by Western sensibilities, such as devouring live insects or intentionally muti-lating the face as a mark of honor.

Once that door had been opened to these kinds of subjects, besides depicting ritualistic torture, rites of passage, and other bloodletting, many other filmmakers would jump on the bandwagon with their own inter-pretations. Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless (1966) used the subgenre as a vehicle for his continuing sexploitation cinema while giving audiences a peek into the lives of strippers in 1960s San Francisco.

Mondo could be considered the predecessor to modern reality televi-sion, only without any commercial breaks and censoring. The filmmakers of mondo would continue to outdo themselves up to present day, com-bining as much raw, real footage of accidents, autopsies, and so on with as little staged action as possible. Arguably the culmination of mondo movies would be in the Faces of Death series, which started in 1978. By this point, however, staged footage was mixed with real footage to heighten the shock to the audience even more. In either case, these types of movies again explored man in his unadorned psychological state, both as animal and as victim of his own trappings.

Another big subgenre of horror film emerged in the 1960s: the zombie movie. The dead were rising from their graves and craving the flesh and brains of the living. Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by George

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Romero on a modest budget, brought the concept of the zombie to American audiences.

Besides the entertaining survival aspects of it, which to this day are copied and used in many other movies, there was also an underlying cau-tionary tale of how we as a society were becoming mindless consumers. It was a theme that was also explored a few years later by George Lucas in THX-1138 (1971).

Zombie movies would continue to be made for the next forty years. They could be made cheaply and had a high return value to them. There was something tantalizing in the thought that the dead could rise from their graves and overwhelm the living, causing the end of civilization as we know it.

(,'"45?>1."1!(!8@"0!8@"1):%'(3@"!8&"'A(*'0'1In the late sixties and into the 1970s we wanted to calm things down a bit. The war in Vietnam was escalating out of control, protests and riots were happening in major city centers. In watching film we wanted to go back to something more abstract to help us forget the real horrors beamed into our houses every night on the news.

So we went back to a familiar horror: the Devil. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) was a film that showed us Satan is still with us, although now he’s just horny. We discovered the last book of the Bible dealing with the end of time and the one that was going to bring it, the Antichrist. The Omen (1976) was very successful following this storyline.

There were some biblical scholars at that time that swore the Antichrist was born in 1966 in the Middle East and that the Bible said that the war to end all wars was to begin forty years after the birth of Israel or add forty years to 1947, to get the year 1987, when Armageddon was to begin. (The end of time and a battle with Satan always means good mon-eymaking in Hollywood.)

The Devil continued on his little rampage through the 70s with what is considered by many to be the scariest film of all time, The Exorcist (1973). Based on a fictionalized account of true events, this film would set the bar for true fright and horror for many years to come. Reports of people col-lapsing after viewing the sometimes brutal and realistically graphic scenes made the papers. When the Reverend Billy Graham reported seeing the Devil in the frames of the film, it only drove more people to see it.

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The late 1970s saw the birth of another monster: a man who has become an unstoppable killing machine. Halloween (1978) introduced us to such a monster in Michael Myers, and from him spawned the next generation of killers on the silver screen.

Several other notable filmmakers started out in this era with man as a monster and man becoming a monster. The Last House on the Left (1972) brought Wes Craven into the limelight and showed the depths of mon-strosity to one another that humans are capable of.

David Cronenberg also emerged at this time with the low-budget clas-sic Shivers (1975), which would depict a theme he would visit over and over: the physical and psychological change of humans into monsters. In this particular film, Cronenberg used the idea of being over-sexualized as a disease that could be caught by parasites and then transferred through sexual contact with others. It was an almost prophetic warning of the coming AIDS crisis.

This decade also marked an influx of Italian horror. It was a kind of Renaissance for them, which opened audiences’ eyes and ears to some of the most graphic and intense horror ever filmed. Directors such as Lucio Fulci and Ruggero Deodato gave us Zombie (1980) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which, aside from their shocking and realistic depictions of death and decomposition, also gave us biting commentary on savagery that exists within our own so-called civilized society.

Suspiria (1977), directed by Dario Argento, was another film that exemplified this Italian Renaissance. With slick editing, gripping story, and high film quality, gore never looked so good. This decade would mark a high-water point for Italian horror filmmakers that has never been matched since.

Horror in the 1970s ended on a high note with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1979). The adaptation from the Stephen King novel combined both psychological horror with supernatural elements of psychic powers and ghosts. Although well received by audiences, many fans of the novel thought that the adaptation by Kubrick lost some of the scarier aspects of the story.

The 1970s were also of note for a major technological innovation: the VCR. Both the Betamax and VHS formats, released a few months apart in 1975, ushered in a new way for people to watch movies. Both battled for supremacy in homes until 1977, when a longer-playing and recording VHS tape and recorder unit finally took hold.

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The year 1977 was important for another development, both for film in general and especially for horror: George Atkinson opened the first home video rental store (called Video Station) in December of that year. The rise of home video was extremely important for horror, because many movies that would never have been shown in theaters for one reason or another were finally able to reach a mass audience all over the world. Studios saw this also as a way to keep their movies alive and generating revenue well past their previously short lifespan in theaters.

(,'"45B>1."*%1'")+"(,'"1-!1,'*If Norman Bates taught us that even the most harmless of people can be cold-blooded killers, then Michael Myers was the next refinement of that idea. It was only matter of time until another one rose from the pages to the screen.

It only took two years. Friday the 13th (1980) launched a long (some would say too long) killing spree at Camp Crystal Lake, first by the deranged mother Mrs. Voorhees, then by her son Jason in the following sequels and crossovers well into the twenty-first century. As of this writ-ing, a remake of the first film is in the works.

In the 1980s, the only big competitor against Jason for box office money was Freddy Krueger, starting in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. Both franchises would show their staying power well into the next two decades, with talk of even more on the way.

VHS and home video rentals also exploded in number during the 1980s. Americans were getting their first tastes of horror from other countries, as well as some cult hits from the ’60s and ’70s, which probably would never have seen the light of day had it not been for this revolution. Independent filmmakers of the day suddenly had a new, widespread outlet for their low-budget creations. Now you didn’t necessarily have to aim for the theater to make your horrific masterpiece break even. The direct-to-video age was born.

(,'"455>1."*'0!C'1"!8&"*'+%8'0'8(1The 1990s, in terms of American horror films, saw some new takes on old ideas. The great slasher franchises of the ’80s were drawing to a close. Friday the 13th registered its ninth installment in 1993, while Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare bowed out its own series in 1991. However,

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both of these giants could not be kept dead for long, with Freddy return-ing in 1994’s A New Nightmare and Jason Voorhees in 2001. For the most part, the field was rife with new blood.

The story of the haunted house was given a facelift and put into new ter-ritory: outer space. Event Horizon (1997) took the haunted house, turned it into a gothic-styled spaceship, and put it on the fringes of the solar system. In the words of its director, Paul W. S. Anderson, the old idea behind the haunted house was that you could always escape. But what if you couldn’t because the nearest habitable place was several billion miles away?

The contemporary haunted house story was also given new life with a fuller treatment of The Shining (1997). This version, written by Stephen King himself and broadcast as a five-hour miniseries, was considered by many to be an extremely faithful adaptation of the book.

In the ’90s, independent film became a more fierce competitor to the big studio projects, especially in the area of horror. With seemingly nonexis-tent budgets, independents were able to turn out blockbusters, as evidenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999), which has one of the largest returns on record for its meager budget of $60,000. While the notion of “found foot-age” was used decades earlier with Cannibal Holocaust, it proved to be a concept that could still drive audiences to theaters to see it again.

/!;!8"*%1'1"!#!%8We’re now in a time when new horror concepts are coming out of the woodwork, or to be more precise, out of the foreign woodwork. The last two biggest horror franchises have come to us by way of Japan. You have to understand one thing here. Though it had experienced the horror of nuclear war, Japan had never known the horror of an actual home-grown mass murderer until recently.

March, 1990. Tokyo, Japan. It was announced that the police had arrested Tsutomu Miyazaki, a quiet, 26-year-old Japanese who came from a middle-class family and worked in a print shop. His crimes: kidnapping, murdering, and dismembering four preschool-age girls in 1988 and 1989. What made the crimes more horrible to the Japanese people was that Miyazaki confessed to cooking the hands of one of his victims and eating them. Japan had entered the ugly world of the serial killer and cannibal.

Five years later, in Tokyo, trains were attacked with nerve agents that killed many innocent commuters. An extreme cult movement was found

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to be the culprit. Soon after, this horror was reflected in the films that came out of Japan.

Ju-On (2000) and Ringu (1998) were two films that came out and ran right into American theaters. Actually, only after they were Americanized a bit. Don’t they sound familiar? They both made a lot of money. Ringuwas remade as The Ring (2002) and Ju-On became The Grudge (2004). Of course, the idea of a restless spirit or spirits had already been vis-ited earlier by American filmmakers, most recently before these film in Poltergeist (1982) and The Entity (1981).

Japanese audiences went wild for these films and so did American audiences for their Americanized counterparts.

Many Japanese film viewers like movies that jump from scene to scene, from here to there with seemingly no connection, sometimes leaving people wondering what is going on. We Americans at first didn’t know what to make of these films, but we knew one thing: these movies scared us. And that’s all we needed to know.

The Finnish didn’t want to be left out of the movement of thriller films coming over into our market; one of their films, Insomnia (2002), was also translated and Americanized.

(,'"(2'8(3D+%*1(":'8($*3The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of horror films due to the proliferation of cheaper, more powerful digital cameras whose output rivals that of even the most expensive 35mm cameras. Indeed, with High Definition now almost in every living room around the coun-try and access to equipment being easier, we can make high-quality films with half the budget!

The old werewolf story was given a new spin with 2000’s Ginger Snaps. This modest independent film told the tale of a young girl turning into a werewolf at the same time she was beginning to experience womanhood. It was a wonderful allegory of two kinds of change, in the form of female sexuality as well as in that of a werewolf. It has spawned two sequels.

Ginger Snaps was a prime example of what the new century would hold. While nowhere near a success at the box office, it found a wide fol-lowing on DVD. Studios and independent filmmakers alike saw this as a strong medium for output. People weren’t going to the theaters as often anymore; they had theater systems in their own living rooms that made

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going to the commercial theater less appealing. Rising ticket prices also contributed to it. The DVD was suddenly a viable means of getting your movie out, no longer carrying the stigma of being a direct-to-video release.

With the DVD becoming the dominant form of home video distribu-tion, VHS sales dwindled down to nearly zero. On December 23, 2008, the last supplier of VHS, Distribution Video Audio Inc., shipped its final load of tapes from its factory and ceased production.

The rise of Internet usage is one more source to look out for. In the past few years, it has become a great distribution medium for movies, without the need for a DVD player at all, just a computer. Netflix, Sony, Tivo, Apple, and Microsoft have all jumped into the game with both hardware and software for easily downloading and viewing movies in high-definition right in your home on your computer or television. Only time will tell if this is a viable medium for distribution, but it certainly levels the playing field for all the smaller guys out there!

This is just an example of what films have become now: a truly world-wide product. If the Japanese can make a better and more horrifying movie than they can in Hollywood, then let them do it. We now have a global market and a global production center.

With the technology that exists today, the next great horror film might be shot and produced in a neighbor’s backyard. We have entered the age that Francis Ford Coppola dubbed the “democratization of filmmaking.” That’s why you’re here, that’s why you’re reading this book: to learn how to write a horror screenplay.

)8'"0)*'"(,%8#At the end of every chapter, I’ve included a few additional challenges to take on called “Extra Credit.” If you’re feeling brave enough, try to do them all. They are there to help give you a jumping-off point to further understand the material presented and to also you help you become a better writer.

Well, let’s get going.