Even if you're alone, it's hard to read 'horror' and be absolutely frightened. Nowadays horror is the mixture of visual and audio mediums. The use of these to create an effective story and setting is what makes horror. The horror scripts are the things 13 year olds notice when going into the ring II. They see teenage girls holding onto their boyfriends arm when stuff pops out or when blood and gore emerge. They assume this is scary. They assume that people will be afriad of somebody getting there throat cut when the slasher pops out of the closet or the audience will be overtaken by terror when the see the fangs of some monster dig deep into a dumb sorority girl and frat boy.

Even if something is horrifying in a movie it's very difficult on paper. What I sometimes try to imagine is how the camera would be set up while reading something scary and if I could conjure up any spooky noises in my head to get me into what I'm reading.

A movie goes through three phases, The writing process, the filming process, and the editing. All 3 are EQUALLY as essential in creating an effective film. Can't have a good film without a good script. But poor choices and execution during the filming stages can make a bad movie out of a good script. And editing takes all the footage captured and has to cut it to tell the story the best way possible and ulitmately decides whether the film will live or die.

Quoted from greg I can see where you get the motivation for your writing now.

In fact, yes, I do get much motivation for writing from these kind of movies. I take these kind of movies and add my own story in it, twist everything around, and that's how I get my ideas!

Curse!

I don't think films have to scare people neccesarily to be considered "horror." I see them as films that contain macabre themes presented in a specific way. This isn't what horror has become either. Even in the 70's, this was somewhat the case.

Dawn Of The Dead wasn't exactly scary (suspenseful, sure, but not scary) yet it is considered to be a horror classic. Same with most Italian horror films (with the exception of Suspiria) yet they're still horror. Many great horror films do scare people and have a lasting effect but they're many great ones that don't (although a horror film should always, IMO, at least try to, if not scare, be suspenseful).

In any case, people nowadays don't scare easily because they've seen everything so I guess that may have something to do with the way many horror films are today.

Quoted from James McClung I don't think films have to scare people neccesarily to be considered "horror."

Look up the definition of 'Horror' and then tell me why films that classify themselves as horror should be classified as horror.

Quoted from thegardenstate89 Look up the definition of 'Horror' and then tell me why films that classify themselves as horror should be classified as horror.

"An intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear." Okay, I get what you're saying and I don't think it effects my logic. Many horror films are "repugnant" and not scary.

And besides, what scares people varies from person to person. What is scary to some might not be scary to others.

This thread which I started seems to be going in circles with members (including myself) saying the same thing over and over again proving nothing. My original question why horror scripts seem to be the most popular thing on this site is now an irrelevant question since I see less and less horror scripts discussed nowadays on the board.
And the majority of the crappy horror scripts are would-be horror scripts left forever to die on the pre teen favorite "My Work in Progress."

The debate which has sparked from this thread seems to be why horror films (and scripts) are so lacking in ideas and just plain bad these days is a difficult question. To put an end to the debate of the crappy horror scripts we read I'll answer you guys with this: When you write for the horror genre you picture a certain shot and how a certain setting will look in you're mind. And to the writer that can be scary. Horror is often made scary by the shots it uses, it's choice of music or sound, and the story. All of these things make a good 'horror flick'. A script is just the building block for any picture.

Horror is also an easy read to begin with, I find myself putting more thought and imagination into reading a drama script over some books I have read. It is not entirely a scary read.

The answer to why we see so many bad horror moviese nowadays is a debatable one, but I think we probably nailed it a few pages ago on this thread.
It could be in our panic induced times we find it harder and harder to get scared, unoriginal, uninspired (or a little TOO inspired) characters and stories, the reasons are countless. It could be just simply just a formula that is constantly being released because it is proven to make money. But do the directors and screen writers set out to make a picture just for money? That's for you to decide.

I wouldn't mind if this thread kept going, maybe we're going into an interesting debate on how horror films define the word 'horror'. But I do believe we should all (myself included)  just stop sitting at our computers whining about what's wrong with the new horror films and go out there and fix it. And my original question needs no answer anymore. It's self explanitory just like the work in progresss section "13 year old wannabe cravens and tarantinos."
This thread had a good run, but i think it's about time we kill it and talk about something else. Plus I should be doing a history paper right now.

PART ONE

From 1974’s Black Christmas – rightly credited with being the god-monster of the modern mainstream genre – to the recent spate of Hollywood remakes (soon to include Black Christmas itself) Teen Horror has become a mainstay of popular cinema. It was a cornerstone of the 80s video revolution and now represents a substantial segment of DVD sales. In addition to the obvious ease with which the genre can be marketed, this is narrative terrain that speaks in very clear and unambiguously symbolic language about one of the most fundamental stages of our psychological development.

If we take the genre-marketing tag ‘Teen Horror’ as describing a movie in which a group of good-looking teens (plus token geek/dork/dweeb/Velma) are bumped off in increasingly gory and innovative ways until one – or perhaps two – remain, then we should perhaps, in film terms, define the Teen Horror sub-genre (though for ease of use I am here referring to it as a genre) as any Horror movie with a teenage protagonist/s.

In narrative terms, the Teen Horror is a combination of the Coming-of-Age story type and pure single-genre Horror. From Stand By Me to Donnie Darko, two key tropes of Coming-of-Age narratives are ‘coming face-to-face with death’ and ‘encountering the creepy outsider’. When the Coming-of-Age story type is told as single-genre Horror, these two elements take centre stage, with the outsider often becoming an antagonist who forces the teenage protagonist/s to confront death repeatedly over the best part of three acts.

To use Michael Hauge’s incisive ‘inner’ problem / ‘outer’ problem paradigm, in the pure Coming-of-Age story type – usually rendered in the Drama genre – there is both an inner need and an outer want. Although the two are often related – and in the best examples symbiotic in plot terms – the outer want can be anything from nursing an animal back to health (Kes) to attending a KISS concert (Detroit Rock City) while the inner need is, of course, always successfully to traverse the rite-of-passage from adolescence into adulthood. In Teen Horror the inner need and outer want are much more closely linked. Firstly, the outer problem (the monster) symbolically represents the inner problem (the psychological turmoil of the rite-of-passage from adolescence into adulthood) and secondly, only when the outer want – to survive – is resolved, can the inner need be met.

So to construct a psychologically resonant and dramatically-engaging Teen Horror screen story, it pays to lay strong narrative foundations with a Coming-of-Age dramatic situation and characters, then symbolically to render the protagonist’s problem within the monster’s backstory, motivation, killing method and characterisation. This strategy is at its most elegantly concise in Halloween.
In Adam Simon’s superb 2000 documentary The American Nightmare (highly recommended and free on the Anchor Bay double-disc edition of The Hills Have Eyes), Friday The 13th screenwriter Victor Miller recounts how he reverse-engineered the formula for Teen Horror from watching Halloween: “First of all you have to start with a prior evil; something that happened a long time ago that was really bad. Then you have to have a group of adolescents – or slightly post-adolescents – who are in an environment in which they cannot be helped by adults. The other thing I learnt from Halloween is that if you make love you get killed.”

Although Miller is of course correct as far as his brief analysis goes – and the first Friday The 13th is an acknowledged Horror classic, not least for Tom Savini’s ground-breaking splatter effects – this reductio ad absurdum has been responsible for a plethora of terrible, rather than terrifying, Teen Horror movies. What is missing in these formulaic and generic Stalk ’n’ Slashers is any psychological depth – and it is psychological awareness that differentiates great Teen Horror from straight-to-DVD Friday-night fifteen-year-old sleepover fodder.

The central idea to grasp is that teenagers are instinctually and archetypally transgressive; and transgression is one of the core tropes of all Horror, from Argento to Yuzna and all points in between. Teenagers go where they’re specifically told not to go (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House Of 1000 Corpses) see what they’re explicitly not supposed to see (A Nightmare On Elm Street, Hellraiser) fall for people they absolutely should not fall for (Fear, Swimf@n) meddle with forces way beyond their comprehension (The Craft, The Blair Witch Project, Long Time Dead) and generally party in completely inappropriate places (Cabin Fever).

As Victor Miller quips, the sexually active, drug-taking characters are traditionally killed first, though this can be read in two ways. Textually this narrative strategy appears to be reactionary; it seems to state that if you get laid first and toke first you’ll be stalked ’n’ slashed first. But the subtext is more interesting, as the monster can be read as a Freudian Super Ego who refuses to let the teenager become an adult, who is intent on keeping the adolescent in an infantilised pre-Oedipal state rather than letting them attain a post-Oedipal, differentiated, adult Self. In this reading, the victims are being punished not so much for experimenting with sex and drugs, but for daring to act like adults at all.

In Teen Horror there should be a simmering tension between the teen protagonist/s and the adult world (think of Carrie and her mother as the apotheosis of this trope) a tension which traps the teenage protagonist between their own developmental processes and the moral strictures of the adult world to which they still desperately yearn to belong. This adult world is at best reluctant and at worst ineluctably opposed to the child becoming an adult and – as represented by the oppressive Super Ego father and the repressive Matriarchal mother – it will often do everything in its power to stop a ‘coming-of-age’ taking place. Think of Hellraiser’s Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), caught between her hammer-wielding serial-killer mother Julia (Clare Higgins), her fratricidal uncle Frank (Sean Chapman/Andrew Robinson) and the polymorphously-perverse Cenobites. What chance of becoming a balanced, well-adjusted adult with a normal, healthy sex drive?

PART TWO

There’s a scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street in which Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) takes a bath with the bathroom door locked. Her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) knocks on the door with an offer of “warm milk”, to which Nancy privately responds “warm milk… gross.” Soon after, Nancy falls asleep and is attacked by Freddy. At first Marge can’t help because, of course, the door is locked; so she has to pick the lock, simultaneously saving her daughter and invading her personal space. This moment, from the most psychologically-penetrating Teen Horror film ever made, sums up the tug-of-war at the very heart of the genre – the battle between childhood and adulthood, between naivety and experience, between pre-sexuality and burgeoning sexual identity, between safety and risk, between acquiescence to the social order and rebellion, between the adult status quo and transgression, between the as yet unfixed adult Ego and the limiting, restricting, authoritarian Super Ego, between the still-fragile post-Oedipal psyche and the pre-Oedipal Id. Nancy’s mother infantilises her by offering her warm milk, turning down her bed and generally trying to cosset her in cotton-wool; Nancy’s father (John Saxon) infantilises her by treating her very real fears as the fantastical creations of a delusional mind.

Freudian psychology looms so large over Teen Horror because the psychological processes at play in a teenager’s psyche are so sweeping and all-encompassing (a Jungian template will often prove more fecund for Horror with adult protagonists, adult conflicts and adult themes). All Horror could be described to some degree as being generated by the violent clash between the pre-Oedipal monster (driven by an unstoppable need to obtain immediate satisfaction of its desires) and the post-Oedipal protagonist (whose repressed desires can be manifested at any moment) [thanks to Reynold Humphries’ book The American Horror Film for describing the two sides of this equation so concisely]. In Teen Horror this conflict is writ large, as in broad story terms the adolescent is often closer to the pre-Oedipal stage than to post-Oedipal adulthood (in Horror films with child protagonists/monsters, this Oedipal battle is waged in occult or supernatural terms within the child’s body and over the child’s soul, because the child’s Ego is not yet defined enough even to begin to combat pre-Oedipal forces).

This adjacency to the pre-Oedipal stage is often increased by the repression generated by a morally conservative and forcefully oppressive adult society. In …Elm Street Wes Craven takes this one step further. By having the genesis of his pre-Oedipal monster Freddy bound up with an act of transgressive vengeance by his protagonists’ parents (they ‘lynched’ child-abuser/killer Krueger) he creates a Super Ego status quo that is already fatally compromised and one which therefore offers absolutely no chance of assistance to the movie’s teenagers.

Urbanoia – in Horror terms the city-dweller’s fear of the ‘other’, usually the remote country and its inhabitants – is another key psychological idea that surfaces time and again in Horror, particularly in Teen Horror. This is the return not only of the psychological repressed, but of the social and economic repressed. From the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Blair Witch Project, Cabin Fever, Wrong Turn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, the House Of Wax remake and Wolf Creek, there is often a stark and increasingly violent juxtaposition between affluent, middle-class college/city kids and those left behind by global capitalism: out-of-work slaughter-house workers, outback vermin-controllers and all those backwoods folk generally disenfranchised by the slow death of the countryside and the inexorable rise of the sub/urban. Again, master of Horror Wes Craven goes one step further and in Last House On The Left executes a stunningly innovative reverse urbanoia: two teenage girls – looking to score some drugs on the way to a rock concert – are abducted by city-dwelling criminals, driven into the country then brutally raped and murdered; the criminals in turn are killed by the affluent, intellectual, vengeance-fuelled, country-dwelling parents of one of the victims.

Apart from the antagonist/s killing them off (Wrong Turn, House Of 1000 Corpses), moral compromise (…Elm Street), isolation (Friday The 13th, Cabin Fever) and being part, or all, of the problem (Hellraiser, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake), there is one other way to remove the possibility of assistance from the adult world, that is to make them figures of ridicule, in other words to infantilise them professionally; hence the high number of utterly incompetent Sheriffs/cops in Teen Horror films. The shockingly ingenious Cherry Falls uses three of these five classic devices: Sheriff Marken (Michael Biehn) - the protagonist Jody Marken’s (Brittany Murphy) father - is a key part of the ‘prior evil’ backstory, a Deputy has his head split open with an axe and the killer turns out to be a figure of authority.

Another fruitful way to approach Teen Horror is through anthropology. The aim that motivates the protagonist/s of all Teen Horror (and indeed of all Coming-of-Age narratives) is initiation into the world of adults, and in anthropological terms initiation means venturing into dark, cruel and excruciatingly-painful territory (tribal initiation rituals are a fabulously inspirational source for Teen Horror). In tribal society it is the male who usually undergoes the type of initiation often reserved for the female in Teen Horror. In her seminal book Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover argues that the teenage boys in a Horror audience do not want to see fictional teenage boys running away from danger, screaming and generally being terrified. She suggests that because society genders this behaviour as ‘female’, the Teen Horror protagonist is embodied in a female character, even though it is precisely this female character with whom the male teenage viewer identifies so strongly.

PART THREE

Because the monster de facto represents aspects of the protagonist’s own turbulent psyche and because the protagonist is sexually in a state of flux (i.e. not yet a fully-sexualised adult), Teen Horror narratives tend not to include a sexual dimension in the protagonist’s human relationships (unlike pure Coming-of-Age narratives) other than the symbolically-sexual relationship with the killer. Instead, Teen Horror narratives can be seen as being about initiating the protagonist into the sexual world. Only when the protagonist has finally defeated the monster is she able to take on an adult sexual identity and adult responsibility.

Two recent Hollywood remakes of classic Horrors have in their own way found innovative strategies with which to address this plot element: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake features a new plot strand in which Erin (Jessica Biel) rescues a baby from the Leatherface family toward the very end of the narrative, thus marking her successful journey into adulthood and adult responsibility. Innovatively echoing Freudian and Jungian ideas, the House of Wax remake astutely centres on two psychologically-resonant pairs of siblings: the protagonists Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and Nick (Chad Michael Murray) and the antagonist brothers Bo and Vincent (Brian Van Holt). It is through resolving their sibling conflicts that the protagonists are able not only literally to survive the plot, but symbolically, as ‘one’ protagonist, to balance their masculine and feminine energies, an essential task to complete prior to a psychologically-successful adulthood.

As essentially and clearly distinguished from the other teens – who will become victims – the protagonist’s character is the one which will ultimately prove to be closest to that of an adult, the one which over the course of the narrative will exhibit the traits that society sees as most useful in its adult members: restraint, caution, selflessness, common sense, loyalty and compassion, but also strength, courage, tenacity and the ability to kill-or-be-killed when push comes to shove; something like the combination of a Buddhist monk and a US Marine. Teen Horror could in fact be read as a kind of Darwinian natural selection of teens fit for adulthood – only the best-suited and most-adaptable will survive. This fact leaves plenty of room for screenwriters to make highly personal, satirical or polemical comments on precisely what it is that society requires from its adults and whether these requirements are entirely appropriate or psychologically healthy (as My Little Eye does with its comments on the contemporary addiction to celebrity and technology).

In order to achieve initiation, in Freudian terms the protagonist will successfully repress her pre-Oedipal psychology by killing the monster; leaving her battered, bloody and exhausted but most importantly leaving her not just literally as the ‘final girl’ but also symbolically as a womb-torn adult. If the protagonist is defeated by the monster (as tends to happen in Teen Horror narratives in which the protagonist is ultimately her own monster, or the monster is inside her own head: Carrie, They) then initiation is frustrated, but this tragic yet nonetheless cathartic ending can allow room for another protagonist to take up the sword and make their own stand against the monster. One important exception is transformational Teen Horror movies like Ginger Snaps or Society in which becoming the monster is itself symbolic of initiation into adulthood. Whether this mutation is, in the final analysis, good or bad is down to the screenwriter’s choice of theme. An interesting recent spin on this is the Scottish Teen Horror/werewolf hybrid Wild Country.

If the protagonist survives and returns in a sequel (Scream), there is a law of diminishing returns, as the protagonist appears to be trapped in permanent adolescence (as also happened with later seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, despite the introduction of Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn). The franchise monster simply represents the psychological battle that awaits all teenagers; and the fact that in Freudian terms the repressed will, by its very nature, always return.

It is when initiation is not only frustrated but symbolically negated that Teen Horror can go beyond tragedy and take on a genuinely nihilistic tone. In this tonal range, the protagonist tries to break free of the pre-Oedipal monster and the morally-repressive Super Ego but learns that there can be no escape from the monster and moreover that the world of adults is irredeemably corrupt. The protagonist is completely destroyed by these truths (My Little Eye, House Of 1000 Corpses, Wolf Creek). In the consumption-addicted West, a culture in which the archetypal rites of passage have been almost entirely eroded, where girls are sexualised at an ever-younger age (and are subsequently increasingly violent) and boys are denied any sense of a journey into manhood (and are subsequently increasingly apathetic) narratives that show teenagers being denied their basic psychological needs are particularly resonant.
In terms of generating new Teen Horror narratives, one recent strategy has been to retell adult story types through the Teen Horror genre: Fatal Attraction’s hell-bitch stalker narrative as Swimf@n, Deliverance’s ‘lost in enemy territory’ urbanoia as Wrong Turn. The art with this kind of re-visioning is to skew the drama so that the teenage characters’ concerns, conflicts and milieu are appropriate to their years.
The best Teen Horrors emerge from a conflation of psychological acuity, innovative setting, an innately dramatic situation, sustained conflict, sharp blades and gushing arteries. Many writers who attempt Teen Horror can do perfectly passable knives and gore, a fair number can come up with an original setting or a new spin on an old one, but far fewer can do absorbing drama and emotionally-engaging characters and even less can manage the psychology. So it is probably a good idea to procure one of those comic-strip-style introductions to Freud, to read Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws and to spend several nights in watching the collected works of masters-of-Freud Carpenter, Craven and Cronenberg.

At its most potent, Teen Horror tackles head-on a period of our lives in which everything is up for grabs and it is this intra-psychic melting-pot of initiation and neophilia which can throw up images as powerful as the blood-drenched Carrie, the drowning Nancy, the blade-gloved Freddy, the eternally-damned Denise and the implacable Michael Myers.

Key Teen Horror films: Last House On The Left (1972), Black Christmas (1974), Carrie (1976), Halloween (197, Friday The 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Hellraiser (1987), The Craft (1996), Scream (1996), Cherry Falls (2000), Ginger Snaps (2000), My Little Eye (2002), Swimf@n (2002), Cabin Fever (2002), Wrong Turn (2003), House Of 1000 Corpses (2003).

You forgot to include a bibliography for your manifesto.


Phil

No more excuse to say "I don't know nothing about HORRORS!"

Yeah, I've often said that myself Kevan, only I tend to ramble on a lot more.

The reason Horror is the most popular thing on this site is because it appeals to those who are in transition becoming an adult. It occupies your pubescent ambigious reality which is in flux as you journey from child to adult..

Most Horror movies of the 90's to the present day tend to be, generally, targeted towards a teenage audience because they tend to deal with teenage concerns..

The point of re-printing the article is so interested parties can appreciate an indepth understanding and assimilation of these ideas. Particularly as there seems to be a lot of younger members of SimplyScripts who choose to write screenplays based upon the Horror theme..

Read the article and maybe it'll help and assist you introducing these subtle genre elements which go towards making your own Horror story when you write a screenplay..

Just information is all.. Food for thought..

Wow, that's nothing short of an impressive article, I must admit. Where did it come from again?

Hey,

First of all, great article, Kevan. Thank you for that. I don’t know how many of the teens at this site will read it and understand it but the ones who do are the ones who are mature for their ages, I think.

I would like to add perhaps another dimension to the conversation that will also bring it more to the specific topic.

Most of the horror scripts at this site are written by teens as far as I know. I think this fact is where we have a breakdown. The Freudian analysis in this article shows how technical some of the scriptwriting can be even though the script itself may not be that good.

Halloween is a fine example of a movie where this analogy was put to full use and succeeded in scores. Many of the imitations of this movie, which replaced substance with gore thinking that was what teens wanted, failed miserably and deservedly so.

But these scripts were written by adults who were trying to get into the heads of their teen targets.

Here at this site, we see the work of teens trying to imitate many of the films that are mentioned. And, as I said, this is where we see the breakdown. Many of these teen writers, because of trying to emulate their favorite films, don’t understand the psychology they’re trying to convey. They’re trying to create the atmosphere they so loved from a particular film without fully understanding the substance of it.

In other words, there’s another reason other than the psychology of it why this genre is so popular. It’s written by their peers.

The sad part is this: only these teens can fully reflect the true principles of today’s “monster.” This is one of the reasons I push so hard for originality. There’s too much imitating of people who may or may not fully grasp the teen condition and not enough digging into today’s youth problems.

What I would like to see is the teen writers of this board take the initiative in changing the way teens are perceived in today’s films. That would require more originality on their part. Maybe this is the ironic catch of the whole thing. Maybe people that young lack the facilities to adequately do such a thing. I’m afraid, until they do, however, the adult writers are going to continue to Freudian analyze them and shape the directions of today’s teens from their desks.