Although I can't share details right now, I have written several screenplays and recently a horror screenplay. A short version of it will be entered into festivals. The feature length, to be filmed later this year/early 2026.
If you've followed my blog for any length of time (almost 17 years), you know I love Halloween, the unexplained, spooky things, and horror. As well, I've written two dozen books on such subjects.
I have some simple things I do when writing horror that really help the process -
Darken the room for writing.
Play horror scoring music.
Avoid watching or reading any horror (whether I like it or not, it will influence my own writing in a subconscious manner).
Take notes from the shower, lying in bed at night trying to go to sleep, driving around in the car - whenever a solution to a scene comes to mind.
Go to abandoned sites, creepy old buildings, darkened cemeteries - anywhere that creates a feeling of desolation, caution, overall spookiness.
Develop quirky characters who seem vulnerable in a bad situation. Make their greatest strength their weakness and their greatest weakness their strength.
Depend greatly on sensory description - make it sound, feel, taste, look, and smell creepy by utilizing a setting that one can immediately identify.
Look back at my childhood growing up in a very haunted Civil War hospital estate. I recall seances and Ouija board experiences, trick-or-treating, darkness, creaking floorboards, moonlight, being home alone at night, thunderstorms - all the things that incite a child's imagination.
Pull the tension out. Draw out those suspenseful moments to let the audience anticipate. It's the not knowing that creates terror. Let great scoring, lighting, and acting bring the tension to the situation.
Give the audience the chance to tag along with the victims and seek harbor with them, cheer them on, or even scream at them to choose the right option.
Ultimately, the goal of a great horror film shouldn't be to create PTSD in the viewer. No one should go home and be traumatized by seeing torture or heinous acts of violence that would have left them forever tormented if they happened in real life.
The audience should get a sense of mastery from the experience, how to survive or how to live on after this horrible series of events. They should actually want to drop back into the film again and again if only to enjoy the atmospheric location, the music, or the characters that have become heroes.
A lot of esoteric indie films these days have become so bizarre they confuse the viewer and are so "artsy" that you almost need to offer the audience a qualude to interpret it. I'm not a big fan of a horror that doesn't seem feasible or even sane. If you doubt the mental state of the director, writer, and editors, you're not viewing art. You're viewing chaos. If a viewer can't identify with a character and every character in the film appears to have no redeeming quality, you've lost the purpose. It's rather like watching a train wreck versus riding a train on a precarious track.
Take advantage of ideal locations, isolation, nighttime, storms.... A horror movie greatly depends on its score, it's set, special effects, foley (sound effects), and its lighting. Imagine these as you write. I make sure to make the movie in my head come to life by giving cues and direction for movement, sound, descriptive adjectives so the art director, sound team, and director can make it come to life.
Always remember - it isn't what the viewer sees, but what the viewer doesn't see. Never give full-frontal answers to what is lurking. Keep the enemy and its movements always just out of clear view. The most unoriginal thing you can do is use writer intrusion by having the bad guy confess everything before he plans to kill someone off. It's a cheap trick and the audience would rather have seen clues and add it up during the film.
As NDAs allow, I promise to keep y'all apprised. I also have other screenplays in the lineup including comedy, western, western horror, docuseries, martial arts western, historic action, and scifi.
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