A WRITER’S VOICE: The Horror Movie – Writing The Inner Psychology
Jacob Krueger discusses how when you realize “this is what its really about,” you can start to get even more creative about the horror moments in your script.
There are two kinds of horror movies. There’s the basic gross-out horror movie where it’s really just about creating a progression of increasingly horrible images and getting a high body count. These movies have a very simple formula: establish a bunch of characters and a bunch of relationships and then, one by one, kill those characters off with the greatest efficiency and bloodiness. All the creative work in those movies really just goes into creating the most horrible of horrors. It’s about making the most disgusting, horrible, frightening “this is going to haunt me in my dreams, I can’t un-see that” kind of moment.
But the best horror movies try to do something much bigger. The best horror movies are either psychological commentaries or political commentaries or sometimes both.
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- More articles by Jacob Krueger
- How to Create Great Horror Villains
- Selling Your Screenplay: Writers Alistair Legrand & Luke Harvis on Horror Film 'The Diabolical'
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The founder of Jacob Krueger Studio, Jacob has worked with all kinds of writers, from Academy and Tony Award Winners, to young writers picking up the pen for the first time. His writing includes The Matthew Shepard Story, for which he won the Writers Guild of America Paul Selvin Award and was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Screenplay. To follow Jacob’s blog or learn more about his Screenwriting Workshops, Online Classes, and International Retreats please visit WriteYourScreenplay.com.
