What Makes a Good Horror Film?

Good horror doesn’t have to mean brain eating Zombies coming over a field while you’re trapped in a house full of strangers with your bullets getting dangerously low and your wondering if you left the oven on (breath) but sometimes it does and if that’s what you are into don’t let us stop you (ok maybe in terms of our guidelines we might) but good horror like ‘Night of the Living Dead’ has to leave a lasting impression and George A Romero’s classic does just that. It was original, fresh and like really, really good horror has an underlining social message.

Horror should fundamentally unnerve its viewer and as such to be truly horrific your film has to have a strong connection with reality. It is the manipulation of this reality, changing the normality of events and objects around us that makes for good horror filmmaking. To elicit this kind of reaction from your viewer there are many weapons that could be used in the horror filmmakers arsenal.

For filmmakers taking the natural and moving it into the supernatural is one way of achieving this and it has been a way of creating horror since filmmaking began. This sense of reality can be achieved through character, location or situation (We talk more about that in the section on writing).

The meat and potatoes of good horror are things that make you the viewer jump out of your skin. What’s down that dark corridor? What can jump out at you? What’s behind the dark door? It could be your friends playing a joke on your or the killer waiting to strike it doesn’t really matter because suspense and surprise is everything. So many films have used this as a
way to scare the viewer and will continue to do so because it works as a mechanism.

Sound is incredibly important and if you watch horror films a lot you will see that these moments of suspense and surprise go hand in hand with intense soundscapes and music tracks. So make sure you think about sound because when you get it right it can heighten emotions and make that scare even bigger.

That is it really in a nutshell, you have to scare and unnerve and make the viewer wonder what is actually behind them as the walk home from the cinema.