Film Courage: Can you explain the three elements of creating a horror movie? Brooks Elms,
Screenwriter: It's a great question. That comes from Blake Snyder's [Author of Save The Cat] idea
about the monster in the house because Blake has this really wonderful, elegant way of thinking
about genre that's different than what most people think about genre. When most people
think about genre they think of sci-fi or western or horror or this or that or the other and Blake
was like well that doesn't really help you write a screenplay. What's a way of thinking about genre,
a way of sort of unified elements that's gonna keep you focused on what matters for you to
create a screenplay with core elements that has the tuning fork that sounds like
wonderful expression of that genre. So one of my favorites is that monster in the house genre and
and that requires a monster of some sort right? But it need not be like supernatural, could even
be like a psychopath or you something terrible and then a house that's confined the protagonist
so that they can't get away right so that the monster is chasing them because if uh there's
no house then there's no tension right the stakes are there because they can't get away
from the monster because they're stuck in the house together and then the most fascinating
part about it is the sin that's the third part and the why is sin and it's because
monster monster in the house movies are a morality tale of when we when you do something bad bad
things happen so uh you know the classic um you know kids type teenagers go into the woods to have
pre-marital sex well then the bad thing's gonna happen the slasher is gonna come out and kill
them right um but without that sin they're just kind of you know a couple walking their dog by the
woods and they get killed it doesn't quite doesn't quite hit us in that same way because we're all
attracted to sin and we all sin to some degree or another and so monster-in-the-house stories
play on that vice choice and terrible response and that's part of the titillation of great horror
and what's also really wonderful about what blake thought about in that theory is that
he then said if you look at a movie like jaws um where the monster is the shark and the contained
the house is the cont is the island where you know the sort of the amity island which was
sort of like the hamptons but like you know this contained place um and then the sin was that um
they knew the threat was there but they didn't shut down the town or didn't keep people away
from the beach because it was a tourist town and they needed the money or they wanted the
money the greed was the same so that makes the that's such an interesting story and compelling
in a different way than if it didn't have that element but then blake really ingeniously said
a movie like fatal attraction he would also put in that monster in the house things
what you know certainly jaws is like a horror movie but how would you fail attractions like
this kind of psychological thriller but let's look at the three elements you've got the monster which
is glenn close playing the psychopathic woman who just was obsessed with this guy
you've got the house was literally the end was the house but it was really kind of the family unit
right and the sin was adultery so you have that same primal pattern of you know wanting something
that you really shouldn't go after and you do it anyway and it brings out the monster
and then all hell breaks loose great example so that doesn't necessarily have to be a horror film
it can be a thriller it could be a drama um i mean did you see dark waters i didn't see doctors
oh okay all right we'll go into that one yeah but it it can it absolutely can transcend what
traditionally we think of as genres it could be sci-fi western it could be anything um the key is
to blake's mind which i thought was really great was that core pattern you're gonna chances of
making a writing a script that makes a deeper impact on people is is much more likely if you
take those three elements and you sort of build your story around those elements no matter what
sort of external genre you place on it does every genre have a certain amount of elements a writer
must know yeah yeah they do it's um because what we're doing is we're taking the audience on a very
personal journey even if it's a comedy or whatever it is and the genre is the set of expectations
that the audience is has been promised for them to plunk down their money to see the story
so if i promise them a comedy and it's not funny they're gonna be pissed off and rightly so
um if it's a horror movie uh it's gotta be scary it's a thriller it has to have tension um
and uh so a lot of beginning writers don't realize that they're not seeing it as a relationship with
the audience with these promises and genres are all about promises and expectations and sometimes
beginning writers will go oh i've got this cool idea and it's kind of this genre and it's kind
of where that genre and it's kind of like that and it's like yeah that's really creative and
you are planning to alienate your audience um and it almost never works um there's some genres that
can kind of um play nice together um uh you know one that a lot of people try to do but
verily very rarely get get right is like horror comedy um edgar wright i think does it masterfully
better than anybody that i've seen but it's really hard and it's really hard because
comedy is so particular and so the comedy has to be great and then the amount of fear and
the scares has to be great so you're talking about two really high bars that are particular
that's why most don't work well and i think that getting back to the other point is that
just early screenwriters sometimes when i when i work with screenwriters they um
it's one of the ways that their creativity gets in the way that they um they it's like they um
they're building a car and they put triangle wheels on the car and um that car is not going
to go it is going to be super creative it's going to be really cool and i honor them for coming up
with those ideas but um it's not going to get them to where they want to go so um there's ways where
you just you know don't you take the round wheel you can make a big round wheel or small round
wheel but make it a round wheel um and then the creativity on top of that then you can go wild
so there's yeah that's a common problem that earlier writers have they don't know which boxes
can be totally crazy and need to be crazy and and different and which boxes are really more like an
engineering problem they just don't mess with that and genre is absolutely one of those ones where
you generally don't mess with it you go you give them what they want and give them a spin
on it but it's really what they want um you know even tarantino who has a deep understanding of
movies and genre you know one of his i think least successful movies was um from dusk till dawn that
he made with rodriguez and i think it was just because it was it was a horror crime film and it
started literally started out as i think more of a crime film and then took this crazy left turn
into a vampire movie um which even just saying it sounds like one of those hey wouldn't it be cool
and then it was like this and then these vampires came out you know and um you know those guys were
at a point in their career where they were killing it and um they're like yeah this is really cool
and they loved it and you know and people you know uh i don't know if it was profitable probably it
might have been profitable or not i don't think it was um or maybe over time it became profitable
but like ultimately i think it's a really good case study of an interesting idea but
a fairly low ceiling in terms of how many people are really going to love it and i'm
sure some people are like i love that movie it's my favorite okay great and if your objective is to
deliver your voice and service to your audience as powerfully as possible for as broad of an
audience as possible stick to one genre and nail that genre and go take that genre to the new place
give it a fresh spin on where it's going next the audience gaining trust the screenwriter
gaining trust of their audience is is it different than this genre promise
no it's the same the one way to establish trust with the audience is if i you know
i've shown them a log line and it's this particular genre and on page one they're seeing
that it already feels like this genre on page one now i'm establishing more trust
and if i'm paid if i'm if it's a comedy and there's nothing funny on page one
problems and what about this i hate to call it self-delusion but i'll just use
that for lack of a better term of a writer thinking they're taking genre to new heights
but they're not really doing that they're mixing it they're they're playing with it in ways that
really aren't taking into new heights so i love that question because um it to me it feels like
their intention is dead on and the execution is a mess so um if they have a high quality
feedback loop system um it will tell them you know it'll be like look i wanna i think i'm gonna have
some action and i'm gonna have some comedy and i'm gonna do this i'm gonna have that and um
the response to that sort of thing is like look this is it's kind of like a little bit of a lot
of things and i'd rather have a lot of one thing um if they're getting high quality feedback um and
then that person can go huh because i thought it was kind of cool okay well i'm going to
make it anyway if i'm independent filmmaker and then it'll play regional festivals or whatever
or not at all but like if you want to blow people away then you do sort of less from a deeper place
and you fulfill that promise of genre of these other things in a way that's profound
and feels fresh and new so it's the same but different it's familiar but fresh um and uh
yeah genre is one of the best ways to do it and so the person that's kind of like
in that scatter place or they've got all these mishmashes um again it's fine you know but they
just have to just compare the apples to apples i'm trying to you know here's a comparable again
they're if they compare one apple that they're trying to do with four different apples that's
the problem right no give timmy one movie that had this particular genre that you loved that
was successful that you you'd love to have that sort of success with your screenplay
what's that apple how you create your apple and then you figure out how you sort of can make
them the same so quentin tarantino tells this great story about when he was acting in the 80s
and uh he had this acting and at that point in the 80s you know you couldn't get there was no
internet so you couldn't get scripts online you had to kind of like watch the movies and
you know take notes and so he's in his acting class and he um you know wrote down the scene from
this movie and handed it to his acting partner and goes like you know we're going to act in this
in the scene together and um and the scene the scene partner goes well holy [ __ ] this monologue
isn't in the movie and quentin's like what oh geez i'm sorry he goes no no this is better than what's
in the movie right and so um the takeaway there for the for the amateur writer is um what he did
inadvertently was realized that he as a writer was nailing at a really high level so um amateur
writers can use or any writer can i use it all the time to sort of compare apples to apples with
any sort of element if i'm trying to get better at let's say tension or you know certain dialogue or
genre whatever i look at what i think is the standard for what i'm trying to do in another
thing and then i do my version of it and i try to get the apple to the apple to be the same in my
view and then i get feedback and are they looking at it and going yeah brooks i can't tell which one
was written by you and which one was written by you know legend a or whatever now now i'm good
it's like fan fiction almost i was doing an early version of it yeah yeah that's right that's right
it was a good look at it that's exactly it and if you can do fan fiction that's as good um you know
i mean yeah i mean there's you can you can get work that way if you can play in that universe
in a way that's as powerful as the you know the people that are already there
sure so if i'm writing let's say a thriller and i think oh wow i'm gonna really this is this
the thriller genre but i'm gonna take it to new heights and let's suppose it's like a wall street
corruption story and somebody is the cleaning lady and she ends up seeing people shredding documents
but then the people that are really the bad guys turn out to be like reptilian society people and
that's i'm almost that's not really taking it to a new height that's mixing genres because now i've
got some sci-fi in there and they don't need to be reptiles you see what i'm saying so i'm mixing
but i my assumption is i think oh i'm going to take this to new heights but if i don't get that
feedback from the feedback loop then i'm going to be delusional and thinking that this is just like
never been seen before so so what i'll say about that is yeah i think that the word delusional
is sort of a charged word that feels a little distracting because in this hypothetical where
somebody's like i'm trying to take the genre to a new place perfect that's exactly what we're doing
that's exactly what everything is that we love has done it takes something not everything but a lot
of things that really break ground it's because they're doing that so that intention is dead on
and the truth is it takes trial and error to be able to get that it's like i want to make the best
new heist film ever right awesome um that's what i'm trying to do where am i at now so to say where
i'm at how is delusional i was like okay fine but like i mean it's kind of a negative way of saying
it's just like you you are where you are and then and then you just kind of figure out here's what
i'm trying to get to here's where i am now how do i sort of get there and um and being gentle
with ourselves and thinking of ourselves or other people is like delusional is kind of a this is a
distracting way of of the matter-of-fact business of getting the apple to match the apple and if um
and the impulse to go the way that i'm going to take it to that next level is adding a bit of this
genre that genre um maybe it's just you know it's it's sort of like um you know you see you're gonna
get a feel for these things you know i mean it's like sometimes some genres do have aspects that
do play nice together you know or harmonize really nice together um and some things kind of clash you
know they're sort of um you know somebody can you know do a website design or just a set of colors
and some people have a knack for like those colors look nice again or like the way you dress you know
some people can do it some people can't people like it and we don't but like
it's that set of artistic choices that harmonize together or not and so um
so uh it's a matter of playing with which story elements end up harmonizing in the right way
to get to that point where you're taking the genre the next level so i would never describe
it as delusional when they're in the process of doing the damn thing that they should be doing
you