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Psychological Horror

E

Eli

HEY ALL,


So, ever since I've played all of the silent hill games, except for Homecoming, I've had a sort of a desire to want to make a horror movie. I know a lot of young people like to do the same, but few have come across as decent (today's Hollywood horror/terror movies are pure nonsense, and just not scary imho)

Hollywood loves the jump scare tactics it seems and pacing and atmosphere are not really the priority. Now, I'm not saying I'm gonna' make some blockbuster horror movie, no, I just want to try this out.

I've brainstormed for a long while, and when it seems like I'm getting somewhere, I look at my ideas again and I don't like them, and I start over and it sucks. I've thrown some ideas to friends, but they didn't care that much :P, so I'm searching for some feedback/criticism here

What made the Silent Hill series the most scary aspect for me what the atmosphere, among more specific things. While I do not want to blatantly steal any ideas from silent hill, it is my inspiration, and may I say that while Christophe Gans version was tasty for the eyes, it left something to be desired, for sure.

On to some ideas...

1) One that I thought up a while back but sort of gave up on was an idea that involved one antagonist (we'll call him Screamer) 'chasing' our protagonists. The thing was, Screamer had a bit of a past to him that eventually forced him to isolate himself from society because of what he saw and did as a child. Having a fond love for the mother he saved as a child, he gets internally anguished when a child or teen disrespects their mothers. What makes Screamer interesting is that he does not want to kill, per se, those he is 'stalking' but he puts them through constant agony with nothing but, drum roll, shrill screams and shrieks that sort of personify his anguish. I haven't done much more brainstorming past that, because when I tried long and hard to find a good program to make said screams, I could not and gave up (I now have an electric guitar I can work with). I would like this idea, if expanded, to include psychological moments, with scary sounds, and complete silence. I've always believed showing less is scarier so Screamer wouldn't have the camera linger on him for long periods of time.

2) The second idea had more Silent Hill-esque undertones to it, but with no copyright/trademark infringements. Our protagonist, Joe, is the oldest sibling in his family who moves away from his family to the big city to start his life and get through college to get a job. One day, he gets a phone call from his parents telling him that his only sister Hope, who he loved so much, died in an accident. One night, Joe is awakened by noises in the living room and finds a doll on the ground that he gave his sister for a birthday. In this case, though Hope is dead, Joe feels she is trying to get his attention to say a final goodbye. And theeeeeen, I sort of gave up because I thought, how the hell would this warant a psychological issue/fear/scares.

That's it for now. Everyday I think about it, so, who knows. Thanks for reading all my blabber. Cheers
 
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Everyone has a different fear. My biggest fear is anything in the water that's bigger than me (docile or not). And that can relate to fear of the unknown. Thanks to Spielberg, this phobia still lingers to this day. I used to have a healthy phobia of spiders until Arachnophobia made light of it. Before that, a fear of death thanks to George Romero. But now I am so desensitized that even my fear of the dark is all but gone. So it takes a heck of a lot to scare me. Most of the films getting spit out lately just make me roll my eyes and shake my head. Now I did enjoy the Scream movies because they brought a nice twist to things. And Saw was also refreshing. But, although fun to watch, neither was very scary to me.

If you can somehow tap into that "fight or flight" instinct in an audience, you'll have a winner. Best way to do that is to create some complex characters that are believable and realistic. If the audience likes your protagonist, can relate to him or her in some way where they can see themselves in your protagonist, and then you put your protagonist in extreme peril, you have a good chance of building fear. If your audience fails to connect on the emotional level with your characters, then they just won't care what happens to them. That emotional connection is the key. And this is where many horror movies fail with me.

Right now I am also working on a horror story. I started with a concept and a situation, and now I am crafting the characters that will make up the story. And my job as the writer is to make you feel for them, to have an emotional response to them and their situation. If I can deliver that on paper, then a director can potentially deliver that on film.

Flesh out your characters. Give them a goal. Give them obstacles to that goal. Make it interesting. But don’t put your characters in danger until you’ve made them likeable and relatable enough for someone to care about them. And don’t suddenly explode the bomb, so to speak, all the time simply for the shock value. Show the bomb to the audience with its 15 second count down. That will build the tension. And then on occasion you can explode an alien out someone's chest.

Since you’re into P.C. games, look at "F.E.A.R.". "Doom3" also kept me on the edge of my seat. I love First Person Shooters because I'm the protagonist. And these two games with a high-end graphics card so the visuals are at their best are very immersive (5.1 surround is a must-have for these games). I tried to play "Silent Hill: The Room", got maybe 10 minutes into it, and shelved it. It didn’t grab me. It wasn’t immersive enough. The movie was entertaining to me primarily for the visuals (its “visceral” aspects). I might take a look at this latest game, though, when I can find the time between writing.

What scares you? Tap into it. If you want some insight on how to convey it on paper and ultimately to the screen, take a look at the teachings of Karl Iglesias, both his seminar DVDs and his latest book, Writing for Emotional Impact.
 
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You sound like you are very into it, and have some deep understanding of what you hope to do ... both good things! I admire your disdain for Hollywood "jump scare tactics" too! One thing to consider, though, as others have said, is that in psuchological stories CHARACTER needs to be fleshed out beyond mere BACKSTORY.

It's relatively easy to create mere "backstory" details ... but that all still needs to CONNECT with your AUDIENCE'S EMOTIONS.

Your Audience's emotions are the "universal" human emotions (fear of death, jealousy, needing to be loved, etc) ... One mustn't fall into a trap that just because the writer creates an interesting set of "details" for their character, that that automatically connects to the audience's emotions.

Are you old enough to remember Howard Hughes, or do you watch MONK on TV? They're deathly afraid of GERMS (let's say). To those characters, it's scary psychological fear ... but to an audience WATCHING, we just think it's crazy or silly.

So the filmmaker's job is to INSTILL THOSE FEARS (your character's fears) into your audience. Unless you make them FEEL it ... it's just data, it's just details.

One reason that "jump scare" becomes tedious is that it offers nothing new, it's cheap and empty kneejerk reflex. Hit my knee with a lil rubber hammer and my knee kicks ... but my BRAIN doesn't really care, does it? Put a scary idea in my BRAIN ... and your movie will HAUNT ME.

I'm NOT suggesting that you don't ALREADY KNOW all that.

I'm just thinking aloud: Backstory "details" aren't psychological horror, in and of themselves. We all must delve deeper than that.

I don't know what the most frightening scene in a movie is ... but the dentist torture scene in MARATHON MAN has to come close. It's not just that Mengele is hurting Hoffman though ... it's the question: "Is it safe?"

"Is it safe?" The utter helpless meaninglessness of the question, repeated over and over and over again ...

To which NO ANSWER, yes or no ... can stop the torture!

It's the HELPLESSNESS. It's psychological horror. "Torture porn" had that at the start ... Will you saw off your own hand? ... I dunno anymore.
 
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WELL, thanks VP and soul for giving me the same piece of advice, and that is, making a believable, real, emotional character.

As you mentioned, VP, in regards to being the protagonist in said FPS's, I realized that it is the same reason I feel that Silent hill is such a good series ('The Room' didn't catch my fancy either; it frustrated me more than anything). If I 'watched' the game unfold instead of actually unfolding it myself, it would not have been have as bad.

I also understand there are human universal emotions, however, everyone is different (jealousy and the need to be loved can differ from man to woman). That being said, do you think it possible to target EVERYone, or perhaps only specific people?

And what kind of ideas can you offer that would make a protagonist real, tangeable almost, and even gripping? Would issues like being single or being divorced, or having children, matter? I ask because I've never looked at protagonists as being SO real. When I leave movies, I never notice people talk about characters or character development, which is interesting.

I guess it's back to the drawing board to flesh out a decent protagonist :P
 
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Scary:
A madman spreads a virus that infects people's brains so their heads rip themselves from their body and grow a midget, spider-like creature that grows out from inside the skull with the person's skin hanging off it like a deformed mask, and it runs around attacking people, especially children, biting at the genitals to spread the virus.

2 Buses crash in the country, one carrying a Italian Woman's Professional Soccer Team and the other a Christian All-Boy's Choir as the zombie-head-virus-monster-apocalypse breaks out in cities.

Led by brutishly savage-for-a-woman Coach Stalinissima and a timid Priest Edmund, the unusual pairing is the only one who can find a cure for the virus and stop the madman!

Hmmm... that was totally off the top of my head, but if anyone is interested, I'll write the mofo if you pay me for it, if you're crazy enough... LOL

But seriously, the scariest thing is that all psychology and science and religion and art and reality is mostly theories and still mostly UNKNOWN... we know very little about anything with any certainty. If you follow science, we are multi-celled organisms made up of little bits of twisted ribbon called DNA which is just arrangements of atoms, which are really just a mabumbabamillion (like 10 to the power of 100 to the power of a mumababillion) bits of string that are vibrating in 11-dimensional hyperspace in a universe that is really just spectrums of light-energy.... If you follow religion, there's an omniscient God sitting in the sky watching everybody kill and murder one another and then judging their souls when they die and loving it all up. Neither side really makes sense, if you really think about it. They're both just interpretations that we make up to help us deal with the immeasurable question: What is reality?

Thus, in order to literally scare the shit out of people, what you should seek to do is reinforce the UNKNOWN and break down the walls and rules of reality. Your movie has to suck them into believing that it is reality, and then smashing what our conceptions of reality are and leaving them in a vulnerable, malleable shape.

Build up some tension while you hint at a hidden, unknown reality, then SHOCK it every once in a while to start busting down that wall. Like, kill a character's child off in the script- something they would never see coming- maybe a grandma gets decapitated by a garage door, it doesn't even have to do with the plot... it just has to be "horrifying".
 
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Spatula, your insight and comedic thinking could've really been used in that "Contact meets Crash on Comedy Central" thread. I was hoping you'd jump in there and rewrite the synopsis. :lol:
 
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VPTurner said:
Have you read any books on psychology? Anything by Carl Jung?

If you want to master psychological horror, you'll want a strong foundation in understanding the human psyche:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_psychology

My wife has her degree in psychology, so I have direct access to an insider. She's my screener. :)

I also have Jung's book "Psychological Types" sitting on my bookshelf.
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But how deep into psychology or abnormal psychology does one have to dive into to get the picture? I mean, were Hitchcock and other great horror producers psychologists? Or were they just creative?
I did take a short psychology course in school and will be taking abnormal psyc. next year (I'm in a policing program) so I do have the gist of it. Again, I'm not writing a book, I'm just wanting to instill some fear, so while the basics of psychology might aid, everyone is different. I just wonder if complex psychology will matter or even be appreciated.
 
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Everyone may be different on the surface, but inside our basic instincts, emotions and needs are all the same. Even Vulcans have them. They've just evolved and learned how to supress them. Why do you think archetypes have lasted thousands of years in stories? They relate to our base instincts and emotions. Deep down, we are just animals, after all. Often not even civilized. "Fight or flight" is a base instinct that every animal has.

I'm not saying you need a degree. But you need to know your characters better than the audience and deeper than you put down in the script. If they're not real to you, how do you expect to be able to make them appear real to someone else? You'll end up with flat, two-dimensional characters and cliche' stereotypes.

Here's something else for you to think about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

If you start threatening someone's physiological needs and/or safety needs, you have a good chance of creating fear. The rest are more or less dependent on the individual and their upbringing, social status, belief systems, etc. I mean, if you hate your grandmother, how much sleep would you lose if she got decapitated by a garage door? You might be elated and not necessarily horrified.
 
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VPTurner said:
Spatula, your insight and comedic thinking could've really been used in that "Contact meets Crash on Comedy Central" thread. I was hoping you'd jump in there and rewrite the synopsis. :lol:
Click to expand...

Can u link me then? I don't read all the posts here because there's just so many, but that one sounds vaguely familiar... throw me a bone and I'll jam something out...
 
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Would most people browsing through this thread come to agree that - and I know there are many types of fears - the fear of pain or death and the fear of social rejection and isolation would scare them?
 
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