Ingredients:
Wes Craven’s Scream on Blu-ray
Theatrical poster for Ridley Scott’s Alien
Scott Cawthon’s indie game Five Nights at Freddy’s
That scene in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist where the fox eats itself
The ingenuity of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook
½ cup milk
1: Grab a bowl and wash it out, [making sure to get rid of all the Salmonella]. Season broth lightly with the opening of Scream and bring to a simmer. It’s a tale as old as time – a girl plays trivia with an unknown caller and ends up disemboweled in a tree. It’s a perfect one-two punch to establish tone and show your audience what they’re in for.
2. Get a friend to bring over Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s the kind of scary done subtly enough to leave you locking your bedroom door at night, minus the shock factor. Players work as a security guard in the dilapidated office of a tacky family restaurant. The freakish animatronic theme-bots that troll the hallways aren’t even the scariest part as you bide your time with a flickering and slowly fading lamp-light. But this is just for spice. Bring to a boil.
3. Shred Alien poster into fine strips and take into consideration how well the Xenomorph (Alien’s monster) personifies the fear conveyed. The xenomorph lurks eerily in the shadows as the film centres around fear and isolation. The unknown that comes with this monster is nicely tied into its inherent scariness. Add milk.
4. Broth should start to smoke soon, probably because you’re boiling paper and shards of plastic.
5. Foreign horror is better, so when you get an opportunity- French it up. Hollywood is bogged down with cliché ridden cash grabs instead of representing horror as a true art form. Don’t believe me? I can make a soufflé that just melts in your mouth with the six Paranormal Activities that exist and a Caesar salad with the seven Saw films. Any questions? No? Proceed.
6. Rinse out anything that has to do with found footage from your dish. Get copy of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and hold that beautiful monster real close. Mad Max brought a visual storytelling to action films that found footage movies took away from horror films. In every shot of Mad Max, you may not have known why something was happening but you always knew what was happening. Found footage films are notable for doing the opposite of that.
7. Season dish with jump scares. They’re cheap, they’re easy-sure. Yet, they’re necessary. It’s hard to keep pace in a horror film with a three act structure especially if you’ve already revealed the monster. A jump scare speeds up the film a bit, adding a punchline to that tension you’ve been building up. Strategic- don’t overuse.
And there you have it, the ingredients that will make your horror film stand out. Happy Halloween!
