I just blogged about the first script pitch for Detox over at the Detox blog HERE. And at the end I mentioned wanting to write a horror script that couldn’t construed as anything BUT horror. You’d think that’d be easy. And, I guess, it would. But maybe my brain is just not wired that way. I set out for Detox to be classifiably horror as a reaction to “The Bet” not being perceived as horror. Now, I am looking to write something else that’s horror since Detox isn’t perceived that way.
Anyhoo. I think the problem I keep running into is that, for the most part, horror films are stupid. They’re good, but there’s usually not much to them storywise. And if there is, they start to move into other genres. Slasher films are undeniably horror and their scripts are usually pretty lame. Group of unsuspecting people trapped somewhere isolated and picked off one-by-one. Sure, a film like Wolf Creek follows that, but front loads with a lot of character development and was unapologetically brutal. A Nightmare on Elm Street mixed things up by adding fantasy elements. The Thing added sc-fi elements. Maybe I just don’t know what horror is.
Actually, I do. I recently was going nuts trying to come up with a short film idea. I had ideas with horrific elements, but they didn’t feel like horror. According to Wikipedia, “Horror films are movies that strive to elicit fear, horror and terror responses from viewers.” Seems pretty simple. And by that definition, “The Bet” is a horror film. It may not have worked for everyone and may have been very light in the fear arena, favoring other darker emotions, but it did “strive to elicit fear.”
I think what I’m expecting out of myself is something more traditionally horror. Something with blood and monsters and screaming. The new idea I’ve got cooking is definitely looking good in the blood department. It might not be the best way to write a script, but going in I’m determined to get a lot of blood, a lot of sex, a lot of nudity, a lot of screaming, a lot of death. I’m sure it will somehow, in the process, skew off into a more heady direction – and that’s fine. I’ll just make sure to keep the blood flowing on the screen.