Praise for A Sense of Dread

“When you’re reading Neal’s work, especially one of his horror/thriller scripts, you find yourself
afraid to read more — but at the same time, eager to keep on reading. There’s no question that Neal’s
work is uniquely memorable and his ‘book of secrets’ should be a must-read for anyone interested in
writing in the genre.” —Joel Roodman, founder of Gotham Entertainment Group, former
senior executive with Miramax Films
“Stevens has mastered that ability to know and understand what makes us all afraid, and has the
ability to apply that knowledge in his writing.” —Jim Strader, Co-Creator of Weird America,
and CEO and Publisher at Quattro Media
“No script ever magically appears. It is the work, the toil, the sweat and blood of a master, a
professional, who understands the craft of manipulation through thoughtfully, yet spontaneously,
telling a well-constructed story … a story that will make you scream in terror, yet drive you to
laughter within a few lines of exposition. A story that makes you want to throw a book or script
across a room out of fear — but you can’t, because you must find out what will happen next. And
THAT is what A Sense of Dread is about. You will love this book.”—Michael Citriniti, Actor,
Goodfellas, Ravenwolf Towers
“There are a lot of ingredients in putting together a successful horror story or film. But I’m delighted
to say that author Neal Marshall Stevens has put those components together in A Sense of Dread:
Getting Under the Skin of Horror Screenwriting! Stevens boldly tackles the subject of “fear” by
providing writers with ways to take their characters (and all of us) on a terror-filled, but
informational journey, on crafting a horror project! Read it, if you dare!!!”—Kathie Fong Yoneda,
Former Studio Exec, Author of The Script-Selling Game
“ A Sense of Dread doesn’t just demonstrate how to write a horror script — it’s a primer in how our
minds work (often against us) and a history of fear and terror throughout the ages. A Sense of Dread
shows us that our biggest fears don’t just come from monsters, demons, or spirits — but our very
humanity: fragile, vulnerable, irrational. It is rich, fast-paced, and eminently readable.
“A Sense of Dread is a must-read — not only for horror writers, but all writers, or anyone interested
in the fascinating background behind our fears, phobias, and what makes us uniquely human.” —
Matthew Reynolds, Hollywood Executive, who developed the screenplays for Hidalgo,
Ladder 49, and the Netflix hit The Highwaymen
“In A Sense of Dread, Neal Marshall Stevens expertly gets to the heart of the scare. What makes us
afraid and how you can turn those fears into a career!” —Tony Timpone, Former Editor of
Fangoria Magazine, Producer and Author
“Literally littered with horrific ideas … and that’s a good thing. No matter your experience in the
horror genre, A Sense of Dread will flood you with ideas for scenes, characters, and stories. Neal
stares deep into the heart of what makes us afraid without making us, the reader, afraid. He unpacks
our Sense of Dread at the most primal, biological, and psychological level. However, the text is light
and easy to read, making a dip into the swamp of the horrific feel like a refreshing dip in a tidal
pool.” —Matthew Kalil, Author of The Three Wells of Screenwriting, Professor at the David
Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts MFA in Screenwriting Program
“Neal Stevens’ love for — and encyclopedic knowledge of — the horror genre is obvious to
everyone who knows him. In A Sense of Dread, he shares his profound understanding of the
psychology of fear, from our terrified responses to creepy critters to our deepest personal and social
anxieties, then gives budding horror writers the tools they need to use that knowledge and master
their craft. Read this book if you hope to overcome any fear you might have of turning out a truly
terrifying script!”—Dorothy Rompalske, Filmmaker, Writer, and Director/ Chair of the David
Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts MFA Program in Screenwriting
“Anyone interested in the craft of horror screenwriting should definitely take a look at his ‘book of
secrets.’”—Denice Duff, Actor, best known to horror fans for her role in the Subspecies
series of films
“ A Sense of Dread deftly manages to be both concise and comprehensive. An absorbing read that
touches all bases, making it a must-have for both fans and creators.”—F. Paul Wilson, best-selling
Author of science fiction and horror, including the Repairman Jack novels
“In working with Neal Stevens, I discovered the extent of Neal’s dark imagination and his broad
knowledge of the horror genre, a deep well of sinister knowledge that he’s now decided to share in
his book, A Sense of Dread: Getting Under the Skin of Horror Screenwriting.
“Neal has managed to incorporate a vast amount of experience in crafting a work that digs down
into the fundamentals of fear and also details its practical application on both the page and the screen.
It’s a must-read for any writer interested in the horror genre.”—Gil Adler, Producer, Writer,
Director, his work includes Tales from the Crypt, Thirteen Ghosts, and Superman Returns
among others.

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 A SENSE OF
DREAD

GETTING UNDER THE SKIN OF HORROR

SCREENWRITING

NEAL MARSHALL STEVENS

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Published by Michael Wiese Productions
12400 Ventura Blvd. #1111
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 379-8799, (818) 986-3408 (Fax)
[email protected]
www.mwp.com
Manufactured in the
United States of America
Copyright © 2022 Neal Marshall Stevens

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without
permission in writing from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

This book was set in Garamond Premier Pro and Din Pro

Cover design by Johnny Ink

Interior design by Debbie Berne
Copyediting by Sarah Beach
Names: Stevens, Neal Marshall, author.
Title: A sense of dread: getting under the skin of horror screenwriting / Neal Stevens.
Description: Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, [2022] | Identifiers: LCCN 2021013988 | ISBN
9781615933334 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—Authorship. | Motion picture plays—Technique. | Motion picture
authorship. | Fear.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 S748 2022 | DDC 808.2/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013988

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To Judith, Jacob, and Zachary

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CONTENTS

Foreword
by Charles Band
Introduction

1
Fear Itself, Part One
The Biological Basis of Fear
2
Fear Itself, Part Two
Psychology

3
Fear Itself, Part Three
Culture
4
The Toolbox Of Dread

5
Putting Theory Into Practice

Conclusion
Why Horror?

Acknowledgments
Suggested Reading
Filmography
About the Author
About Charles Band

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FOREWORD

I started working with Neal over two decades ago, and the movie business
has been through lots of changes over that time. What hasn’t changed is our
mutual love of movies, monsters, and horror — and the joy of bringing that
special combination of scares, thrills, and just plain weirdness to our
audiences.
Neal has a deep (might I say almost scary?) knowledge of horror movies
— old Universal classics, Euro-horror, obscure low-budget creepy rarities
from the fifties and sixties. If I mention some rare horror flick as a reference
for something we’re developing, chances are he’s not only seen it, but
probably already owns a copy.
Over our years together, Neal has worked on everything from our own
unique take on giant monster movies — Zarkorr! The Invader and Kraa the
Sea Monster to children’s fantasy — The Shrunken City, Clockmaker, and
The Secret Kingdom, to our own unique combination of horror and off-beat
comedy with movies such as Head of the Family, Hideous, and The Creeps!
to straight horror in projects like Talisman, Stitches (which he directed) and
his multiple contributions to our perennial Puppetmaster series.
More recently, he’s gone on to contribute his talents to our streaming
projects — Trophy Heads and Ravenwolf Towers.
Neal’s originality, talent, and just plain oddball sensibility as a
screenwriter has made him an invaluable contributor to the crazy, scary, and
definitely weird Full Moon Family!
So, read on!
—Charles Band

Charles Band has been the first name in low-budget, high-concept genre entertainment for over forty
years. For more about him check out the information on page XXX.

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 INTRODUCTION
I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror.
Edgar Allan Poe

Tales of Horror have been with us since before the beginnings of history.
From time immemorial, they have been whispered around the campfire,
painted on the walls of caves, and passed down in song, story, and myth.
We have gone in search of the things that terrify us, maybe to learn from
them, maybe to test ourselves, maybe for some reason we don’t quite
understand.
Our most ancient narratives that come down to us from before the
beginning of recorded history speak of the confrontation of our ancestors
with their darkest fears.
But what, after all, is horror? What horrifies us and why? Is it simply the
fear of what lurks unseen in the dark, or the fear of death, or of physical
injury?
Then there’s the larger question: What is it that tempts us to experience
horror, whether in the spoken word, on the page, on the stage, on the
screen? What is that urge that makes us want to peer through our fingers at
those forbidden and often subversive images on the screen?
What is it that draws so many of us to those sharp edges of experience
and imagination?
That is part of what we are going to explore in this book — the nature of
fear itself; where it comes from, what fears we have in common with other
members of the animal kingdom, what fears are uniquely human, what fears
are tied to particular times, cultures, and places.
We will also explore whether fear and horror are the same thing, and if
they differ, what distinguishes one from the other?
I believe that the emotion of horror is embodied in what I call the Sense
of Dread.
Here are some examples:
 In Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) — when the unseen force that
haunts Hill House approaches Eleanor and Dorothea’s room in the form of a
terrifying banging in the hallway outside — and then jiggles the doorknob,
trying to get in.
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) — when Wendy finds the
unattended typewriter containing the “novel” that Jack’s been working on
for endless weeks — only to discover that page after page consists of
nothing but “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. …”
In James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013) — when the terrified daughter
stares into the darkness behind her half-open bedroom door and whispers to
her sister, “There’s someone behind the door.”
What’s important to note is that in none of these examples is there any
immediate physical danger. To the extent that there may be a physical
threat, it is indefinite, lurking elsewhere, beyond a door, or unseen in the
shadows.
Dread runs deeper than simply the apprehension of physical danger. It’s
the difference between facing a lion in the jungle as opposed to hearing the
scratch of claws behind the wall. It’s the difference between being
confronted by a man with a gun as opposed to discovering a worm crawling
under your skin.
We experience the Sense of Dread when that which we believe to be
safe, secure, or sacred is unexpectedly penetrated or violated by The
Forbidden, The Unknown, or The Unnatural.
In the Chapters that follow, we will explore both Fear and its origins and
also the concept of Dread.
We’ll try to learn how we, as screenwriters, can understand and use
them.

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 1
FEAR ITSELF, PART ONE
THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF
FEAR
The only thing we have to fear is — fear itself.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933)

Biology lies at the base of our fundamental experiences of fear.

The emotion of fear is linked with what is commonly known as the
fight/flight reflex, a response that we share with virtually every member of
the animal kingdom with a working brain above a certain level of
complexity.
The structure known as the amygdala, located near the brain stem,
regulates fear in human beings (it serves many other functions as well). It’s
one of the most primitive parts of the brain, and is found in all mammals,
from shrews to the blue whale. While it may enter into the realms of
speculation, other members of the animal kingdom, from reptiles to
amphibians to fish, might also experience the emotion of fear.
However, that doesn’t mean that, even for human beings, the experience
of fear is universal. Sufferers from an extremely rare genetic disorder
known as Urbach-Wiethe disease, which can lead to lesions forming on the
amygdala, can sometimes exhibit a complete lack of the emotion of fear.
Here’s a particularly grim example from another species. For the mouse,
their experience of fear, under normal circumstances, usually keeps them
lurking safely in corners. But they undergo a strange change of behavior
when infected by the toxoplasma parasite.
The mouse is only one stop on the parasite’s intricate reproductive
journey. Inside the mouse, the parasite travels to the brain, where it causes
the mouse to lose its fear of cat odor — bad for the mouse but good for the
parasite that infects it, and that’s because a fearless mouse tends to stray out
into the open, where it is apt to be eaten by a cat. Inside the cat’s gut, the
parasite is able to complete its reproductive cycle.
As a side note, one study found an increased level of traffic accidents
among human beings infected with the toxoplasma parasite. If thinking
about this is starting to creep you out — well, at least it suggests that your
amygdala is present and working well.
But the above raises a more profound question. Just how far does it go?
What aspects of our own fears can we recognize and understand in other
animals?
I’d like to talk about a number of fears that we share with other members
of the Animal Kingdom.

Temple Grandin is well-known as an animal scientist who has used her

unique insights born from her autism to investigate the internal lives and
thought processes of other living creatures. In her book Animals in
Translation (2005), written with Catherine Johnson, she discusses some of
the fear responses that we share with other animals.
These are some of her conclusions.

FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN IS UNIVERSAL

It’s as true for a cow, a cat, or a dog, as it is for us. But matters are more
complicated than that. We all live in a world that is full of new experiences.
Full of “unknowns.” If we simply ran away from everything new, we
wouldn’t survive for long. On the other hand, if we blundered around,
failing to take proper precautions around the new and strange, we’d likely
end up on the inside of — well, something new, strange — and deadly.
Grandin talks about the behavior of cattle, noting that they’re easily
spooked, that they’ll run from anything novel in their environment. But
they’re also very curious animals. They have to be, because it’s only by
investigating their environment that they can find food, avoid danger, and
maintain social relationships.

CURIOUSLY AFRAID
So what happens when you introduce some novel object into a field where
cattle are grazing? Well, if it’s something new and moving toward them,
there’s no question what to do. They get out. Fast.
But what if it isn’t approaching them?
Then they exhibit a behavior that Grandin refers to as being curiously
afraid. This is a behavior that’s broadly exhibited across the Animal
Kingdom and should be very familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a
horror movie.
This is how it works for cattle. If something new enters the environment
and is obviously dangerous, there’s no question as to what to do. They’ll
run. If something enters the environment and is obviously familiar and of
no use to them (that is, it’s not food or a potential mate), there’s also no
question as to how to behave. They ignore it and go on about their business.
But what if it’s ambiguous? Something they’re just not sure about.
Maybe it’s nothing — or maybe it’s dangerous. Maybe it’s useful;
something good to eat, for instance. Just leaving it alone isn’t a good idea.
Whether you’re a cow, a cat, or a human being, you need to find out.
Thus you find yourself in the midst of that competing tension of emotion
that Grandin calls being “curiously afraid.”
In the case of the cattle, they will very cautiously approach the novel
object, extend their heads, their tongues, examining “whatever-it-is.” Touch,
taste, wait to see if there’s any sign of danger. If so, if they’re startled, then
they’ll get the hell out of there. If not, and having investigated fully and
come to the conclusion that whatever-it-is is neither useful nor harmful,
they’ll go back to doing what they do best. Eating grass.
But what’s the human equivalent? Where have we seen examples of
human beings being “curiously afraid”?
How many times have we watched that scene in a horror movie of
someone walking down the long corridor toward the half-open door? Or
down the dimly-lit cluttered alley way? Or down the basement stairs where
they’ve heard a sound and where the lights are now no longer working?
There is no explicit visual danger. If there were, they’d get the hell out of
there. No, the menace is always ambiguous. Its nature is such that, even
though we’re always saying, “don’t do it, get the hell out of there,” at the
same time we know that they really can’t.
 We, like the characters in those horror movies, are curiously afraid. Even
though we suspect that something terrible is likely lurking behind the half
open door or down at the bottom of those dimly lit basement steps — still,
curiosity drives both them and us.
Both of us have to go on, to find out. Maybe it’s nothing.
Only of course, in the real world, that may be true. But in a horror
movie, on some level we know that ultimately, there will always be
something there, lurking in the shadows.

THE STARTLE RESPONSE

This is something else that we share with other members of the animal
kingdom. Pretty much anybody who’s owned a cat knows what happens if
you sneak up on it and poke it with your finger (which I used to do to our
rather high-strung pet, back when I was an ill-behaved kid growing up in
Boston).
Needless to say, a startled cat can jump really high.
The same is true with virtually any mammal, including us. A sudden
unexpected touch, sound, appearance, will produce the traditional “startle”
response. We’ll jump, gasp, blink, pull back. Our hearts will beat faster.
The sudden intrusion has triggered the flow of adrenalin. It’s triggered
our “fight or flight” response. Essentially, we have a built-in alarm system
that’s not particularly discriminating. All that it does is react to something
close that we didn’t expect and don’t immediately recognize.
The biological alarm instantly goes off!
Get ready to fight! Get ready to run! As with many such indiscriminate
alarm systems, it’s set far toward the “false positive” side. Much better,
when it comes to preserving our lives, to jump every so often over nothing,
than to not be startled when you should and end up inside the stomach of a
sabre-tooth tiger.
Anyone who’s ever watched a horror movie knows that filmmakers have
taken advantage of the startle response since the beginning of motion
pictures. The advent of sound increased the effectiveness of the startle
response, which these days is called a “Jump scare” or a “boo.”
In contemporary movies, it’s rare for us to see a jump scare of any kind
without it being amplified on the sound track with some sort of loud
orchestral blare to send us jumping out of our seats.
 Of course, since this is a biological response, the reaction isn’t limited to
horror movies. There are any number of thrillers, suspense films, and action
films that make use of the startle response to get the audience to jump out of
their seats. Bodies drop out of closets. Hands reach in from just out of
frame. Telephones suddenly — RINNNNGG!!! — at a much louder volume
than reason dictates.
And, of course, it always works, because those moments bypass reason,
and go straight to our most ancient biological reflexes.

In a later chapter, we’ll go into greater detail about the uses of the
“curiously afraid” reaction and the startle response — the countless
variations that have been used in movies down through the years, and how
modern screenwriters can make use of them in crafting their own new scary
scenes and sequences.

FEAR AND THE MAPPING OF THE BRAIN

As we know intuitively, the vast network of our body’s nervous system
doesn’t treat every part of our body equally. Some parts of our bodies
receive the lion’s share of both sensory nerves and pain receptors. Some of
us may remember an old summer camp game where someone draws a
number with the tip of a finger on someone else’s back. Can you guess the
number? It’s harder than you think, simply because the back, compared for
instance, to the palm of the hand, is sparsely equipped with sensory nerves.
It’s equally true that certain parts of our body are much more sensitive to
pain than others.
In 1937, Doctors Wilder Penfield, Edwin Boldrey and Theodore
Rasmussen, conducting investigations of human brain function, created
what they called sensory and motor “homunculi;” that is, they created
physical representations of the human body based on how much of the brain
was devoted to a given portion of the human anatomy.
Many years later, this three-dimensional sculpture of the “sensory
homunculus” was created, based on their initial research:
Apart from looking like something out of a horror movie, what is intriguing
about the above image is that it bears a striking similarity to drawings of the
human form made by very young children.
Take this example, for instance:

What do we see emphasized? Head, mouth, eyes, nose, hands. In the

drawings of young children, the torsos are often literally absent, with limbs
simply grafted onto the head.
This is telling us something about the way in which children develop —
which is that they “see” people not as we are physically, not as their eyes
perceive us, but as their brains perceive themselves.
Mostly, as we grow older, our mental map of ourselves tracks with
greater precision to our objective physical form. But sometimes, there can
be a pathological mismatch, as in the case of sufferers from anorexia, who,
even when underweight to the point of near-starvation, will look at
themselves and “see” someone who is overweight. Or in the case of those
unfortunate individuals who suffer from “phantom limb” syndrome, they
continue to feel pain in arms or legs that have been amputated.
But what does all of this have to do with horror movies or with the Sense
of Dread?
Quite simply this: When we talk about those biologically-based aspects
of fear, we have to go back to that “sensory homunculus,” to those aspects
of the human body that are most sensitive, most heavily “wired” to feel
pain.
From our earliest childhood, we instinctively react with horror to the
prospect of injury to certain parts of our bodies. Specifically, injury to the
extremities:
Hands, Fingers, Wrists, Feet, Toes, Ankles

And the front of the face:

Eyes, Nose, Lips, Tongue, Teeth

And getting our Hair tangled or pulled out.

Here are some classic examples:

Jack Nicholson’s nose being slit open in Roman Polanski’s

Chinatown (1974)
Jon Voight’s crushed fingertip from Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway
Train (1985)
Richard Burton’s spike-pierced foot from John Boorman’s Exorcist
Part II (1977)
James Caan has his ankles broken in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990)
Peter Cushing has his hand chopped off in Terence Fisher’s Island of
Terror (1966)
The unfortunate woman’s eye pierced by a splinter in Lucio Fulci’s
Zombie (1979)
Dustin Hoffman’s dental torture scene from John Schlesinger’s
Marathon Man (1976)

There are many other examples and I leave it to you to think of your
own.
 Of course, Chinatown, Runaway Train, and Marathon Man aren’t horror
movies, and yet we often find, not only in these movies but in countless
other examples, that so-called mainstream cinema turns to the tropes of
horror cinema for some of their most effective and memorable images,
scenes, and sequences.

EXERCISES

Come up with a list from movies you’ve seen of effective examples

of Jump Scares.
Come up with another list of effective “curiously afraid” moments.
Come up with another list of effective moments or scenes from
movies (horror movies or otherwise), that took advantage of “brain
mapping” sensitivity by targeting eyes, fingers, extremities, etc.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue to explore the ways in which the
nature of fear connects not only to human biology, but also to that which
makes us uniquely human, to human psychology, and to our place in a
changing society.

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 2
FEAR ITSELF, PART TWO
PSYCHOLOGICALLY-BASED
FEARS
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror.
Edgar Allen Poe

INSTINCTIVE FEARS
Many years ago philosophers believed in the so-called “tabula rasa,” that
we were born as “blank slates” on which our parents, society, or the
experiences of our up-bringing inscribed our personalities, our loves, our
fears, our preferences, needs, cravings, and desires.
Scientific research (and the accumulated insight of countless parents and
caregivers) have led us to understand that we are far more complicated
beings than the mere sum of our experiences. That just as many of the
fellow organisms with which we share this planet come into the world
equipped with instinctive behaviors as well as the ability to learn from
experience, the human “slate” with which we are born is far from blank.
Research into young children indicates that certain fears are, if not
universal, at the very least, broadly shared among young children in widely
diverse cultures, circumstances, and up-bringing.

Fear of Rats, Mice, and Other Scurrying Things

This is a fear that arises very early in childhood. It is the especial tendency
of rodents to occupy the corners and crevices of our own living spaces that
seems to intensify the sense of loathing that we have for them. And while
there are always exceptions to any rule, it appears clear that the sense of
horror, the Dread of the Rodent is something that runs deep into our DNA
— a loathing that we seem to share with other mammals.
 It’s important to understand that this fear of rodents isn’t inherently
rational. A rat, for instance, isn’t any more dangerous, say, than a fox. In
fact, a fox is certainly more dangerous. But the prospect of finding a fox in
your bedroom may be surprising and even scary, but it wouldn’t fill you
with the sense of sheer loathing, that “Sense of Dread,” that you would feel
at discovering a rat in your bedroom.
Why? Because the fear of foxes is learned. We have to learn that foxes
are dangerous by observing their appearance and behavior (or learning
through others). The horror of rats is built in. Our reaction to them is instant
and visceral.
One should note that our fear of rodents extends to bats. Though they’re
not officially members of the rodent family, in appearance and behavior, our
instinctive reactions tend to group them together, we think of them as flying
mice or even worse — flying rats.

Fear of Spiders
This is another widely experienced instinctive fear.
Now, the Arthropoda covers a wide range of species and genera; the
spiders, the insects, the millipedes — countless crawly, biting, stinging
things in sea and air — so our reactions to the whole range of things that fly
and buzz and crawl and bite and sting likewise covers a broad range.
Not many people are terrified by butterflies or caterpillars, nor even by
mosquitoes despite the fact that over the centuries the diseases that
mosquitoes have carried have probably been responsible for more human
deaths than all the wars combined. But we simply think of them as an
annoyance; we don’t dread them. We’re not horrified by a mosquito bite.
On the other hand, spiders in particular, trigger that instinctive reaction
of dread in a way that bumblebees or dragonflies do not (not that there
aren’t people who are afraid of those insects as well).

Fear of Snakes
We’ve saved the scariest for last. Here, as a sub-category of the fear of
reptiles, we find the single greatest fear among both children and adults.
51% of Americans surveyed reported snakes as their number one fear. This
is true even among those who have grown up with essentially no direct
experience of snakes.
Fear of Choking, Smothering, or Drowning
The above group is, likewise, one of those common, instinctive fears. We
don’t need to look very deeply for the reason for this one, of course. If our
brains are deprived of life-giving oxygen for three minutes, we’ll die. Not
being able to breathe almost immediately triggers a biological reaction, that
desperate sense of smothering, usually coupled with panic, the fight-or-
flight response. It’s a tragic irony that this panic response often overwhelms
the ability of someone who finds themselves choking or drowning to make
decisions that might actually save their lives.
While the fear of choking or drowning seems self-evident, what about
the others? Where do they come from, these fears of rats, of spiders, of
snakes? Surely the world is full of many things that are far more dangerous.
For instance, young children have no fear of those chemical poisons that
lurk in bottles beneath the sink. However dangerous they are, there’s no
instinctive aversion to deadly chemicals, no natural protective safety valve
that makes us fear or avoid them. We simply have to learn to stay away
from them.
It’s pretty clear that these deeper fears aren’t learned. That is, they don’t
come from outside of us. The fear doesn’t come from the rats, or the
spiders, or the snakes themselves. These fears come from within. They are
genetically programmed by the forces of natural selection, for reasons that
reach back into the dim mists of our ancient human or perhaps even pre-
human ancestry.
Again, we go back to that fight-or-flight reflex and to the instincts that
trigger it, the potentially dangerous things that creep and crawl in the
underbrush beneath our feet and in the corners and in the shadows. It would
have been lethal for our ancient ancestors to wait long enough to find out
just what it was that was doing the scratching or the crawling or the
scurrying.
Instinct had to take over, to send the adrenalin pumping and to hit that
internal button that makes our skin crawl and every sense react with an
instinctive loathing and trigger the urge to jump back, retreat, lash out and
get the hell away from those scratching, scurrying nightmares in the
shadow.

CROSS-OVER FEARS
Some of our fears are unquestionably built-in. Others are most definitely
learned. For instance, we seem to have no instinctive fear of fire despite the
fact that it’s very definitely dangerous. The human race just seems to have
met up with it in the mists of pre-history too late for us to have developed
any instincts about it. We have to put our fingers into the flames a few times
before we start being afraid of it. It is a “learned” fear. We’ll talk about
learned fears shortly.
But there is another category of fears, an intermediate category of things
that are feared by a great many people that, for lack of a better way of
thinking about it, may have one foot in the “instinctive” category and the
other in that “learned fear” category.
Here are some of them:

Fear of the Dark

It’s interesting to note that very young children aren’t afraid of the dark. It’s
only something that develops as our brains, and by extension our
imagination, develops. It is only then that we begin to populate the dark
with our fearful imaginings, as we start to conceive of entities that might
cause us harm, that might attack us, frighten us, inevitably we populate the
shadows and the darkness with those entities. Of course, this runs deep into
that fundamental fear — the Fear of the Unknown, for where else does the
unknown lie, if not in the dark?

Fear of Closed Spaces/Being Trapped/Paralysis

It’s worth noting, as above, that very young infants actually find
confinement, in the form of “bundling,” in which the infant is tightly
wrapped up so that she ends up looking like a little mummy, actually quite
comforting. Theories suggest that this state imitates the confined
environment of the womb.
But as we age and start to feel the need to move around, being restricted
and confined becomes not only unpleasant but ultimately deeply disturbing.
While there are obviously many people who aren’t bothered by tight spaces
(note those people who go crawling around in caves) for many of us, the
prospect of being confined in tight quarters, unable to move, or having our
ability to move restricted, likewise the thought of being physically
paralyzed, is a profoundly terrifying one.
Fear of Bees/Stinging Insects
A sub-category of the fear we have of insects, generally. While the
grounding, in the form of our fear/discomfort of insects generally, is present
regarding bees, wasps, etc., it’s inevitably magnified in respect to any
stinging or biting insect, and often all it takes is for someone to get stung as
a young child for that fear to be fully established, often for a lifetime.

Fears of Thunder and Lightning

A very common childhood fear, and not a surprising one. Extremely loud
and sudden explosive noise, bright flashing light, and the whole thing often
accompanied by huge winds. This immediately triggers our fight or flight
reaction. But, of course, there really isn’t much we can do, and it is that
helplessness in the face of a relentlessly violent nature that magnifies our
fear.
It’s not surprising that ancient (and not so ancient) peoples associated
thunderstorms with the anger of heaven. There is just something about
thunder and lightning that suggests rage and danger, and as young children
we respond accordingly. We feel as if we’re under attack, and helpless to
defend ourselves, and very often carry those reactions with us into adult
life.

Fear of Deformity
There’s a term known as the “Uncanny Valley” that’s used in the realm of
CGI or other manufactured images of the Human Figure. It describes what
happens when the image in question comes quite close to being perfectly
realistic but not quite close enough. The human observer can tell the
difference, and that condition of “close but not quite human” is enough to
set off alarm bells in our heads. It’s shouting, “Whatever this is, it isn’t
really human! — It’s not one of us!”
Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically, human beings with physical
deformities can also trigger that same “uncanny valley” response. This can
be something as minor as being “wall-eyed,” where you simply don’t quite
know where the person is looking, or of those born with Down Syndrome,
or those with much more dramatic physical injuries or birth defects.
Very young children hardly react at all to the sight of physical
deformities and children who are raised by parents who possess even
extreme physical deformities don’t find them to be unusual or disturbing. It
seems clear that part of what makes such things disturbing to us is the need,
through experience, to establish certain norms of human appearance and
behavior. Once those norms are established through cultural determinants
and are more-or-less “locked in,” it is only then that those individuals who
stray too far from those normative standards will trigger that “uncanny
valley” reaction.

LEARNED FEARS
Inevitably, even those fears that we learn have their roots in our deeper
shared humanity. Of course, we come into this world with the capacity to
feel pain, both physical, mental, and emotional, but inevitably, there’s no
way to know just what we might face in the world. The dangers and terrors
change from place to place and time to time, and so we are well-adapted to
change as well. As different things in different times and places hurt and
threaten us, so our fears likewise change along with them.
These fears are shaped by who we are, by our personal experiences, by
our times, and by the expectations of those around us.

Fear of Heights/Falling
It was thought for a long time that this was an instinctive fear. This was
based on research done in 1960 by psychologists E. J. Gibson and R. D.
Walk, in which infants were allowed to crawl out across a wide sheet of
glass that extended across a sudden drop. Even infants who had never
experienced a fall and thus had no “conditioned response” to the danger of
falling, nevertheless pulled back from the apparent brink.
But more recent and extensive studies conducted by Karen Adolph, at
the Infant Action Lab, now indicate that infants aren’t intrinsically afraid,
but actually learn to navigate drops and slopes without any particular
anxiety or fear response. Thus, individuals who fear heights and falling
must learn this reaction through experience later in life.

Fear of Open Spaces

The technical term for this is agoraphobia, which also includes the fear of
crowds, and of social interactions generally. Just as many people have a fear
of closed spaces, being trapped, and of being paralyzed, the Fear of Open
Spaces is its mirror image. Agoraphobia also develops in association with
panic attacks, sudden and often unpredictable attacks of paralyzing terror.
It’s worth noting that this syndrome is very rarely found in young children.
It is one that develops much more frequently later in life. It’s often found in
the elderly.
What causes it? While it sometimes arises due to post-traumatic stress
syndrome or in response to stress, there often seems to be no particular
reason for it to be found in the sufferer’s life history. It’s interesting to note
that this condition seems to have a genetic component. Those who suffer
from it are likely to have relatives who also suffer from it.
Some of this may relate to the fundamental differences in personality
types between introverts and extroverts, those who tend to prefer solitary
activities as opposed to those who enjoy social and interactive
environments. While there’s nothing wrong with being either an introvert or
an extrovert, there’s a possibility that Agoraphobia may embody an
intensification of in-born introverted tendencies.
Apart from that, the underlying causes are obscure.

Fear of Public Speaking/Public Humiliation

It’s interesting to note that, for whatever reason, women in general tend to
be more fearful than men — with one exception. This is it. Men are more
afraid of public speaking, of being compelled to expose themselves
(figuratively) before the judgment and potentially, the scorn, of others.
Some of this may reach back to ancient prehistory, to our origins as a
tribal species in which our ancestors had to establish relationships of
dominance and submission. These hierarchies of dominance and submission
often involved ritualized displays as much as actual physical combat;
displays in which the defining attributes of confidence, skill, physical
strength, health, beauty, intelligence, et al., had to be demonstrated to the
members of your pack. By demonstrating this publicly, males achieved
dominance or, failing to do so, were humiliated, sometimes to the point of
being driven from the pack.
It’s possible that, for many men, the prospect of having to present
themselves publicly triggers some of those ancient competitive fears —
those fears of failure, those fears of public judgement by their peers, the
fear of public humiliation and of ostracism. Far better, something whispers
from out of the subconscious, to remain silent and anonymous. Let others
try and suffer the risks of failure and humiliation, while you stay safe in the
shadows ….

Fear of Contamination/Contagion
Our feeling of revulsion at the sight, the smell, the touch of various bodily
contaminants seems so obvious and inevitable that it’s difficult for us to
realize that this is, in fact, learned behavior.
Any parent who has raised children from infancy knows very well that
babies and toddlers show no revulsion, never mind fear, of excrement,
vomit, blood, or decay, not only of the human variety, but of pretty much
any other nasty and repulsive material that they might find in their
environment.
We respond so dramatically to such things that we fail to realize that
there must have been a time in our lives that none of these things bothered
us at all. Not the smell of vomit, not the touch of mucous, not the sight of
excrement, or the smell of death. We learned, through conditioned response,
to be repelled by them, and by extension, to include these things in the
broad category of contaminated/contagious things to which we respond
with a sense of loathing and horror.

Fear of Being Crushed/Dismembered/Devoured

This particular fear reaches far beyond the general apprehension that we
have toward physical harm or death. Nobody wants to be shot or stabbed or
to die from a heart attack, but those sorts of bodily assaults are rarely
associated with a sense of horror. Having your body torn apart, crushed, or
eaten by something, whether by one creature big enough to do it, or by a
great many smaller creatures, on the other hand, is genuinely horrifying.
I’ve grouped all of these different fears together because they have
something in common. Obviously, these would all be horribly painful
experiences, but there’s more to it than that. Fundamental to our sense of
self is that we are “Beings,” not merely things. A chair is a thing. A piece of
meat is a thing. A dismembered arm is a thing. A dead body is a thing.
The sudden and brutal transformation of that “Being,” of ourselves,
transformed into a mere thing, into crushed flesh, into dismembered limbs,
into prey devoured by some other creature — it is that transformation that
inspires horror — that brutally triggers that “Sense of Dread.”

Fear of Being Lost

An essential part of growing up is moving out of the comfortable and
familiar realm of home and family as we start to navigate the larger world
beyond. At first, we start to explore that unfamiliar world in the company of
others — parents, older siblings, teachers, etc. But eventually, we will set
out on our own and face the inevitable disorienting reality of becoming lost.
Sometimes, we might be lost in the woods, or on the streets of a town or a
city, or else (and sometimes this can be even more frightening) lost in the
midst of a crowd, at the beach, or a shopping center, surrounded by
countless strangers.
Those early experiences of being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off
from friends, family, home, and safety can be terrifyingly disorienting. No
string or trail of bread crumbs, no map or compass to guide us back home.
We suddenly find ourselves adrift in the world. What can we do?
That fear of being lost and alone follows many of us from early
childhood, whether we find ourselves lost in a crowd in bright daylight or
lost alone in the woods in the dead of night, the helpless child emerges from
the depths of memory — and we are afraid.
It’s worth mentioning that the Ancient Greeks had a name for exactly
this sort of fear — the sudden and inexplicable terror that came upon
travelers in the deep woods at night. They imagined that it was caused by a
visitation from their god of the wood, the goat-legged god, Pan, and so it
was named after him — Panic Fear.

COMMON PHOBIAS
Phobias are intensely paralyzing versions of fears that are broadly
experienced. Where do normally experienced fears end and phobias begin?
Psychologists generally categorize phobias in terms of their capacity to
interfere with daily functioning. If a fear is so intense that it prevents you
from living your normal life, then it has risen to the level of a phobia.
But it’s important to realize that there is no clear line of demarcation. For
any given fear, you will find people at one end of the scale who have
absolutely no fear at all (say no fear of snakes) all the way to those who are
absolutely paralyzed at anything that even looks like a snake.
Why this broad difference? While some of this may be caused by a
traumatic incident or life experience, very few such fears can be traced to
this. It’s possible (though we really don’t know) that fear levels in respect to
particular things may simply be a normal human variation, much like height
or hair color or temperament. This may account for the fact that,
statistically, women tend to be more fearful than men.
So — here are some common phobias. Of course, there are inevitably
some fears listed below that we’ve already talked about:

Fear of Spiders and Insects

Fear of Snakes
Fear of Rats and Mice and other Crawling Things
Fear of Drowning/Smothering/Choking
Fear of Being Lost
Fear of Close Spaces/Paralysis
Fear of Crowds/People/Open Spaces/Being on Public Display
Fear of Heights/Falling
Fear of The Night/The Dark
Fear of Thunder and Lightning
Fear of Uncleanliness/Contamination, including:
Blood
Vomit
Excrement
Mucous
Pus
Viscera
Slime
Decay/Rotted flesh
Bodily Infection/Infestation/Parasites

In addition to the above, there are other common phobias, which are, of
course, intense versions of more broadly held fears.

Fear of Flying
This is one of the more common phobias, and is also an extremely common
fear, above and beyond the common fear of heights and of falling. Why
flying in particular? It’s speculated that for many people, the lack of control
exacerbates this fear — the fact that not only have they been carried to
lethal altitudes, but that their fate is in the hands of technology, of weather,
of men and women over whom they have no control at all. It is that highly
effective combination of “Height + Helplessness” that drives the Fear of
Flying.

Fear of Dogs/Fierce Animals

More than most fears, this is often triggered by environmental reactions,
early experiences with aggressive barking or biting dogs. As young
children, our reactions to loud noises are built in, because loud noises in our
environment are often associated with danger. It could be anything from a
falling tree to a charging rhino to an attacking animal. Thus, a loud, barking
dog triggers the Flight-or-Fight reaction, and even if the dog doesn’t cause
any harm, it impresses itself upon our memory. If it bites, that makes an
even greater impression, one that can follow us throughout our lives.

Fear of Blood
It is obvious that many people have little or no fear of blood at all. At the
same time, for those who have this fear, it can literally be crippling. It is no
exaggeration to say that some people literally pass out at the sight of blood.
Yet it is important to realize that this is largely a learned behavior. In
frontier societies in which animals are hunted and butchered by every
family, it is very rare for people to react with fear at the sight of blood.
Quite simply, they have been raised around it and they see it all the time.
Of course, as blood is associated with injury in ourselves and others, it is
appropriate that we draw those inevitable associations, but often our alarm
at the sight of blood comes more from having seen an exaggerated reaction
from those around us as we grew up, from those who rarely saw blood in
their daily lives, and as we saw those extreme reactions, we learned those
lessons and sometimes learned them too well.

Fear of Shots/Needles/Blades
This is one of the most common phobias around, effecting around fifty
million people in the United States alone. Obviously, part of the fear of
getting a shot, or of being cut by anything razor-sharp, relates to a very
obvious reluctance to having our skin pierced by anything. It injures us. It
hurts.
At any rate, it arises early. Young children are terrified at getting shots,
and the fear often remains or even intensifies in many adults, becoming a
crippling phobia. Some adults will avoid any medical treatment, even life-
saving treatment, if it means facing a needle.

Fear of Hospitals/Doctors
Of course, the connection between the fear of getting shots and the fear of
hospitals and doctors is obvious, but the broader fear runs deeper. To
understand it, it’s worth examining and understanding the “rituals” of
hospitalization. Patients are made to undress, to wear robes that render them
partially naked. They are wheeled around in wheelchairs, even if they are
perfectly capable of walking, likewise made to lie in bed, even if there’s
nothing about their condition that would necessitate their staying in bed.
While there are some vague justifications for doing these things, the
main reason is to institute a fundamental change in status, to move someone
from being an autonomous person in control of themselves to becoming a
“patient,” a submissive and largely helpless being who will, ideally, be
under the control of the hospital staff. Ultimately, patients are going to have
to go through some exceptionally unpleasant, debilitating, painful, and
perhaps even crippling experiences while in the hospital. The more they
resist, the more they fight back, the harder it will be (from the hospital’s
perspective) for the staff to do what has to be done.
In response, hospitals institute a series of procedures to render the patient
more submissive, more helpless, and more dependent. The hospital staff
would say that it is to help them do their jobs more effectively.
But think of it from the perspective of the patient. Remember what
makes flying so terrifying for those who fear it? It is the sense of being
helpless and out of control. That is exactly the sense that hospitals are trying
to create in their patients. Their goal is for patients to surrender their sense
of personal autonomy and control to the doctors, nurses, and staff around
them. They want you to put yourself in their hands. Their intentions may be
benign, but for many people, the less control they have, the more terrifying
the experience becomes.
Fortunately, many doctors and some hospitals are changing their views
on this approach. But old habits die hard, and many of the rituals of forced
submission are still alive and well in the corridors of our hospitals, along
with the terror that such places inevitably engender.

Fear of Fire/Being Burned

Humanity’s love-hate relationship with fire extends far back into prehistory.
In some ways, fire has been essential in the development of civilization. It
brought light and warmth into the cold and dark of our ancestors’ night. It
was instrumental in preparing food, in working metal for tools and
weapons, and later in clearing fields for planting. Fire was one of
Humanity’s earliest faithful servants — but always a dangerous servant,
likely to lose control and to turn upon its master.
There has always been a strange dichotomy at the heart of our
relationship with fire. Knowing its dangers and its capacity to get out of our
control and to spread destruction, as we come to know it, we inevitably fear
it. Yet we are also fascinated by it, by its beauty and its power, even by its
power to destroy.
There’s a reason why people have traditionally stopped to watch a house
fire, much as people slow their cars to peek at the scene of a traffic
accident. It’s more than merely curiosity. We are drawn to the flames, much
as we are drawn to a scene of death and destruction, so long as the fire
doesn’t get too hot, or the danger too close. We are horrified, and yet we are
fascinated.
As to the deeper phobias that many people have regarding fire, these can
emerge from traumatic exposure to fire early in their lives.
Often though, as with many phobias, they remain unexplained.

NIGHTMARES
We spend around a quarter of our lives asleep, and a quarter of our time
asleep is spent in REM (rapid eye movement) or dream sleep.
So why exactly do we sleep? And why do we dream?
There are a number of theories, but what it really comes down to is,
though it has been studied and continues to be studied, there is no scientific
consensus — nobody really knows. Whatever sleep is, though, we know
that it’s conserved across broad areas of the animal kingdom.
All mammals and all birds sleep.
Sleep is so well-conserved that aquatic mammals that would drown if
they became completely unconscious and certain species of birds that often
remain in flight for days or even weeks at a time, have evolved what’s
known as “uni-hemispherism,” that is, one side of the brain sleeps while the
other remains wakeful.
All birds and mammals exhibit REM sleep, which means that they also
dream.
So why do we dream? Why do other animals and birds dream?
Again, there are a number of theories, but no consensus. For a time, it
was theorized that sleep was intended as simply a means of conserving
energy, but then we discovered that animals in hibernation also sleep, and in
order to do it they actually have to briefly increase their metabolism in
order to enter their sleep phase (and this would hardly apply to migrating
birds who sleep while in flight), so that explanation obviously won’t do.
Though we have no way of knowing what animals may dream about,
there is some suggestion that, as with human beings, animals will act out
behaviors in their dreams that correspond to similar behaviors that occur
during their waking lives. At any rate, experiments studying the brain waves
of sleeping and waking animals have found correspondences between the
brain waves associated with certain waking activities and the same brain
waves experienced by those animals when they’re asleep.
We’ve seen the same thing in dream studies involving human beings.
It may be that what we experience or remember as dreaming is part of
the larger process by which temporary memories acquired during the day
are sorted and biologically catalogued into permanent memories.
Sleep and dreaming may be the brain’s regular and essential sorting and
book-keeping period, without which the brain becomes overloaded with
uncatalogued material and is finally unable to process anything new.
Though we don’t exactly know why, we know that we must sleep and
that we must dream. Those who are deprived of them will quite literally die
of exhaustion.
That leads to the final question and the one most relevant to us. We all
dream, but dreams come in different sorts, and most of us not only have
dreams but nightmares.
So what are nightmares? Why do we have them? Unfortunately, the
answer is the same.
Many theories, but no consensus. Nobody really knows.
The word itself, “Nightmare,” has nothing to do with horses, but comes
from the Old English word “mare” meaning a demon or goblin who
disturbs our sleep with terrifying dreams.
In various traditions, dreams and nightmares have often had a prophetic
character, in which evil dreams are sent to warn us of evil events to come.
More modern approaches have substituted a subconscious or psycho-
symbolic significance for dreams and nightmares, in which various dream
archetypes are universally representational, such that figures and events in
our dreams embody collective stand-ins for Father or Mother, or a variety of
human anxieties and desires. While such interpretations are always possible
and may give us a useful framework for examining our dreams and
nightmares, caution is always advised in respect to all such theories, since
falsifying them, if they are actually false (a required hallmark of any valid
scientific theory) is exceptionally challenging.
While waking anxieties certainly have an effect on our dreams, it’s
important to remember that we tend to forget most dreams almost
immediately, both good and bad, and that anything that disturbs our sleep
will increase the likelihood of our remembering our dreams. So when our
days are filled with worries, those worries may not only present themselves
in the form of nightmares but also, because they interfere with our sleep,
they increase the chances of our remembering those disturbing dreams.
For the purposes of this book, it’s worth looking at some of those
“nightmare” archetypes. Some of them are familiar, relating as they do, to
phobias and to waking fears that we’ve already discussed.
Yet some of those archetypes seem to be found much more broadly in
the realms of our nightmares than we might otherwise expect. Why these
particular images and scenarios, as opposed to countless others? Why is it
that so many of us share certain categories of nightmares, walk down the
same shadow corridors when we sleep?
Again, as with so much about the experience of sleep, there are many
theories but nobody really knows for sure.
 It may be, as Carl Jung suggests, that many of these dream and
nightmare images have deep and universal symbolic significance, his so-
called archetypes of the collective unconscious. Again, while these notions
may be intriguing and worth further study, it is more than we are capable of
exploring here.

The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters — Francisco de Goya

In exploring various Nightmare Motifs, it’s important to realize that

nightmares encompass not only events, but in a deeper sense, emotions,
memories, and even our sense of identity.
That is, we not only dream an experience — say, for instance, a half-
open door — but we also “dream” how we feel in response to it, which may
be an emotion of stark terror. The door itself may not be intrinsically
frightening. Within the dream we may not know, nor ever know what lies
behind it.
The fear we feel is part of the dream itself.
In the same way, we may visit some place, in the context of a dream, that
we have visited many times before, may meet someone that we know well
— and yet all of that too, may simply be part of the dream — memories of
events and people that never actually happened outside of the constructed
universes of the dreams themselves. We may have the sense of having a
dream that we have dreamt many times before, and that too may simply be
part of a dream that we have only ever had once and never before.
Even our own identity, within the landscape of dreams, is often
changeable, or divided. The sense of simultaneously being within a dream
and at the same time observing the events of the dream, including
ourselves, is commonplace.
Less commonplace is the experience of genuine duality, of having two
unique sets of thoughts, even of two distinct personalities running at the
same time, which can also occur during dreams. Our brains consist of two
hemispheres, one of which is normally inaccessible to our waking or
conscious mind. It’s possible that, during dream sleep, there are interactions
between these two hemispheres, and briefly, we are able to experience what
both of our “selves” — in the sense of both hemispheres of our brains —
are thinking and even dreaming, at the same time.

COMMON NIGHTMARE MOTIFS

Falling/Heights
Common nightmare motifs frequently incorporate scenarios of falling,
vertiginous heights, climbing in dangerous or threatening environments, or
combinations of the above.
In the early stages of sleep, dreams of tripping or falling are sometimes
associated with a “sleep start.” This is a sudden, fearful awakening,
accompanied by a sharp twitching of the body known as a “hypnic jerk” or
a myoclonic contraction. This abrupt jumping awake, sometimes
accompanied by a gasp or other vocalization, appears to be associated with
a change in brain wave activity, as the brain moves from one sleep state into
a deeper one. That is, as we start to “fall” into a deeper state of sleep, that
descent is somehow translated into a literal sense of falling, and the body,
especially one that’s been primed with caffeine or other stimulants, reacts in
this unfortunate way.
There have been some theories that suggest that the pervasive fear of
falling in dreams reaches far back to our pre-human tree-dwelling ancestors
who had to sleep high up in the limbs of trees and who thus had a keenly
instinctive reaction against falling, especially while sleeping. In support of
this theory is the observed fact that our hands grip tightly while we sleep, an
instinctive reaction that we share with modern tree-dwelling apes, who grab
onto tree limbs to hold themselves in place while sleeping.
While this is an intriguing idea, the support for it is nevertheless limited.
What we do know is that the fear of heights and of falling seems to
broadly permeate our nightmares across time and culture.

Being Pursued
The place may be familiar or strange. It may be day or night, inside or
outside. It may be some place from the familiar present or out of your past,
or someplace that you’ve never seen before, or maybe an amalgam of all of
them. The same is true of the Pursuer. It may be someone that you know
currently, or someone out of your past, or someone that you’ve never
known, a friend, an enemy, or a stranger. Or the Pursuer may be something
inhuman, a predatory animal, an alien, a monster, or a shadowy something
largely unseen, yet nevertheless terrifying.
You, the Pursued, may be as you normally are, or you may be someone
else — perhaps a younger version of yourself, or you as a child — or
someone altogether different, or your identity may shift as the dream
unfolds.
And as with all dream landscapes, the places and people and beings
often change unpredictably as well. What stays the same is that you are
being relentlessly pursued, that you are terrified, and that you desperately
need to escape.

Inability to Flee, Inability to Run, Heavy Feet

A common adjunct to the nightmare of pursuit is that you, the Pursued,
often find that for various reasons within the dreamscape, your ability to
escape the Pursuer is impeded in some terrifying way. As you run, you find
that your feet suddenly become impossibly heavy, or seem to stick to the
ground, as if you were stuck in mud or quicksand. The harder you try to
move, the more difficult it becomes. There may be a sense of entanglement,
of being generally trapped and unable to move at all, even being unable to
breathe.
This sense of being frozen, trapped, or paralyzed is related to the broader
experience of “sleep paralysis” which can occur as we slip between waking
and sleeping and which we will discuss later.
 What is worth mentioning though, is how familiar this particular
scenario is to those who regularly watch horror movies. That is, the Pursuer,
whether human or inhuman, comes on slowly, loping, limping, and the
desperate Pursued, often runs as fast as they can, and yet somehow —
however slowly the Pursuer advances and however fast the Pursued runs
(despite the occasional and inevitable trip) — the oncoming Menace
inevitably closes the distance. This is the Logic of a Nightmare, and it
comes straight from our own nightmares of pursuit and our inability to
escape.

Being Late/Being Lost/Not Knowing Where to Go (Late for Class)

This is one of our most common nightmares and is interesting because it
combines both fundamental and instinctive fears, that of disorientation and
the fear of being lost with the learned fears that relate to social concerns;
meeting obligations such as showing up on time, knowing where your
proper classes are, having prepared for that test that you were supposed to
take, being where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there,
all of those deep fears and anxieties that relate to our place in our particular
social order. That’s especially true as we grow up into that social order and
have to face all of the pressures that are put upon us to conform to the
demands of achievement: test-taking, schedules, going to new strange
places, etc.
For the majority of us, we feel safe at home in the world of familiar
things, and by extension, the world outside is new, strange, and potentially
dangerous. It is both tempting and threatening. The path to mastering that
world carries with it a set of stereotypical anxieties and fears that often
express themselves in the form of nightmares.
The “late for class” nightmare, the “Final Exam that you haven’t studied
for” nightmare, the “Can’t find my classroom” nightmare, all of these and
countless variations are expressions of those enduring anxieties.

Bodily Distortion/Decay or Identity Change

One of the more common aspects of dreams, as I’ve indicated above, is the
fundamentally changeable nature of people, places, and things within the
dream landscape. Most of these transformations are non-threatening or even
joyful. One can have dreams in which one is younger, or a child again
(presuming that one had a pleasant childhood), or an animal, or some
admired person, or possessed of godlike powers. Those who have died
might be alive in our dreams. We may revisit places and people who have
long departed.
It’s common to speak of our “dreams coming true” and there are whole
categories of “wish fulfilment” dreams to which that expression applies.
But on the other hand, there are also dreams that we never want to come
true; transformations of our bodies, our identities, and the identities of those
we know and love in ways that can be profoundly disturbing. These include
changes in physical scale; we may find ourselves giants or dwarves, or
some parts of our bodies — hands, arms, legs, eyes, fingers — distorted in
size. In some nightmares, this distortion tends to focus on one side of the
body, with eyes and head swollen or limbs or fingers swollen out of
proportion on only one side.
Not only may we find that our bodies have changed physically — aging,
decaying, or no longer working as they should — but we may also find
ourselves possessed of forbidden desires and feelings that are not our own,
or at any rate, desires that our conscious minds do not recognize or
acknowledge. We may experience rage, lust, fear, or hatred and act upon
those emotions, directing them toward Others, sometimes familiar Others,
or Others who have been transformed, or Strangers who may be surrogates
for those we know, or simply Unknown Others who populate the
mysterious landscapes of our nightmares.
More disturbing still is the inevitable fact that, as in all nightmares, there
is a sense of reality to the impossibilities of the dream world. We may react
with horror at who we are, how we look, what we feel, how we act — but
yet, doesn’t it all seem as if it has always been this way, will always be this
way?

Losing or Breaking Teeth

A common adjunct to the above category of bodily distortion are
nightmares involving the losing or breaking of teeth, often our own teeth,
sometimes those of others. Nightmares may involve teeth becoming loose,
falling out, being displaced in our mouths, coming loose in the midst of
embarrassing social situations, or our discovering that our teeth are missing
or oddly changed or distorted, too small or too large.
 Why all of these dreams about teeth? Well, one obvious possibility
reaches back to our Sensory Homunculus: our teeth are among the most
highly innervated parts of our bodies, and because they are so highly
sensitive and thus lay claim to a larger portion of our brain’s sensory
landscape in our waking life, perhaps they also demand a higher degree of
our brain’s attention in the realms of our dreams.
There may be an association between these “tooth” dreams and night-
time bruxism, or tooth grinding, which may affect as much as 50% of the
population (growing less as we grow older), but what connection there may
be, if any, is purely speculation.

Blood/Bodily Fluids
Our waking fear and revulsion of blood and other bodily fluids and
materials — mucous, vomit, excreta, et al. — often presents itself in the
transgressive territory of our nightmares. Scenarios involving finding
ourselves bleeding, or others bleeding, touching or being touched or
covered by blood or other unwholesome bodily materials, or even
consuming these things, or often more terrible still, realizing after the fact
that one has eaten or is eating something unwholesome, are all common
nightmare motifs.

Sexual Transformation/Violation/Forbidden Acts

Here, of course, the ultimate transgressive realm and the territory that is
often rarely touched upon consciously, or if so, is often cloaked in feelings
of shame and guilt, often rears its head in our nightmares.
This includes the whole range of forbidden sexual relations, ranging
from adultery, to homosexual acts (presuming that one considers such acts
to be forbidden), to relations with children or animals. Sometimes we may
be in the midst of such acts ourselves or may be witnessing someone else
engaging in them. We may be the victim or the victimizer, finding ourselves
experiencing the terror and shame of violation, or — and perhaps this is
even more disturbing — experiencing the terrible desires of the aggressor.
Or, as sometimes happens in dreams, we may experience both at the same
time, or we may observe from some perspective removed from the action as
our “Dream Self” engages in some activity that the “Watching Self” finds
horrifying, but has no power to stop.
Night Terrors
Night Terrors or Sleep Terrors are a dramatic and frightening phenomenon
different from conventional nightmares. Most notably, they don’t occur
during traditional REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is the time
when we dream. Nightmares, of course, are simply a kind of dream. So, it is
clear that we experience vivid dream-like and nightmare experiences
outside of the times that are associated with traditional dreaming.
Night Terrors, as a rule, tend to happen either early in sleep or near
awakening, and are often associated with sleep walking. In fact, they seem
to be a sub-category of sleep-walking.
The sufferers (and the majority are children) often begin an episode by
screaming, thrashing in bed, sitting up with eyes wide open in terror,
sometimes getting out of bed and moving around the house. But they are
not awake, and strongly resist being restrained or awakened.
What the internal experience of Night Terrors may be is obscure as the
sufferers don’t seem to remember the experience. Fortunately, Night Terrors
don’t seem to have any lasting negative effects, despite how shocking they
may be to those who have to live through them.

Sleep Walking
Night Terrors are, obviously, associated with the larger phenomenon of
Sleep Walking, but what causes that?
To understand it, we need to look at how the brain behaves when we
sleep. During sleep, we have experiences that correspond to waking
activities. When we do, the parts of the brain that correlate to those actions
are activated. We “dream” of walking, so the brain sends signals to our legs,
telling them to walk.
So why don’t we? That’s because, as we pass into sleep, the brain
activates a system that, in essence, paralyzes the body, preventing it from
carrying out the brain’s instructions.
But sometimes that system goes wrong. And when it does, the
instructions manage to go through, and though we continue to sleep, our
bodies get up and act out, not only walking but sometimes speaking,
writing, having sexual relations — a whole range of behaviors.
It is interesting to note that Sleep Walking, like Night Terrors, doesn’t
occur during REM sleep, so even though we are carrying out, in some
fashion, experiences in our sleep state, these are not “dreams” in the
traditional sense, in the same way that Night Terrors are not nightmares in
the traditional sense.

Sleep Paralysis/Feelings of Suffocation

In the same way that the mechanism which paralyzes the sleeping body can
go wrong, thus permitting Sleep Walking, it also sometimes goes wrong in
the opposite way. That is, the Sleeper begins to wake, but the body remains
paralyzed.
The result, which can last from seconds to minutes can lead to a
terrifying sense of suffocation, a feeling of pressure on the chest. It’s
sometimes accompanied by a feeling of a terrifying “presence,” as if
somebody or something is literally pressing down on top of you. Thus we
get the myth of the “night hag,” a hideous supernatural visitant that
crouches down on top of the sleeper’s chest during the night. Many stories
will draw upon a variety of the above elements.

EXERCISES

List: Some of your favorite horror movies that rely on instinctive,

learned, and nightmare fears.
List: One or more nightmares of yours that might form the basis of a
scary scene.
Write: a brief scene that employs some of the above fears.

OceanofPDF.com
 3
FEAR ITSELF, PART THREE
FEARS BASED IN CULTURE
Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of History.
Robert Anton Wilson

Only human beings have “culture” as the term is generally understood. It

refers to the expression of the broadly held beliefs, myths, art, taboos, and
social practices of a given people. Inevitably, many of our collective hopes,
our aspirations, and also our fears emerge from the culture of which we are
a part.
For instance, it’s not surprising that people who are part of a culture that
is strongly oriented toward Fundamentalist Christianity and a belief in a
literal Satan often fear the tortures of Hell.
Conversely, in traditional cultures that possess a strong belief in curses
tend to have a comparable fear of witches and witchcraft.
These are, of course, learned fears, but they belong in a category of their
own. We are social animals and these are “social fears,” in the sense that
they emerge from our place in a larger society.

PARANOID FEARS
When we talk about Paranoid fears, it’s important to make clear that we are
not talking about paranoid schizophrenia, which is a specific form of mental
illness.
However, the paranoid form of schizophrenia is characterized by certain
kinds of delusions and obsessions which are often reflected in fears and
anxieties that are broadly shared by the surrounding society of which the
sufferers are a part. It is those latter fears that we are going to explore in this
section.

Fear of Conspiracies
Conspiracies lie at the heart of Paranoid Fear, and as modern society
becomes ever more interconnected, the power of technology to spread these
conspiratorial memes has grown exponentially.
What seems to be at the root of such fears? In some sense, the tendency
to see conspiracies is a response to an even deeper fear, the fear that we
may be in a fundamentally disordered and meaningless universe. It is
terrifying to imagine that death and injustice arise through random forces
and random acts. On the other hand, there is some comfort in the notion that
such actions are the result of broad, unknown, malicious, perhaps even alien
or supernatural forces, that are working secretly to bring them about. If that
is the case, in principle, those forces can be unmasked, exposed, and fought.
Conspiracies knit together often unrelated events, such as school
shootings, or incidents of child sex abuse, into a single, broadly connected
network of malignant operators. Instead of simply being an accumulation of
tragedies, they become a puzzle capable of being solved.
The problem is that the threads of connection are often purely imaginary.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals and unfortunately, like seeing
animals in drifting clouds or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, the
pattern-seeking mechanism can also cause us to see connections between
events that simply aren’t there.
Those who retreat to a world of conspiracies inevitably find themselves
living in a realm in which countless organizations, governments, businesses,
religions, are spinning webs of lies around them all the time.
To be a conspiracy theorist is very much like living in John Carpenter’s
movie They Live (1988), in which the world has been invaded by aliens
indistinguishable from normal human beings, unless you happen to have a
pair of special glasses that reveal their true nightmare form — only in our
world, the real world, nobody has the glasses.
You just have to rely on a variety of arbitrarily chosen Authority Figures
to tell you who to trust and who the “aliens” are.
The result is that, in backing away from that fear of a disordered world,
the Conspiracy Theorist ends up backing into a world that is, in many ways,
far more terrifying — a world in which no institution, no government, no
media, no family member, no person, can ever be completely trusted.
In fact, for the Ultimate Conspiracy Theorist, we may not even be able to
trust ourselves.
Fear of Possession/Mind Control
The concept of possession, either by human, demonic, or animal spirits, is
an ancient one, reaching back in various forms as far as ancient Egypt and
Greece, and was (and still is) broadly believed across the world. Not all
such concepts of possession are necessarily malignant. Some traditions
involve connecting to animal or human spirits in order to gain strength or
wisdom. But in many traditions, such possession is most definitely
involuntary and destructive.
The human body is invaded by some external force, the purpose of
which is to control, dominate, and ultimately to destroy the body and to
steal or corrupt the soul of the victim.
In the West, we are familiar with the concept of Demonic Possession and
Exorcism, concepts that reach back to accounts in the Christian Bible.
Islam also has a tradition of victims being possessed by Jinns, spirits that
rank lower than angels but have the power to appear as human beings or
animals. But it’s important to note that Jinns, unlike demons, are not
inherently evil and so their motivations for possessing human beings can
vary from case to case.
Traditional eastern religions may also contain notions of spirit
possession in less familiar forms.
In addition to the notion of possession as we traditionally understand it,
is the notion of mind control, the sense that either we, or those we know,
have fallen under the control of someone else or of some malign influence.
This notion may have its root either in the Supernatural — again, the
notion that either our minds or the minds of others are being controlled by
demonic or Unnatural agencies — or in the Pseudo-natural realm. I say
“pseudo-natural” because, insofar as we know, the ability of natural or
human forces to actually control the human mind (say, through hypnotic
suggestion or “brain-washing”) is extremely limited.
So the fear of mind control is expressed in the common ideas that some
Government (either our own or a Foreign Power) has acquired some means
by which they have taken control, either of a select few, or of the population
generally. Or perhaps these are Malevolent Aliens who are controlling us
for purposes of their own. They may have already taken over the world and
are in control of the World’s Governments, or perhaps the invasion is
underway, or has just begun.
Remember the Fear of Flying and what lies at its root? The Sense of
Helplessness. In many respects we find the same thing lurking at the heart
of the fears related to Mind Control. As people feel less in control of their
communities, of their country, of their destiny, even of themselves, as they
start to feel like strangers in a strange land, it isn’t surprising that they start
to feel as if there are forces — intelligent and malevolent forces — at work
bringing this all about. Evil Forces controlling the Government. Evil Forces
Controlling the Church. Evil Forces controlling the Military. Evil Forces
behind Child Sex Abuse and School Shootings. Evil Forces controlling
“Us.”Both of these ideas, Possession and Mind Control, are connected.
They are linked by the deep fear that someone we know, perhaps someone
we are close to or care about deeply, has suddenly become a malevolent
stranger. Or even more terrifying, the fear that we have become a stranger
to ourselves; that we no longer control our own actions, that our thoughts,
feelings, even our memories, are no longer our own.

Fear of Secret Sinister Meanings, Codes, Languages, Connections

We spoke earlier in the section dealing with Conspiracies, about the
tendency of the human mind to seek out connections in the world. This can,
of course, help us to survive. The ability to see and understand connections
in the world is part of why humans are as successful as we are. But,
inevitably, there’s a downside. Because we are as fine-tuned as we are to
recognize connections in the world, we will often see them when they are
actually not really there.
This mental “fine-tuning” works in a number of different ways. For
instance, our brains are built to recognize human faces. So, we will
inevitably see them in all sorts of places where they aren’t: in clouds, in
wood grain, in shadows, or in the patterns of color our eyes make in the
dark.
In the same way, we are conditioned to react to the sound of our name.
That’s why we can pick out someone calling for us in the midst of a
crowded room. But in the same way, it’s easy to “hear” our name being
spoken in that same crowded room, even when it hasn’t been. Is someone
talking about us? What are they saying? Why are they laughing?
 Depending on what your name happens to be, your brain can interpret
even purely natural sounds as someone calling your name. “Neal” happens
to be one of those names, and on more than one occasion, the author,
completely alone in his office, has heard his name being spoken, whispered,
called — when there was simply no one there. An auditory hallucination?
No. Our daily life is full of little random sounds, coming from outside,
coming from around the house (or if you have a couple of dogs, coming
from them).
It’s just that, every so often, one of those countless sounds happens to
come just close enough to the sound of a human name to trigger that
reaction, just as that shape in the cloud or in the shadows comes close
enough to trigger the reaction that says “that’s a face.”
This pattern-seeking also leads us astray as we tend to see letters,
numbers, and even words in nature: imprinted in layers of rocks, worked
into the bark of trees, in cloud formations, in the wings of butterflies,
essentially wherever we look. There’s a great temptation to see intention in
such things. Is the conclusion that these letters hidden in the natural world
are the sign of some Higher Power undermined by the fact that nature not
only provides us with the letters of the Roman alphabet, but also with the
Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese alphabets as well? What exactly are all of
those random letters attempting to convey?
Or is it simply that our letters are geometrically simple and easily
reproducible forms, most of which were originally derived from the shapes
of Nature itself? Is it really surprising then, that Nature, with its almost
limitless diversity of forms will, by chance alone, occasionally produce
those alphabetic shapes, in much the same way that it is able to produce
approximations of the human face and the form or the shapes of animals or
familiar objects?
Given the above, our pattern-seeking way of thinking has led people to
the notion that hidden meanings or secret codes have been worked into
either our everyday world or into our sacred texts. If only one could decode
these hidden meanings, one could either understand the real, hidden
meaning of the world, or perhaps even foretell the future.
Numerology is one such practice, and an ancient one. It is based on the
notion that every letter has a corresponding number and that various
practices allow one, through the study and manipulation of those numbers,
to gain a mystical understanding of people, events, and the future.
The Bible Code, presented in a book by Michael Drosnin in 1997, is
another approach to attempting to manipulate letters, in this case the letters
of the original Hebrew Bible, as a means to foretell the future. It suggests
that by setting the Hebrew letters of the Bible in a graph and reading them
at particular intervals, say every tenth letter, every twentieth letter, every
fiftieth letter or what-have-you — perhaps left to right, or right to left, or
diagonally — one might come up with some arrangements that contain
meaningful information about the future.
There are a few problems with this. First of all, interpretation is difficult
because the original Hebrew has no vowels, so one has a great deal of
flexibility in assigning contemporary meaning to ancient vowel-free
wording. Second, it’s easy to score a hit when what’s been predicted has
already happened. It’s much harder, using this method, to uncover
predictions for things that have not yet happened.
Finally, one can actually use this method with pretty much any book and
also derive similar “prophetic” statements. But it’s unlikely that Herman
Melville intended to predict the future when he was writing Moby Dick.
Most likely, this is another example of pattern-seeking behavior gone
awry — of finding patterns where none actually exist.
Of course, some may find comfort in the notion of fulfilled prophecy, of
the confirmation of ancient, sacred texts, and there’s no intention here to
address that. Rather, the goal is to look at the other side of that coin.
Namely, there can be a profound sense of fear at that prospect of secret
messages hidden in the sacred texts with which we are familiar, and the
possibility that those hidden messages may carry dire or even apocalyptic
news.
Likewise, the notion that those around us may be communicating in
ways that we don’t fully understand, using “code” of one kind or another, or
that the books or newspapers or the digital media that we use on a daily
basis may also be carrying some secret, coded messages or information of
which we are unaware.
Thus, we have all of the fears associated with the “Dark Web.”
Of course, the “Dark Web” itself is real. It refers to the whole range of
unindexed web sites, and within that realm are all of the illegal and illicit
sites that involve the sale of drugs, guns, hacked websites, stolen credit
cards, illegal pornography — essentially everything nasty and forbidden
that the human mind can imagine and that someone else has figured out
how to monetize and put up on a web site.
But however nasty something may be in reality, inevitably our fears have
the ability to make it nastier still. So, we populate the Dark Web with the
world-wide Satanic Network, with Snuff Films, and World-Wide
Government Conspiracies.
Our fears inevitably grow in the dark. The Internet and the Dark Web
may very well be the biggest and most expressive form of modern
Darkness, and it is there that our Contemporary Fears seem to grow and
spread more quickly than anywhere else.

OTHER CULTURE-BASED FEARS

Fear of Intruders/Home Invasion

The terror at the prospect of threatening strangers invading our private
spaces — not only our homes, but the still-more private spaces within our
homes, our bedrooms and bathrooms — lies at the heart of the Sense of
Dread. Our homes are the places we feel safe and protected. Within the
home, we specifically reserve our bedrooms and bathrooms for our most
vulnerable and private activities. It is the sudden and unexpected
penetration of those safe spaces that creates that sense of horror — that
Sense of Dread.
There are countless examples in movies and in fiction in which the
home, the bedroom, and the bathroom, have been chosen as the location for
a scene of terror. Think of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960), the “horse head” scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather
(1974), the besieged houses in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
(1968) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), among countless others.
There are always places where we expect to be safe, and other places
where we expect to face danger — but when danger unexpectedly confronts
us in the places where we expect to be safe — the emotion that results is
horror.
So effective is the fear engendered by the notion of home invasion that it
has become its own sub-genre, producing movies such as William Wyler’s
The Desperate Hours (1955), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997),
remade by the same director in 2007, David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002),
and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008).

Fear of Clowns
There’s a famous quote attributed to the great silent actor, Lon Chaney,
“There’s nothing funny about a clown at midnight.”
Inevitably, we would be disturbed at the prospect of a Figure of Fun
showing up in a time or a place where it didn’t belong. This is central to the
notion of the Sense of Dread.
But the fear engendered by clowns runs even deeper than that. We look
to the human face as the key conveyor of human emotion. The fact that the
Clown’s face is painted on — the painted smile, the painted frown,
concealing the real emotions beneath — makes for a potentially disturbing
dichotomy. Being confronted by a painted face is much the same as being
confronted by someone wearing a mask that hides the real face and thus, the
real feelings and real appearance beneath.
The Clown, intended to be a figure of fun, can appear to be the Perpetual
Stranger, carrying the inherently threatening character possessed by all
Strangers.
In addition, the painted face gives the human face beneath an appearance
of something that is decidedly less than fully human, thus pushing Clowns
into that “uncanny valley” realm that’s been previously discussed.
All in all, clowns have always had one foot firmly planted in the realm
of our nightmares.

Fear of Madness (in Ourselves and Others)

Among our most fundamental inviolate spaces is the “Self.” That’s why the
fear of possession or mind control is so persuasive. But there is a deeper,
and in many ways a more grounded fear, relating to the undermining of our
Sense of Self, and that is the fear of madness, of our loss of Self or the loss
of those we care about to the ravages of mental illness.
Those familiar to us may become strangers. Friends may become
enemies. Those that love us may suddenly hate or fear us. Or perhaps (and
this may be even more terrifying) the World Itself may become an unknown
and terrifying place if we become the victims of mental illness. The laws of
nature, cause and effect, the whole world, may suddenly be revealed, in
some unpredictable way, to be fundamentally different from how we have
always imagined it to be. And if our own ability to perceive the world, to
analyze it, to trust our perceptions, our memories, our capacity to reason,
cannot be trusted, by what yard stick can we ever even judge whether we
are insane living in a sane world — or just maybe we are sane and the
world itself has gone mad?

Fear of Size Distortion

World mythology is replete with tales not only of giants but of “little
people,” both of whom have always haunted the dark corners of our tales,
ancient and modern, and of our fears.
Most of us are familiar with the giants out of mythology: Atlas, who held
up the world, the Titans, and the Cyclops Polyphemus out of Greek
mythology, the Anakim and Goliath from the Hebrew Bible, Cormoran and
Gogmagog from Celtic mythology, and the Frost Giants of Norse
mythology. Most other ancient cultures also have tales of giants, both good
and bad.
It’s interesting to note that the story of the man-eating Polyphemus
recounted in The Odyssey is not the only mythical account of men being
devoured by giants — or even by the human-like gods of the ancients.
The fear of Giant Human or Semi-Human Beings often seems to go
hand-in-hand with the fear of being eaten alive. While one might ascribe
such a fear as understandable to peoples who lived side by side with large
predatory animals, it’s worth noting that occupants of civilized societies,
who are unlikely to see such predators outside of a zoo, nevertheless share
the horror of being eaten alive, of being treated as a cat treats a mouse, and
we still find such narratives as terrifying as our ancestors did.
The “Little People” — the opposite side of the “giant” coin is equally
familiar as cultures all around the world have myths and stories of tiny,
often distorted Human Beings, sometimes malevolent, such as Goblins,
Selkies, or Trows, who steal away our children or substitute changelings, or
merely mischievous creatures who disarrange our houses at night or trick
travelers on lonely roads or hills, such as Leprechauns, Elves, Pixies, and
Sprites. At worst, the Little People can be terrifying, at best they are rarely
fully benign. Contact with such magical beings often carries a risk, the
chance of being lured into some desperate venture, of trading away
something essentially human, losing a piece of one’s soul.
Most interesting of all is the modern equivalent of the “Little People.”
I’m speaking, of course, of the “Grey,” the contemporary vision of the
visitor from Outer Space. It’s worth noting that early descriptions of the
occupants of UFOs were of various kinds — Lizard People, Tall, Blonde
People, Goblin-like Creatures, Moth-Winged Aliens, and other variants —
before settling on the classic slim, small boned, long necked, large-headed,
large-eyed, small-mouthed beings that we now associate with UFO
visitations.
As with other mythic accounts of “Little People,” these beings are
sometimes benign, sometimes mischievous, and sometimes terrifying. Just
as the Trolls and Goblins of ancient stories were responsible for kidnapping
travelers and children, so the “Greys” of our modern pseudo-scientific
mythology do the same thing. Some accounts have even endowed them
with literally magical qualities, for instance, the ability to walk through
walls.
It is interesting to note that ancient fears are often reconfigured into a
contemporary form. The fear of being possessed by Satan is reconfigured
into a fear of being mind-controlled by the C.I.A. Fear of being stolen away
by Goblins or the “Little People” has been transfigured into a fear of being
kidnapped and experimented on by space aliens.

Fear of Rape/Sex-Based Menacing/Coercion

Sexual relations are among the most intimate of all human associations.
Thus, necessarily, we are at our most exposed and vulnerable, both
physically and emotionally, when we relate to others sexually. We are
exposed in the sense of being partially or completely naked. Parts of our
bodies that are normally “untouchable” are exposed. We invite highly
intimate physical contact or penetration. The experience itself often
involves the most intense physical, sometimes even painful sensations.
And in virtually all societies, sexual contact is cloaked in moral,
religious, and societal taboos. We are allowed and sometimes encouraged to
do things during sex that we are forbidden to do under virtually any other
conditions. It all seems so thoroughly “wrong” — in fact, many of us grow
up being told that it is wrong — and then we find ourselves in a situation
where, whether within the acceptable bounds of our particular culture or
otherwise, we all pretty much find ourselves doing it.
Of all of the virtually universal activities in which human beings engage,
sexuality is more permeated with the sense of The Forbidden than any other
— the other, of course, being Violence.
Our Fears, our Desires, and also our Insecurities related in various ways
to Sexuality and the Sex act, inevitably permeate both the literature and the
Cinema of Horror. Chief among these, inevitably, is Sexual Violence, the
act of Rape, or of Sex that is coerced, whether through threat, through Mind
Control, or Possession.

Fear of Mutilation/Torture/Cannibalism/Death
Of course, our fear of pain is very much born with us, as are all of the
related prospects of injury and physical harm, not only to ourselves but to
those around us. It’s important to understand though, that things like the
sight of death, suffering, and injury, whether to animals or to other people is
largely a matter of socialization.
Whether it is the killing of animals through hunting, through animal
sacrifice, or human killing in warfare, or through human sacrifice — all of
these things have been common down through history. Ritual Cannibalism
has also played a part in various cultural and religious rites. Even practices
that strike us as the most extreme form of human abomination — the torture
and killing of children — was routinely practiced as part of various
religious rituals.
In the same way, self-mutilation or the ritual mutilation of others has
also been practiced historically, without any particular fear or horror being
attached to it at all.
One need only remember the atrocities of the Roman Arena, perpetrated
largely as a kind of grotesque form of public entertainment, including
helpless victims being fed alive to animals, burned alive, crucified, women
raped to death by bulls — all while the gathered crowds cheered. Nothing
to be afraid of here — unless you happen to be one of the “performers.”
Here lies the terrifying dichotomy of our fear relating to mutilation, to
torture, and even to death. That is why we find this category here, among
the fears based in culture, rather than where you might expect it, among the
instinctive fears. It is because, overwhelmingly, how we as individuals react
to violence — to killing, to physical harm caused to others, and even to the
prospect of harm and death directed against ourselves — is intimately
connected to the way that these concepts are viewed within the larger
community of which we are a part.
If child sacrifice is normal in our world, then for the most part, we
consider it to be normal and acceptable.
If a widow being burned alive on the same pyre with her dead husband is
normal in our world, then, for the most part, we likewise consider it to be
normal and acceptable.
If spectacles of murder and torture are considered to be an enjoyable
form of popular entertainment in our world, chances are we’ll join in and
find it to be enjoyable ourselves.
As with various sexual practices, we can see that what horrifies, repels,
and disgusts the members of one culture at a given time seems quite normal
and reasonable to members of a different culture at a different time.
How do we then account for the effect of our instinctive fears? Fear of
blood? Our instinctive reaction to pain? Don’t we, after all, have an instinct
for self-preservation? Don’t we fear death instinctively?
The reality is much more complicated, because we are much more
complicated organisms in which our in-born drives are often at odds with,
and thus amenable to being shaped and influenced by, the environments of
personal experience and culture.
We have nurturing instincts and aggressive instincts, the instinct to
dominate and the instinct to submit. Various conflicting drives and desires
are available to be shaped by the forces of the Family, the Tribe, and the
Social Groups of which we are a part — which may, themselves be at odds.
Our Family may pull us in one direction, our Faith in another, the Nation
in yet another, while our own personal and unique Fears and Longings may
drive us in an altogether different direction. In the end, we are more than
simply the sum of what we have inherited from Nature and how our
environment seeks to shape us. There is a sort of alchemy that occurs within
the developing human mind that yields results that may be altogether
unexpected — that may produce geniuses of intellect, art, spirit, or even of
evil.
If we were universally repelled by the notion of torture, or cannibalism,
or murder, then they would not loom as large as they do within the dark
realms of our worst fears. We don’t simply fear them because we fear being
their object. Obviously, most of us don’t want to be tortured, nor killed, nor
eaten. I say “most of us” because obviously, there are masochists, both
conscious or otherwise, who do arrange things so that they will suffer (the
reasons are often complicated), as well as those who, again for various
reasons, want to be killed. There have even been cases of people who not
only wanted to be killed but who specifically wanted to be killed and
cannibalized and have actively sought out people willing to help them
accomplish this (hard to tell how one would have “enjoyed” the benefits of
such an agreement, never mind enforced it).
But we also fear these things because they loom within many of us as
dark temptations. The urge to commit acts of violence, to harm others, to
make people suffer, to kill — even, though obviously much less common,
to commit acts of cannibalism. All of these things, on some level, are part of
our collective human experience.
The tendency is to refer to the people who commit these horrible acts as
“monsters” — to describe the acts themselves as “monstrous.” But the truth
is that they are all too terribly human; the cruelties of parents to their
children, the atrocities of war, the systematic use of torture by the State and
the Church, the brutalities of genocide, the crimes of the serial killer, the
pedophile, and the sexual sadist. None of these are “inhuman” acts. They
are all too human.
They belong to us, though we’d like to disown them. And that is one of
the reasons we fear them.

Fear of Victimization of the Helpless

Between our instincts, which encourage most of us toward nurturing our
young, and toward caring and supporting our close kin, and the vast
majority of cultures which support those underlying instincts, one sees that
most stable societies have incentivized our built-in desire to care for the
young, the old and the helpless amongst us.
In the preface to the law code of Ur-Nammu, created around the year
2050 B.C., the oldest surviving code of law in existence, the King, Ur-
Nammu is credited, during his reign (among other things) for this: “The
orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered
up to the mighty man; the man of one shekel was not delivered up to the
man of one mina.”
In describing this powerful King in the ancient pagan world, he was
lauded for protecting the helpless child, the poor, and the widowed.
This thread runs deep. The prospect of harm directed at those that we
consider to be the helpless among us stirs not only our sense of outrage, but
also our deepest fears. It is not only that we value our own children and our
own parents, it is that we ourselves were once children. We were once the
helpless ones. And seeing our own relatives grow older, becoming helpless,
we cannot help but see, in them, our own future.
In the same way, even the wealthiest and most powerful among us are
subject to the winds of fate and fortune. The rich may become poor. The
healthy may become sick or crippled. And, if they live long enough, the
young will become old.
Inevitably, narratives of threat or harm directed against the traditionally
weak or helpless — against Children, the Elderly, the Handicapped, the
Blind, and traditionally against Women, who have been viewed as less able
to defend themselves than Men — have always produced, and still produce,
a powerful reaction. Such narratives, images, scenes, and sequences
generally have a much greater effect on a reader or viewer than a
comparable scene in which the victim is an otherwise healthy adult male.
Inevitably, of course, modern movies seek to undermine the stereotypes
of Women, the Handicapped, the Elderly or even Children as being
“helpless” — but even so, when they are shown in danger, it still presses the
same button.

Fear of the Helpless as “Victimizers”

As is often the case, we experience the Sense of Dread when our normal
expectations are suddenly subverted. Thus, when those that are usually
depicted as helpless, those that we love and seek to protect suddenly
become a source of danger or menace, the result can be profoundly
terrifying.
Horror Cinema has more than its share of terrifying children ranging
from Rhoda, the blonde-haired, braided, and murderous daughter of
Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956), to the possessed Regan MacNeil of
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), to Damien of Richard Donner’s
The Omen (1976), to the terrifying, glowing-eyed, mind-controlling
children of Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960) and Anton Leader’s
Children of the Damned (1964).
Then there’s a whole genre of “killer kid” movies, including Sean
MacGregor and David Sheldon’s The Devil Times Five (1974), Narcisco
Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), and Fritz Kiersch’s Children of
the Corn (1984) based on the Stephen King short story, along with its
various sequels.
There are, of course, many others — including, more recently, the
terrifying Blind Man in Fede Álvarez’ Don’t Breathe (2016).

Fear of Religious-Based Taboos

Every Culture is hemmed in on all sides by a variety of taboos —
restrictions of various sorts, some of which loom large in our lives, some of
which are almost invisible, either by virtue of seeming self-evident or due
to their universal acceptance within a given society.
It is all the more shocking when someone breaks those rules that are
never questioned — when they break rules that we don’t even realize are
rules at all.
Of course, not every taboo necessarily inspires the Sense of Dread.
Virtually every culture, for instance, has taboos regarding appropriate dress
and nudity and sexuality, but violations of those taboos (with a few
exceptions) rarely create any sense of fear or dread.
Taboos relating to religious matters, on the other hand, inevitably touch
on issues that affect life and death, our place in the universe, and the fate of
our spiritual existence. Thus, the violation of religious taboos very
frequently touches the Nerve of Fear. We fear God’s wrath. We fear Hell.
We fear the judgment of our fellow believers.
Religious Taboos include, of course, all of the vast minutiae of religious
law, both codified and folk law, both monotheistic and pagan, curses,
witchcraft, demonic possession, the violation of holy places and objects,
Secret Knowledge or Forbidden Rituals, Satanism, as well as the entire lore
regarding the End of Days.
As with many things that touch upon that Sense of Dread, what much of
the above list has in common is, once again, the notion of the Forbidden.
 Religions define our place in the cosmos, locate us in the context of a
broader moral universe — where we have come from, where we should be,
where we are bound, what we ought to do, how we should live — and also,
those things that we shouldn’t do, shouldn’t say, shouldn’t think or feel,
places we shouldn’t go, words that shouldn’t be spoken, lines that shouldn’t
be crossed.
Cross those lines, speak those words, think those thoughts, perform those
rituals, invoke those Forbidden Forces, and you have entered into the
Realms of Darkness or, perhaps even worse, brought Darkness into our own
world.

Fear of Religious Figures or Institutions Being Attacked or Corrupted

Along different lines, we have traditionally looked to our Religious
Institutions and Religious Figures as emblematic of dependability,
reliability, and trustworthiness (though perhaps a bit less in recent years
than in the past). In a world that is constantly changing, we often look to
those institutions and those that represent them, as hallmarks of stability,
something that we can depend on in times of trouble, loss or grief.
So what happens when those Institutions and the Men and Women
within them are shown to be vulnerable to outside forces, corrupt, perhaps
even evil — not at all what we thought? Maybe there are Malevolent
Influences at work within them. Perhaps Forces of Evil that have,
unbeknownst to us, invaded, penetrated, or corrupted the very institutions
that we look to for moral guidance? The sheep are revealed to be wolves in
disguise — or maybe something worse.
For True Believers, their religious commitments are fundamental. When
they come into question, the entire nature of their lives, of the world itself,
begins to come apart. If those commitments cannot be trusted, then nothing
can. For the deeply religious, it is the inability to fully confront that
possibility (a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance) that awakens a
profound Sense of Dread.

Fear of Authority Figures or Institutions Being Attacked or Corrupted

In the same way that many of us have traditionally invested our trust and
belief in Religious Institutions and Authority Figures, the same is true for
our Government Institutions and Authority Figures. Even within our own
current, highly polarized state of affairs, for many of us Party Loyalties or
political philosophies and individuals who we view as representational of
those Parties or philosophies have stepped up to serve the purpose that was
once held by purely nationalistic loyalties.
And the consequences are the same. “Our Side” (whatever that side
happens to be) and “Our Guy” (whoever that happens to be) are often
viewed through a glass of confirmation bias, such that they really can do no
wrong, no matter how wrong they are. Political affiliations, like religious
ones, are frequently foundational and once a commitment is made, it is very
difficult to shift, without turning our entire world view upside down.
Thus, inevitably, when such institutions or the people that embody them,
are attacked, undermined, or corrupted, either physically, psychologically,
or through supernatural means — when we are forced to acknowledge that
they are not what we have always believed them to be — the result is
frequently a profound sense of disconnection. As with our religious faith,
when we invest our faith in our state, or our political party, or in some
political leader, only to discover that they are not who we thought, or what
we thought, the consequences can be world-shattering.
And, of course, terrifying.

Fear of Family Figures or Institutions Being Attacked or Corrupted

We move down the list, from Religion, to State, to Family.
Of course, there are a great many dysfunctional families, which may
present a partially or even a completely normal aspect to the outside world,
while concealing behind closed doors almost any degree of emotional,
physical, or sexual abuse. Such family dysfunction, of course, is at the heart
of the Sense of Dread. Parents who should love, nurture, and protect instead
harm, exploit and undermine — or even kill. Children who should be loving
and responsive to affection sometimes lack basic empathy, and exhibit
sociopathic or even psychotic behavior from early childhood.
Again, the revelation of Family Figures and the very Institution of
Family being revealed as something other than what we expect it to be,
want it to be, need it to be, is profoundly disturbing. Most especially, when
a Parent or a Child, who we have always believed to be loving and caring,
suddenly changes or is revealed to be someone other than we have always
believed — again we stare into the heart of Dread.
Fear of Traditional Celebrations Undermined
We celebrate many of the critical and transitional events of our lives.
Beyond that, there are yearly celebrations, some religious, some patriotic or
ethnic, that mark the passing of the years. Such celebrations are the
hallmarks by which we measure the passing generations, times when
friends and families gather, times for joy and for remembrance.
Of course, family celebrations can also be times of great tension and
conflict, where old wounds are uncovered and new ones are inflicted.
But from the perspective of horror, such celebrations have always
provided limitless fodder for Dread. Any Celebration where we traditionally
come together in happiness and joy, by its very nature, were it to be
suddenly and unexpectedly shattered by violence, by death, or by the
supernatural, that contrast will inevitably be particularly horrifying.
We expect death, bloodshed, violence, ghosts, and demons to appear at a
graveyard at midnight, or in a dark dripping basement, but when those
things show up at a child’s birthday party, or at a wedding, at a
Thanksgiving Celebration, or at Prom Night, the horror is multiplied
because the darkness has intruded into a realm of light.

Fear of Intimate Places or Acts Intruded Upon/Violated

As in our discussion of Home Invasion, there are not only places, such as
bedrooms and bathrooms, that we consider to be, in a sense, sacred, places
where we expect to be safe and protected from intrusion or observation by
strangers, it inevitably follows that there are activities that we inevitably
expect to be “safe” from observation or intrusion.
Chief among these, of course, are undressing, nudity, sexual activities,
bathing and, in Western Societies, toilet activities. It’s worth noting that
there are cultures where urinating and defecating don’t carry the same rigid
taboos that they do in Western societies. This is a learned behavior.
In any case, because we expect privacy for these activities, and thus
expect that the places in which we carry them out to be private and
protected, any unexpected intrusion upon those places and especially upon
those acts, is always an effective basis for a frightening sequence.
It’s no surprise that we find many film scenes where victims are
menaced in the shower, in the bathtub, in bed, while partially or completely
undressed, in the midst of sexual activity, or even while sitting on the toilet.
 Of course, couples who dare to go out on a date in a horror movie often
take their lives into their hands. From the perspective of the Horror Movie,
the Date is a “two-for-one,” in that it’s one of those traditional rituals that
we’ve all been part of — and thus having violence intrude upon it is
particularly horrifying.
Also because such scenes involve some sexual element and thus, we also
have death, violence, or the supernatural intrude upon the intimacy of the
sexual act (even if it’s no more than a couple making out in a car before
they’re found by some deadly menace), thus making the whole thing that
much more disturbing. It’s worth noting (and others, of course, have made
this connection before), that many of the above situations are not only ripe
for Horror, but equally ripe for Comedy. The connection between Horror
intruding upon the Forbidden and Comedy doing the same warrants much
more attention than we can devote to it here.

Fear of Spiritual Contagion

This is the notion that evil may be passed from one person to another, one
generation to another, or may infect a particular place, a house for instance,
or a patch of ground, a forest, or even a family or a bloodline. Spiritual
Contagion lies at the heart of the notion of Curses which may follow a
particular person, or even move from one generation to the next, or follow
someone or infect those who are close to them, pass from Father to Son, or
First Born to First Born. Or it might infect a patch of ground or a sacred,
forbidden area or object, such that those who enter into it or touch it might
be struck down in some way (thus the Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, or the Ark
of the Covenant).
The notion of Spiritual Contagion is interesting because, though it
obviously carries with it the notion of agency — that some person, or divine
or malignant force, is responsible for it — it nevertheless often acts in much
the same way as a disease or natural force might act, spreading as a disease
might spread, or acting as a poison might.
There is even some overlap here with the concept of Possession, with the
notion of the Demon or Incubus, once driven out of the victim, being able
thereafter to infect or possess some other person unless dealt with
appropriately.
Fear of Wholesale Collapse of Society/Law and Order
We live in the Developed World in a highly advanced, intricately
interdependent technological Culture. All of this depends on countless
pieces working more-or-less flawlessly all the time. Food, water, sanitation,
power, transportation, industry, medicine, information, government:
somehow or other, without any single guiding hand, they all seem to
integrate reasonably well and it all works.
That is, most of us most of the time can get up in the morning expecting
the world around us to function. The lights will turn on when we flick the
switch. Water will flow when we turn the faucet and our toilets will work
when we flush them. We’ll have food on our shelves and garbage trucks to
take away the waste. Most of us have jobs and cars or trains that will take
us there and home again — and there will be houses or apartments for us to
live in.
The overwhelming majority of us will make it home without being
robbed or killed. Neither we nor our loved ones are likely to die or be killed
in the near future due to some malevolent act or due to some terrible injury
or sickness. Nor will we be dragged from our homes and enslaved.
That’s far better than most people could have said about their lives for
the majority of human history. It all just seems natural and inevitable for so
many of us, all the pieces fitting together and working the way they do.
And yet, those myriad pieces that make up our complex modern
technological society are quite delicately balanced, and it wouldn’t take
much at all for all of those pieces to come apart.
Just as we depend upon our religious institutions, our governments, our
families, at the most basic level, we expect our societies as a whole to hold
together — for the lights to work, clean water to flow, for there to be food
at the grocery store, police on the streets to keep order, for our money to
have value, and our basic institutions to keep on working.
And yet we know that in the face of various pressures from within and
without, societies have collapsed, leading to wholesale starvation, plague,
civil war, genocide, and cannibalism.
But surely, such things could never happen here. That’s always what they
say before the axe falls. And stories of the Collapse of Civilization, of the
End Times, are as old as literature. In the history of motion pictures, the
subject of the end of the world was being explored as early as 1916, in a
Danish film directed by August Blom aptly entitled The End of the World.
Historically, many of these movies have veered more in the direction of
adventure or melodrama rather than horror, until George Romero’s
breakthrough horror movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and his two
follow-ups Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985. These
films formed the foundation of an entirely new post-apocalyptic horror sub-
genre, which emerged pretty much fully formed from the minds of George
Romero and his co-writer Joe Russo.
From these relatively humble beginnings, literally dozens of movies and
television series have emerged, all derived, to a greater or lesser extent,
from the template laid down by these movies. And while there are many
other elements within them that exploit the Sense of Dread, the exploration
of the collapse of Law and Order, and everything that we associate with
Civil Society and civilization, is very much at the heart of Romero’s zombie
movies.

URBAN LEGENDS
While “Urban Legends” as such have been around since time immemorial,
the term and its broadly understood meaning — that of contagious
narratives with a humorous, horrifying, supernatural, or mysterious quality,
intended to be taken as true and whose source is usually ascribed to “a
friend of a friend” — dates back approximately to 1968, when it was used
by folklorist Richard Dorson.
In subsequent decades, Jan Harold Brunvand, a Professor of English at
the University of Utah, introduced the concept to the general public in a
series of books, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981), The Choking Doberman
(1984), The Mexican Pet: New Urban Legends (1986) and others.
And yes, there was a horror movie named Urban Legend, released in
1998, directed by Jamie Blanks, about a series of mysterious killings related
to — well, Urban Legends.
Of course, not all Urban Legends are frightening. Some are comical,
such as the “Jato car” — an account in which some misguided soul straps a
Jet-Assisted-Take-Off Rocket to the back of his car with unfortunate (if
unsurprising) consequences.
 Some are bizarre, such as the account of the scuba diver picked up by a
fire-fighting helicopter’s water-bombing scoop and dumped high in a tree.
Some Urban Legends simply spread because of wish fulfilment or
because people like to be in possession of supposedly secret or special
knowledge — thus, the notion that the Proctor & Gamble Logo identifies its
relationship to Satanisn, or that secret clues indicate that Paul McCartney of
the Beatles (who is alive and well as of this writing) actually died in 1966,
or that Elvis (who actually died in 1977) is still alive and in hiding.
These Urban Legends may be odd, amusing, luridly thrilling, or even
vaguely sinister, but they’re not frightening.
But there is a whole category of such Legends that are intended to raise
our hackles, and we’ll take some time here to examine a number of them, to
see just how these tales draw upon the Sense of Dread as we have explored
it in the Chapters above, to create their own unique frisson.

Have You Checked the Children

A teenaged Babysitter downstairs. Two young children asleep upstairs.
Then the phone rings. A sinister Voice asks, “Have you checked the
Children?” Afraid, she goes upstairs to check. The children are fine.
Later, the phone rings again. The same Voice, the same question. “Have
you checked the Children?” Angry, she hangs up.
But the calls keep coming. Eventually, she calls the Police and she’s told
that they will monitor her phone. If the Man calls again, they’ll trace the
call and find him. The phone rings once again — “Have you checked the
Children?” The frightened Babysitter slams the phone down.
A few seconds later, the phone rings again. She grabs up the phone, only
to hear the Police on the other side, “We’re on our way! Get out now! The
call is coming from inside the house!”
Terrified, the Babysitter rushes from the house, meeting the Police
outside. By the time they enter, they find the children inside, having been
murdered by the grinning Prowler whom they catch, lurking upstairs in the
dark.
There are other, more benign endings to this story, in which the prowler
is caught before the children are harmed, or in which the calls turn out to be
a hoax perpetrated by one of the children.
 There is also an interesting variant in which the Babysitter keeps visiting
the children’s room, finding them asleep and apparently untouched, but
notices a large, life-sized clown statue in the room each time she goes to
check. Instead of the Police, she calls the Parents, who proceed to comfort
her — until she mentions seeing the clown statue in the children’s room, at
which point the alarmed mother tells her that there isn’t any clown statue in
the children’s room!
The Elements of Dread: We can see quite clearly that this Urban Legend
hits on a number of points. Children are endangered. The Young Girl is
endangered. The House and the children’s bedroom, traditionally places of
safety, are threatened and ultimately penetrated. This is rendered especially
effective when the Unseen Menace (and this quality of the Menace being
Unseen is itself particularly terrifying) which our Protagonist imagines to
be outside, actually turns out to be within the apparently Safe Space of the
house itself.
The above Urban Legend was the basis of the 1979 feature, When a
Stranger Calls, directed by Fred Walton, as well as its 1993 sequel and
2006 remake.

The Hook
This story, or variants of it, dates back at least as far as the 1950s.
A Couple is parked in an isolated Lover’s Lane, going about the sorts of
things that couples do in Lover’s Lanes, when the music on the radio is
interrupted by a special News Report.
A Maniac has escaped from a nearby Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
He can be immediately identified because he has a missing hand, replaced
by a Hook. He is violent and extremely dangerous. The Girl is frightened
and wants to leave, but her Boyfriend, of course, would much rather stay
and continue their previous activities.
Unfortunately, the mood’s been broken and finally, after repeated
requests, the annoyed and frustrated Boyfriend starts the car and peels out
of Lover’s Lane.
He drives back in angry silence, pulls up to her home, gets out of the car
and circles around to open her door. As he does, he freezes in shock.
A HOOK is hanging off of the Passenger Side door.
 As with most Urban Legends, there are many variations on this story,
some involving hooks, some not.
One popular version places the same couple in the same isolated Lover’s
Lane, the same music interrupted by the same urgent news report about the
Escaped Maniac (sans the identifying Hook).
In this variant, the Couple continues their amorous activities until the
Young Girl pauses, believing that she hears someone or “something” in the
surrounding woods. Perhaps they should go? The Boyfriend, growing
frustrated, opts to demonstrate that there’s no one out there and departs,
leaving his Girl behind, locked in the car.
Time passes and there’s no sign of the departed Boyfriend — only the
Young Girl begins to hear a strange sound, the sound of something scraping
rhythmically across the roof of the car — shff-shff, shff-shff, shff-shff. Over
and over. But what could it be? A branch, blowing in the wind? But there
wasn’t any branch low enough to touch the car when they drove up.
And where has her Boyfriend gone? She realizes that he’s taken the car
keys with him. There’s no way to escape and she’s too terrified to leave the
car.
Finally, morning comes, and the Police arrive. They knock on the
window and she sees horror in their faces as she opens the car door. As they
start to take her out of the car, one of the Officers warns her — whatever
she does, she must not look back toward the car.
But as they lead her away, her curiosity gets the better of her and she
turns back to look.
Her Boyfriend has been hanged from a tree directly above the car. As the
wind moves the body back and forth, the tips of his shoes brush the top of
the car — “shff-shff, shff-shff.”
The Elements of Dread: Here we have an intrusion upon a protected
activity, in this case sexual activity. While a car isn’t exactly the same as a
home or a bedroom, it often acts as a surrogate, a home away from home, in
this case a place that young couples can go and find privacy for intimate
contact. Of course, it’s often portrayed as a place where such contact is
interrupted in various horrifying ways. In the latter version, the Young Girl
is left alone, vulnerable, and under threat. The further element of insanity, in
the form of the Mad Killer, and deformity, in the form of the hooked hand,
are also present.
 There is also, in both versions, the revelation of the unexpected
closeness to Death, in the former when the hook on the door is revealed, in
the latter, when the unfortunate Young Girl turns back and realizes that the
mysterious sound was due to her own Boyfriend’s body brushing against
the roof of the car mere inches above her head.

The Licked Hand

A Young Girl is being left home alone for the first time, but is comforted as
her beloved dog is there to protect her. That night, she hears a news
broadcast warning of a killer loose in the neighborhood. Terrified, she
proceeds to check all of the doors and windows, making sure that they’re
locked (but forgetting to check the basement), and then takes the dog with
her and heads to bed.
Later that night, she awakens in darkness to the sound of something
dripping in the nearby bathroom, but she’s too afraid to get out of bed to
check. She reaches her hand down and is met by the sensation of her dog
licking her hand. She returns to a restless sleep, waking every so often,
always to the sound of that odd dripping coming from the bathroom, and
each time she reaches her hand down and is reassured by the lick from her
dog.
Finally, morning comes, and in the light of day she rises, no longer
afraid, and goes to the bathroom. There, she discovers the horrifying source
of the dripping — her dog is hanging there, his throat cut, his blood slowly
dripping onto the floor — and on the bathroom mirror is scrawled in blood,
“Humans can lick too….”
Variations have the parents arriving home, discovering the killer under
the bed, or in a closet, or the parents killed, or the daughter.
The Elements of Dread: Again, there is intrusion into a Safe Space, into
the house, into the bedroom, under the bed, and into the bathroom. A child
is menaced, a dog is killed. There is blood and also the revelation of
intimate and perverse pseudo-sexual contact, in the form of a dangerous and
murderous intruder licking a young girl’s hand, with all of its queasy
suggestiveness.

The Spider Bite

A Young Woman from the Midwest is on vacation in Mexico, and one day
she’s sunbathing outside her hotel and she feels something crawling on her
face — and then a sharp sting. She quickly brushes it away, only to see the
remains of a nasty, long-legged spider which has just bitten her on the
cheek.
Later, when she returns home, she notices that there’s a tiny red spot
there, marking the spot where the spider has bitten her. At first, it’s only
slightly annoying. She puts a drop of antiseptic on it and tries to forget
about it.
But she can’t. It grows progressively worse, swelling, and becoming
more itchy and painful as the days pass, until finally her whole cheek
appears to be red and swollen. She goes to the Doctor, who suggests that the
bite must have become infected and gives her some antibiotics to take.
But the wound continues to get worse, continues to swell, and the itching
becomes unbearable.
Finally, one night, the wound pops — and thousands of baby spiders
proceed to pour out, scurrying across the terrified Woman’s face!
Variations place the home of the Woman in various Eastern cities,
sometimes in the U.S. or in England, the place that she visits varies also.
Sometimes it’s in South or Central American locales, or sometimes even in
the Southern United States. Also, sometimes the spider’s bite is on the
Woman’s head, with the spiders growing and hatching within the Woman’s
hair.
The Elements of Dread: Obviously, first and foremost, this legend takes
advantage of our fear of spiders. There’s a Woman in danger. Also, the
notion of bodily contamination, of foreign living things growing within us.
And it also touches on the idea of the fear of foreign and potentially sinister
places, touching on the broadly held racist idea that somehow places “down
south” are inherently scary, possibly dirty, and likely to contain hidden
dangers.

The Mexican Pet

A Young Couple is vacationing in Mexico by the beach, and one day the
Wife discovers a small, bedraggled stray puppy trembling against the wall
outside the verandah of their motel room. The Wife, feeling sorry for the
little creature, puts out some food and water for it and, after a few days,
allows it to come into their room and sleep with them. By the end of their
vacation, she’s fallen in love with the tiny creature, who is now sharing
their bed and snuggling with her, licking her face and taking tiny bits of
food from her fingers.
Having fallen in love with it, she decides that they can’t possibly leave it
behind, and so when they travel back home, they take their new pet with
them, the Wife holding it wrapped in a warm blanket.
Once back in the States, they decide to take their new doggie to the Vet,
so that it can get checked out and get its shots. As soon as the Vet takes a
look at their new puppy, he recoils in horror.
“This isn’t a dog!” he says. “It’s a dock rat!”
The Elements of Dread: Just as spiders take center stage in the “Spider
Bite” Urban Legend, we have the Rat taking center stage in this one. Again,
an inherent object of loathing manages to work its way into safe spaces, a
bedroom and a bed. We have the element of contamination, as the vermin
touches, snuggles with, and licks the Woman. And of course, the central
object of the creature’s “affection” is a Woman, traditionally thought of as
more vulnerable. In addition, there is the notion of concealment, of
something horrible hiding beneath the surface of that which we perceive as
friendly, affectionate, and loving — a puppy.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker

It’s late at night and a light rain is falling as a tired Motorist drives down a
deserted road on an open stretch of rural country. As he rounds a
treacherous curve in the road, his headlights catch sight of a forlorn Young
Girl standing by the side of the road, her thumb outstretched. He pulls over
to let the girl in.
“Sorry,” he says, “the front seat is full of junk. Hope you don’t mind
climbing into the back.” The Young Girl doesn’t mind and clambers into the
back seat. The Man notices that she’s pale and shaking from the cold, and
offers her his coat to keep warm. She asks him if he might drive her to her
home, giving him an address a few miles further on down the road. He
agrees.
As they drive, the Man asks her how she came to be out in the rain on
the side of the road, but the only answer she gives is that she’s “ … trying to
get home.”
 After a short time, the Man spots the house off the side of the road
described by the Young Girl and pulls the car over. As he turns around to
bid the Girl good-bye, he’s met by a sudden shock.
The car is empty. There’s no sign of the Young Girl. Not only has she
vanished without a trace, the coat that he lent to her is gone as well. Not
sure at first what to do, the Man finally goes to the house and knocks on the
door.
The door is opened by an Elderly Man and his Wife. As he starts to
explain what happened, they interrupt him. In fact, they’ve been expecting
him. The Young Girl, they tell him, was their daughter. It seems that she
died in a tragic accident, trying to hitchhike home on that treacherous curve,
and ever since, on the Anniversary of her Death, she shows up on that road
and tries to get home.
She’s been trying to get home every year since her death — over forty
years ago. They buried her in that cemetery, they say, pointing to a nearby
graveyard. The grave is just inside the gate.
Still not quite believing what he’s been told, the Man heads to the
Cemetery and passes through the gate. There, in the place the Old Couple
described, was the grave of the Young Girl — with his coat draped across it.
The Elements of Dread: The Sense of Dread encompassed by the
Vanishing Hitchhiker Legend is much more subtle than in the previous
legends. No rats. No spiders. No maniacs. No real sense of danger at all. Yet
we find it chilling. Once again, we have the setting of the car, the protected
space, the home-away-from-home surrogate. The Driver allows someone
into that safe space, a Young Girl apparently in need — again the
appearance of helplessness — only to have it revealed at the end that what
seemed to be normal and helpless is actually something very different. He
has welcomed something in that is Dead, a Restless Spirit that wanders
away from her grave. And while this particular spirit seems more tragic than
malevolent, the mere notion of coming close to such a being brings with it a
deep disquiet — it awakens our Sense of Dread.

EXERCISES

Make a List of your Favorite Horror Movies and write out which
specific Elements of Dread each one uses in order to produce its
scares.
Write two scenes for a possible horror movie, each one drawing on
and developing different Elements of Dread as discussed above.
Note: each scene may use more than one Element of Dread.
Find a Scary Urban Legend not described above and work out which
Elements of Dread it contains.

OceanofPDF.com
 4
THE TOOLBOX OF DREAD
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is
fear of the unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft

We’ve spent a lot of time examining the biological, psychological and

cultural basis for the emotion of fear — the basis for our experience of
Dread.
Now we’re going to see if we can figure out how to write a screenplay
that scares the hell out of the reader, and will ultimately scare the hell out of
the viewer.
That, of course, is always the objective, to create, for the reader, the
experience a viewer will have watching the movie.
To do that, it’s important to understand some things that are essential in
crafting any story.
Emotions never just “happen” in any story. Whatever the emotion may
be, we don’t laugh, we don’t cry, we aren’t sad, or afraid, or filled with joy,
simply because “things happen” on screen.
Nothing “just happens” on screen — or on the page. Everything is a
decision made by the writer or by the director (or, of course, by the actor).
The decisions that we make become the emotions that our readers, and,
ultimately, our viewers experience.
If a scene isn’t scary, but should be, or isn’t touching, but should be, or
isn’t exciting, but should be, it’s because somebody has made a wrong
decision. Something is missing that should be present. Somebody — and it
may be you — has got some work to do.
Never assume that because an emotion “ought” to be present at a certain
point in your story that it will somehow appear automatically. Surely, you
might think, Grandma’s just died, so obviously, everyone should be sad
right about now, both in the scene and, of course, in the audience.
 But the harsh reality is that we’ve seen lots of scenes like this, and
sometimes they pull on our heart strings and sometimes they just come
across as phony or as nothing at all. The characters on the screen, or on the
page, may be crying — but we’re not.
And, of course, it works the same with scares. The characters may be
terrified by the pursuing horror — but we are not. We’ve seen it all before.
We don’t relate to it. We don’t experience their fear.
That is always the challenge: to make the reader, and by extension the
viewer, experience the emotion that the characters within the story are
feeling. You can never just assume that because your characters are sad, the
reader will be sad or because your characters are terrified your readers will
be terrified.
The Second Thing to understand, especially in relation to a surprise twist
or a suspenseful sequence or a jump scare or any other surprise moments or
sequences that produce an emotional reaction, is this:

THE EMOTIONAL REACTION IS IN THE STRUCTURE, NOT IN THE SURPRISE

On a certain level, this should be obvious. If it weren’t true, we wouldn’t be
able to re-watch a comedy that contains jokes or gags that depend on
surprise twists and reversals. If the twist was essential for making us laugh
— then the jokes wouldn’t be funny a second time.
But they are. We can watch great comedies, knowing exactly what the
jokes are going to be, whether it’s physical, verbal, or behavioral comedy
— and it’s still funny.
In exactly the same way, great horror and suspense movies, even when
you’ve seen them multiple times and know exactly when every shock and
every jump scare is coming, can be just as effective — just as scary, just as
suspenseful — as they were the first time you saw them.
One of the great non-genre examples of this is the concluding sequence
of Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995). Pretty much everyone who watches this
movie, because it’s based on a famous historical event, knows that the
Astronauts got home safe. On that basis, there ought to be no suspense
involved in their re-entry.
But the filmmakers make the decision, at a certain point just as the re-
entry begins, to leave the Astronauts and focus on those who are waiting at
home — that was a key structural decision. A News broadcast clarifies that
they’re going into “radio blackout,” that blackout has only ever lasted three
minutes, and after three minutes, we’ll know if they survived re-entry or
there will only be — silence.
And then the clock starts to tick down as we move from family
members, the Wives, the Children, the elderly Mother, the Son at the
Military Academy, the various Members of Mission Control, all watching,
all waiting, frozen — the three minutes pass. The emotionless voice keeps
calling to Odyssey. No answer. No answer. No answer. Silence.
The tension is unbearable — and then, a crackle. On the TV screen, a
glimpse of parachutes opening — and Jim Lovell’s voice finally comes over
the speaker, and instantly, all of the tension is released — everyone
explodes!
Including, by the way, everyone who’s watching the movie. The tension
has been ratcheted so incredibly high that we’re cheering too.
Even though, of course, we always knew that they were going to be fine.
And no matter how many times we watch the movie, the tension ratchets up
just the same, the release is just the same.
That’s why you can hear the same joke over and over again and still
laugh. That’s why you can watch the same scary scene from a great horror
movie and be terrified over and over again.
An emotional scene often has the structure of a joke. In fact, such scenes
are often called “gags,” whether in reference to comedy, to action, to
suspense, or to horror. Structurally, there are similarities in scenes that build
toward laughter as well as in scenes that build toward terror.

USE OF TENSION
As we mentioned above, any emotion can be intensified through
“ratcheting,” in which the structure of the scene compels a character or
characters to hold in an emotion, and we follow as the contained emotion
builds, builds, builds toward some final moment of release.
A wonderful example of this is in the TV Movie directed by John
Newland (of One Step Beyond fame), Don’t be Afraid of the Dark (1973).
It features a young housewife (played by Kim Darby) menaced by a host
of tiny malevolent creatures that she’s accidentally freed from a bricked-up
fireplace in her new home.
 There is a truly memorable scene in which she’s at dinner with her
husband and some houseguests. She’s already on-edge because of a number
of mysterious happenings — hearing sinister voices — all of it dismissed
by her impatient husband.
Of course, we’ve heard the voices. We know that she’s freed something
horrible that was trapped down in that fireplace, and so we know that
something’s going to happen.
As the dinner party proceeds, something under the table tugs her napkin
off her lap. One of her guests gives it back to her. She tries to behave
normally, to dismiss it, to ignore what just happened — and yet again, the
tension is ratcheted, as that something tugs the napkin off a second time.
Then, she looks under the table, only to see one of the nasty little
creatures lurking there, staring up at her.
She screams — tension is released. But nobody else sees the thing. And,
of course, nobody believes her ….
For those of us who saw this movie over forty years ago, it remains one
of the hallmarks of Nightmare Cinema. Even watching it today, it far
surpasses in terms of out-and-out terror, the over-embellished CGI
complexities of Troy Nixey’s 2010 remake.
One of the best examples of the use of building tension is the opening of
George Romero’s classic original, Night of the Living Dead (1968).
The first fourteen minutes of this movie is an almost continuous
ratcheting of tension, from the time that we first spot the sinister figure in
the distance, as Barbara and Johnny place the memorial on their father’s
grave (we, of course, know that something’s not right), as Johnny taunts
Barbara, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”
Then, as the loping figure continues to advance, we start to see him more
clearly. There’s just something a bit odd about him. He’s not walking quite
right. And his clothes are scuffed-up. Barbara’s concern, of course, is that
the man might hear him being mocked by Johnny. That is — right up until
she’s suddenly and viciously attacked! As far as the two of them are
concerned, squabbling Brother and Sister a few seconds before, this all
comes literally out of nowhere.
Now Johnny intervenes, defending her — only to find himself in a life-
and-death struggle as Barbara looks on, shocked. How is this happening? In
a matter of seconds, the fight is over. Johnny is either rendered unconscious
or killed, and now the Attacker is after her.
She’s now running for her life. She falls, kicks off her shoes, makes it
back to her car with seconds to spare. But what now? No keys. Johnny had
them! Now the Attacker attempts to break into the car, grabs a stone,
smashes away at the window.
Finally, as the window breaks and he reaches in, groping for her, she
pulls the emergency brake, and the car starts rolling down the hill with the
Attacker loping after it.
But the escape is only momentary. The car runs against a tree. Barbara,
shoeless, is forced to flee on foot, with the Attacker close behind.
She makes her way across a field, the Fiend in close pursuit, gets to a
dark and apparently abandoned farmhouse. She grabs a knife, but what is
she to do? The phone? Not working. Outside, night has fallen, and the Lone
Attacker has been joined by Others. What is going on?
She climbs the stairs, only to be confronted by a mangled corpse lying at
the top of the steps!
Fleeing in terror, she flings the door open, only to find herself staring
into blinding headlights — and Ben — the first human being she’s seen
since losing her brother.
There are very few horror movies of any generation, with an opening as
effective as Night of the Living Dead. Central to that effectiveness is that it
starts with an essentially normal state of affairs, a squabbling Brother and
Sister going about their business. It could be anybody — and that is the
idea. Since this is an event that is happening across the world, it would, in
effect, be happening to Everybody — to Anybody. This is just where we
happen to enter into this World-Wide Event. It is because neither of them is
special, because Barbara has no special skills, no special understanding of
what the Hell is going on, that we relate to her. We relate to her
helplessness, to her confusion — and to her terror.
Starting with them rather than, say, starting with Ben, or with any of the
other characters who end up trapped in that house, was not a random
decision, even though the story ultimately leaves Barbara largely behind.
Russo and Romero, who wrote the screenplay, made that decision because
they wanted us to experience that initial introduction to the events of the
Return of The Dead, through Barbara’s eyes — through the eyes of one of
the most vulnerable characters in the story.
Because she is helpless and has no idea what is going on, we relate to her
terror. And because her fear continues to mount, continues to “ratchet,” we
become ever more afraid as her confusion, her sense of helplessness, and
her terror grows.

BUILD TO THE SCARE, CONTINUE TO BUILD, AND FOLLOW THE RELEASE WITH
ANOTHER SCARE
In this scene, as in many other scenes, Romero builds to the scare, as in the
opening Graveyard Scene, and then continues to build, allowing new scares
to mount. When there is a moment of possible relief, as when Barbara
reaches the refuge of the farmhouse, we are then confronted with yet
another jump scare in the form of the hideous body at the top of the stairs
which drives Barbara out, into the arms of Ben outside.
Tension release often comes in the form of a reversal — in some
surprising or unexpected direction.
A wonderful example of this comes from The Haunting (1963), Robert
Wise’s brilliant version of the Shirley Jackson novel.
A group of diverse Ghost Hunters has taken up residence in Hill House,
hoping to penetrate the secrets of the Other World. What haunts Hill House?
No one can really be sure as the nameless entity never actually shows itself,
appearing instead as a terrifying thumping, moving invisibly down the hall
beyond the doors, a rattling at a doorknob, a vast pressure that bows a door
in almost to the point of shattering ….
And in one specific scene, two of the occupants, the neurotically
vulnerable Eleanor, and Theodora, the sophisticated lesbian psychic, are
now sharing a room (and a bed) after the terrifying events of the previous
night.
Eleanor wakes in the shadowed darkness to the sounds of muffled
voices. She whispers to Theo not to speak, lest whoever or whatever it is
realizes that she’s in her room. She reaches out her hand, whispers for Theo
to take it.
Eleanor stares at the wall, at a curled pattern of leaves in the plaster. Or
is it? Because as the voices continue, a Man’s voice mumbling, a Woman’s
laughing, it seems as if the simulacrum of a face appears in the molded
shapes of the plaster.
Meanwhile, the sound of a child’s voice, crying in torment, is added to
the others. Eleanor feels Theo clutching her hand, tighter and tighter. The
sounds grow more insistent — Eleanor grows more and more horrified.
Theo’s hand is almost crushing hers.
We hear Eleanor in Voice Over, “If there’s one thing I cannot stand it is
for anyone to hurt a child.” She goes on, “I will get my mouth to open and I
will yell, I will yell, I will yell!”
Finally, she breaks the spell and screams, “STOP IT!”
As she does, the light flips on. Far across the room, Theo sits up in bed.
Eleanor has been asleep on a settee.
“What is it, Eleanor? What’s wrong?”
It’s only then that Eleanor sits up, stands, lifting her hand, in cold shock.
“God,” she says, “Who’s hand was I holding?”
Of course, the finesse of the scene, as it’s conceived and ultimately shot,
is that we never see Theo until the final reveal, and yet, because of the way
that it’s structured, remaining always either tight on Eleanor or on the
exceptionally creepy plaster pattern on the wall, that we never even think
about the fact that Theo remains unseen during the whole of the scene, right
up until that reveal.
Inevitably, one of the advantages of developing a script with the Director
who’s going to be shooting it is that both Screenwriter (in this case, Nelson
Gidding) and Director already know how scenes like these are going to be
shot.
It will always be a challenge in writing a Spec script when trying to craft
a scene like this, when you alone understand that it must be seen on screen
in a certain way in order for a critical reveal to work. It’s one of those
situations that requires a certain finesse in describing it.
On the one hand, you never want to be accused of “directing on the
page.” On the other hand, the goal is always to try to create, in the mind of
the reader, the experience that a viewer would have, while watching the
finished film.

FAKE TENSION BREAK

There are any number of versions of this, often included in a “curiously
afraid” sequence. That is, a scene in which some character is being drawn
down that alley or down that flight of basement stairs or down that
shadowed corridor where we all know (including that character) that they
really shouldn’t go.
It’s common to interrupt that journey with a Fake Tension Break. The cat
in the alley knocks over a garbage can, or the Hero turns on the stairs and
sees their reflection in a dusty mirror. The result is a Jump Scare — we
think that it’s something — but no, it’s nothing.
Those beats produce a Tension Break. The character goes “phew …,”
and we do the same. But then, they keep on going down the stairs, down the
corridor, down the alley — allowing the tension toward the final reveal to
continue to build.
Instead of actually relieving tension, the Fake Tension Break actually
places us more on edge. It acts as a preview of the real terror that we know
(though they may not) is coming.

THE TWIST
In the same way that the laugh in a gag comes from a sudden unexpected
twist or reveal at the end of the gag, so in the case of a horror gag — the
resolution often comes in the form of a sudden and unexpected reveal that
elevates our sense of horror, that “pays off” the gag.
As with a comedic gag, the twist, the surprise reveal, should be set up in
some way. We don’t see it coming, but in retrospect, the groundwork was
established.
The resolution of the scene in The Haunting is a great example of this;
on the one hand, the reveal of Theo being across the room and thus of
Eleanor having been holding the hand of “something else” is a fantastic
twist. But it was fairly set up — because we went through the entire scene
without seeing or hearing a word from Theo. If Theo had actually been next
to Eleanor, really holding her hand, wouldn’t we have expected the camera
to cut to her, to show her reaction? Yes, in retrospect. And yet, the way in
which the scene is staged and shot, fortunately, doesn’t even make us ask
ourselves that question.
Another fantastic example of this is the ultimate twist ending of
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), in which the “ghosts” haunting
the isolated country home of the high-strung Grace and her light-sensitive
children during World War II are ultimately revealed to actually be the new
living occupants of the house. It is Grace and her children who are finally
revealed to be the Ghosts, unaware of their lifeless state until forced to
realize the truth.
Yet, this surprise twist is properly set up, especially when Grace’s
husband, who disappeared in World War II and was long thought dead,
arrives home unexpectedly for a brief stay, only to depart as mysteriously as
he arrived. But from where, after all, has he come, long after the war’s end?
And where does he go and why? It may almost have been too much of a
hint — but even so, it doesn’t keep the ending, when it finally comes, from
being exceptionally chilling.

THE JUMP SCARE

We spoke at length about the startle response, and Horror Movies have
taken advantage of this from the earliest days of cinema.
This was more of a challenge during the era of silent motion pictures, but
even then, there are memorable uses of the Jump Scare.
One of the most notable among these is the shocking reveal of the
scarred face of Lon Chaney’s Phantom, in Rupert Julian’s Phantom of the
Opera (1925).
Also, we can’t leave out one of the most shocking images in all of
cinematic history, featured in Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist short, Un Chien
Andalou (1929).
It features a scene in which a man lifts a straight razor to a woman’s eye,
starts to draw it. The image then cuts to a shot of a narrow cloud sliding
across the moon, and we are, in a sense, comforted, believing that the visual
metaphor is going to substitute for the ghastly reality. Then we cut back to
the continuation of the image — a terrifying Jump Scare as the blade
literally slices the woman’s eye open — an image of graphic horror
unmatched for generations.
In the decades that followed, after the advent of sound, the uses of the
Jump Scare increased, although it wasn’t used as frequently as one might
imagine.
Notably, it cropped up in Jacques Tourneur’s The Cat People (1942), in
which the character Jane Randolph, walking down a lonely street at night
can hear the echoing clatter of an unseen woman’s heels following behind
her — and then they stop. Nervous, she keeps walking. But somehow, she
senses that she’s still being followed — by something.
Then just as she hears what might be the snarl of a leopard, there’s a loud
hiss! It’s the air brakes of a bus as it pulls to a stop in front of her. Rescue.
An even more memorable Jump Scare shows up in Christian Nyby’s The
Thing from Another World (1951), rumored to have actually been directed
by Howard Hawks, by the way, in which the previously unseen Thing has
been trapped in the greenhouse at the Polar Station where the action of the
story takes place. The Military Men, armed to the teeth, led by the no-
nonsense Captain Hendry, approach the heavy door. They’re ready to enter
and face the Thing.
Hendry gives the order for the door to be opened — only to find the
Thing standing right in the doorway, facing them! Chaos — and gunfire —
ensues.
Moving through into the sixties and seventies, filmmakers got the hang
of using jump scares. Finally, in the eighties, they’d pretty much figured out
how to do it; most notably they’d realized that accompanying a visual Jump
Scare with some loud noise, whether justified or not, amplified the effect
significantly.
Since then, it’s become Standard Operating Procedure.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF JUMP SCARES

The Sudden Jump Scare

Characters are simply going about their business, whatever it might be,
when, out of nowhere ….
Well, here are two examples — both sharks.
First: Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). They’re out on the boat. Quint is
working on his fishing reel, Hooper is “driving the boat,” and Chief Brody
is starting another chum line, and as he starts to toss out this nasty mix of
stinking dead fish and blood he begins to complain. Why can’t Hooper take
this messy job for a change — as he promptly tosses a load of chum into the
gaping jaws of the gigantic white shark, rising to the bait. (The tension of
this Jump Scare, of course, is released by one of the best lines of the movie,
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat….”
 Second: Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea (1999). The Team of shark
experts is trapped in an underwater moon pool, and are fighting amongst
themselves because the super-intelligent shark breeding experiment has
gone a bit off the rails, and Randall, played by Samuel L. Jackson, proceeds
to give the others a serious dressing down about how they all need to stick
together and find a way out — at which point a gigantic shark jumps out of
the moon pool, grabs him, and drags him to his death while the others look
on in horror.
Now, let’s be clear. Deep Blue Sea is a very silly movie, but it does
contain that one very effective Jump Scare.

“Jump Scares” That Relieve Tension in a Mounting Suspense Scene

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) has a prime example of this
when Protagonist Jay, having inherited the “curse” after having sex with her
boyfriend and finding herself relentlessly pursued by the Lethal Demon of
the title, who is invisible to everyone but those who have been cursed (and,
of course, us), finds herself on the beach with several of her friends —
when the relentless “It” shows up, approaching her in the form of a Young
Girl.
When she finds herself grabbed by the hair and lifted, she pulls lose, and
she and the others retreat in terror to a shack on the beach. Her friends still
don’t know quite what’s happening, even when she empties a revolver at
the approaching menace, to no effect.
Fred, one of her friends left outside and in the line of fire, shouts for her
to stop shooting as the Demon rises, unhurt by the bullets. Jay frantically
locks the door, only to glimpse a large form moving past a narrow window,
then something starts pounding on the door.
And then the Jump Scare — as “It” smashes a big hole down low,
toward the bottom of the door, sending splinters flying across the room and
then … silence.
A brief moment of relief follows as, for a few beats, nothing happens,
but surely it can’t be over. As we MOVE IN on the hole low down on the
door, suddenly — Fred sticks his head into view — another Jump — as he
demands to know what’s going on. There isn’t anybody out here! Again, the
tension is briefly relieved as he rises, moves away.
 And then, once again another Jump Scare — as the Demon appears in
one of its truly terrifying forms (of which there are many), grey-faced,
black-eyed, crawling in through the hole — sending Jay rushing out
through the back.
Mitchell manages to accomplish something else in this scene which is
also a variation on a standard Jump Scare. That is —

Ending a Scene with a Second Larger Jump Scare after an Earlier Jump
Scare
All of this goes back to the notion of ratcheting up the tension in the scene,
and using successive scares followed by tension release and then continuing
to build.
One of the best examples of this can be found in James Wan’s The
Conjuring (2013), in the sequence that begins with Carolyn Perron in her
daughter’s room upstairs — there’s a sudden huge crash! We all Jump!
That Jump Scare brings her to the top of the stairs. All of the pictures
hanging on the wall down the stairwell have fallen. Heading down and
searching the first floor of her new home, she begins to hear the mysterious
clapping, part of the hide-and-clap game that we’ve seen her play earlier
with her children. Only her children are all upstairs — so who’s clapping?
And then, as she circles through the darkened rooms of the first floor,
she hears the sound of a door opening. She turns, and sees that it’s the door
to the basement. The sound of someone playing the broken piano comes up
from below. She takes a step down, turns on the light, shouts that she’s
going to lock up whoever it is down there!
And then the next Jump Scare, as the basement door slams into her face,
sending her careening head-over-heels down the basement steps, trapping
her there. She rises, bruised, half-stunned — and terrified.
The basement itself is full of junk, full of shadows, lit only by the light
from a single incandescent bulb.
She stares this way and that — and then, out of a dark space across the
basement, a child’s ball comes flying out, bouncing across the floor toward
her.
She breaks, rushing back to the stairs. As she does, another Jump Scare
as the lone bulb bursts, leaving her and the whole basement, in total
darkness. For a moment, all we can hear are the sounds of her desperate
scramble on the stairs — and the sounds of a child’s laughter, then her
fumbling with matches.
Finally, as she lights a match with a trembling hand, she comes back into
view. She leans forward, trying to penetrate the darkness below. One match
burns out. She lights another, continuing to stare downward, and thus
directing our attention in that direction, seeing nothing.
Then, a child’s voice, “Do you want to play hide and clap?” — and the
Final Jump Scare as hands emerge from the darkness behind and above her,
clapping.
For the remainder of the Standard Jump Scare Types referred to below,
we’ll generally leave it to you to come up with examples of your own. They
are so common that they can be found in countless Horror Films.

AUDIBLE JUMP SCARES

These range from the classic “over-amplified phone ring” to the sudden
crash of thunder, to a sudden off-screen scream or the howl of a cat or, well
— you no doubt have your own examples.
Loud noises trigger our startle reflex. If we’re already in a state of
tension, this works even better. It didn’t take filmmakers long to figure this
out and exploit it.
A Loud Noise will make the audience jump.

VISUAL JUMP SCARE

Almost always, Visual Jump Scares are combined with an Audible cue. If it
isn’t practical to incorporate one into the action itself, then it will simply be
added to the music track or just laid into the soundtrack itself — a loud
Sting or Blare to help sell the Jump.
There are countless variations of the Visual Jump Scare. These are
general categories, but far from an exhaustive list:

From Off Screen

A hand reaches in from the side, from below, from above. This can be an
actual menace, though more often than not, it’s a “fake” jump scare.
A Cat, a Dog, comes jumping in, or a bird flies into a nearby window.
Sometimes, in a more sinister version, it might be a bat. Again, this only
refers to things entering from Off Screen.
 Objects falling into Frame — again, more often than not, these are Fake
Jump Scares — some innocent object that defuses tension along the way to
a bigger scare.

From Within the Screen

A door, a box, a cabinet, a hatch, or something similar is opened or falls
open, revealing something shocking — a body or a head or spiders or rats
— anything that produces a sense of shock or horror. Again, the reveal
could also turn out to be something harmless, thus relieving tension with a
Fake Jump Scare.
A Light Source is turned on or moved, revealing the presence of
something in the shadows. Again, it might be a body, a Menacing Presence
— or it could simply be a mirror or something harmless (thus a Fake Jump
Scare).
Objects within the Frame falling, moving, exploding. Pictures fall off
walls, objects go flying, burst into flame. Doors and windows slam.

Movement Reveal
There are many variations on this. A Character may move, revealing
Someone or Something behind them.
Someone or Something may rise up into view behind a Character ( …
and yes, we all remember that terrifying moment from Scott Derrickson’s
Sinister (2012), when the Demon popped up behind Ellison).
What is particularly effective about the above Movement Reveal Jump
Scare is that, generally, one Character within the scene sees the horror,
while the other, the one facing away from it, does not.
A Mirror is turned, revealing Something in the reflection.
A Character opens a curtain or blinds, revealing Something on the other
side.
The Camera moves to reveal the Jump Scare — sometimes following a
Character or moving in relation to that Character to reveal the presence of
Something or someone not previously seen.
Note: Generally, you want to do your best to avoid describing camera
moves, so if you really feel that it’s necessary for the sake of a particular
effect, you would tend to describe these in terms of character movement.
THE FUNDAMENTAL JUMP SCARE CHALLENGE
Jump Scares can be used to great effect in horror movies, or they can come
across as cheap and second-rate. Either way, because of their basis in
human biology, they’re going to produce the expected result. They’re going
to get the audience to jump. That’s why filmmakers continue to depend on
them.
That is also why they continue to pose a significant challenge to the
horror movie screenwriter.
No matter what you do, Jump Scares will simply never be as scary on
the page as they are on the screen.
As a biological limitation, there’s nothing you can write that will make a
Reader jump in the same way as they will when they see and hear the
comparable moment on screen.
That means that a screenplay that depends solely on Jump Scares is not
going to be as effective as one that depends on integrating those moments
more broadly with the Sense of Dread.
It would be like reading a comedy script where we know where and
when we are supposed to laugh, without ever actually laughing as we read
the screenplay.
If you’re writing a comedy, you want the reader to laugh, and if you’re
writing a horror movie, you definitely want to scare your reader.

EXPLICIT VS. NON-EXPLICIT HORROR

The debate between horror films that rely on explicit images of violence
and sexuality and more subtle horror films seems to be a perennial one.
On the one hand, you have classic horror films such as Jack Clayton’s
The Innocents (1961), Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), or Alejandro
Amenábar’s The Others (2001) that show almost nothing in the way of
explicit imagery.
On the other, you have some of the truly great horror classics that don’t
shy away from the explicit depiction of violence and bloodshed, most
notably, George Romero’s Dead Trilogy, Toby Hooper’s original Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974), or Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987).
There’s a certain critique of Horror Movies that suggests that the more
subtle and less-explicit Horror Film is somehow inherently superior — that
Films that imply the menace and never show anything explicitly (you know,
the way movies used to be made “in the old days”) make for better movies.
I think that a much broader perspective is needed, irrespective of the
genre. There will always be stories that will work more strongly taking an
indirect or subtle approach to the material, and in just the same way, there
are always going to be stories that will require a more direct approach.
There are going to be Action Movies that will be more or less explicit in
their depiction of violence, Romance Movies that will be more or less
explicit in their depiction of sexuality, and Horror Movies that will be more
or less explicit in their depiction of Visual Horror.
A big part of the question in developing any story dealing with the
depiction of violence, of gore, of sexuality, has to do with what effect those
images are going to have on the reader, and by extension, on the viewer —
especially on the viewer — because reading about blood and gore, reading
about explicit violence, is a much less shocking experience than actually
seeing it on screen, and that has to be part of the thought process of any
screenwriter developing such material.
What purpose, in relation to your story and your Characters, thematically
and emotionally, do these images serve? Why are they on screen? And also
— when are they on screen?
Ultimately, everything that you put on the page, which is destined to be
shown on screen, should be thought of not only in terms of moving the
story forward (which, of course it should), but also in terms of its emotional
effect.
Inevitably, certain images will horrify, will shock, will even potentially
disgust the viewer. Of course, audiences differ, and there will be audiences
who view horror movies as a kind of endurance test, who want to be
challenged by ever-bloodier, gore-laced, and more disgusting images.
When we talk about Exploitation Cinema, this is what we’re talking
about. Images are being put on the screen solely to create a thrill, an effect,
whether it’s to shock, or titillate, or gross out the audience.
The Gore Movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis fall into this category.
There are any number of filmmakers (and screenwriters) who’ve made a
living making Exploitation Films down through the years — and obviously,
there has always been and always will be an audience for those movies.
 If you’re into those movies, I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t be,
but that’s not the kind of Horror Movie that we’re talking about.
So, what about the use of graphic violence in a movie that’s not being
used just for exploitation?
How is it best used, and to what purpose?
Let’s consider one of the best examples. That would be George
Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead, his Dawn of the Dead (1978).
This movie was released unrated, due to its explicit violent content and,
unlike the original, was also shot in color, making the violence all the more
graphic.
For those of us who saw this movie in its initial release back in 1978,
Dawn was like nothing that had ever been put on the screen before in terms
of its graphically realistic depiction of violence. But Romero made some
very interesting creative choices in the making of this movie.
First, the movie starts off in the midst of the absolute chaos of that First
Night when the Dead have come back. In the first ten minutes or so, we are
assaulted with some of the most horrific images of violence that had ever
been put on screen up to that time — most notably shots of people’s heads
being blown off, and several shots of zombies taking bites out of people and
tearing the flesh away in full close-up.
What is most interesting about those opening moments of Dawn of the
Dead is that the movie never gets as graphically violent as this again. The
point is — it doesn’t have to. We are so shocked, so put on edge by those
images right up front that for the rest of the movie, we simply have the
sense that just about anything might happen, anything might abruptly come
out of nowhere and assault our senses.
And just in case we start to become complacent, Romero will jab us with
another shocking image, such as the moment when a zombie is killed by
having a screwdriver thrust through his ear, just to remind us that — yes,
don’t forget — we’re in a world where anything horrible might just happen.
Graphic violence, of course, serves other purposes in Horror Cinema.
The depiction of blood itself shocks us. Most of us are conditioned to react
to it with distress.
Along the same lines, the sudden intrusion of violent death into
otherwise comfortable and normal surroundings is likewise profoundly
horrifying. That abrupt transformation of person into mere flesh undermines
our very sense of being.
The use of violent images and sequences are available to the writer and
the filmmaker as tools for creating the Sense of Dread.
But there is also a downside to the use of such images. As with any
image or sequence designed to produce a powerful emotional effect, the
overuse of such material will inevitably lead to desensitization. The law of
diminishing returns applies. It’s very much like continuously playing music
at full volume. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.
John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is one of the most effective examples
of the proper modulation of the use of graphic violence. It has some of the
most memorably bloody sequences in any major motion picture of that
decade, but Carpenter most definitely chooses his moments.
Some of the most memorable images aren’t intrinsically threatening; for
instance, the discovery of the body of the Norwegian, his blood pouring in
twin frozen streams from his wrists, and the moment when Windows takes
his own blood sample by slitting himself under his thumbnail with a scalpel.
These “small” horrors punctuate much more disturbing moments —
images of the dormant Thing’s discovery and autopsy, and the full-scale
horror sequences, most notably the one in which Copper, attempting to
revive Norris with a defibrillator, ends up getting his arms bitten off — the
sequence that ends with the infamous “spider head” transmutation.
The Thing starts slow and builds its scares, both large and small, in a
masterful way. At its heart is a growing sense of paranoia, of Men who
never quite know who’s human.

ISOLATION/CLAUSTROPHOBIA/DISLOCATION
Another element that The Thing develops in a very effective way is the
sense of isolation, which is critical to the development of the story. From
the very beginning, the Antarctic base is cut off from the outside world,
unable to communicate with anybody, and as the story progresses, the sense
of intruding cold and darkness grows and grows — until there is nothing
left but the two survivors (or is there really only one?) waiting for the cold
and the dark to claim them.
We are social animals; thus we associate being cut off from the company
of other human beings, from the normal social structures of Family and of
Community, with a state of deep unease and outright fear.
Horror Movies have exploited this collective fear of Isolation,
Claustrophobia, and Dislocation in countless ways:

Trapped in Narrow Spaces

The most obvious example — characters trapped in tight spaces —
anything from the Rock Climber trapped by the boulder in Danny Boyle’s
127 Hours (2010), to Laurie trapped in the clothes closet in John
Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), or Jeffrey trapped in Dorothy Vallens’
clothes closet in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

Trapped in Caves/Underground/Graves
Again, many examples — Neil Marshall’s The Descent (2006), Bruce
Hunt’s The Cave (2005), Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried (2010), Christopher
Smith’s Creep (2004), or Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972). Caves,
graves, subway tunnels — places of darkness surrounded by earth — they
all seem to inspire an essential sense of dread in us.

Trapped In or Underwater
Of course, the sense of the water as being bottomless, holding unseen
terrors and secrets for those who swim in it or dive into it — with Jaws
being the defining example of this. Then, of course, there’s Chris Kentis’
Open Water (2004), with its terrifying sense of the dislocation of wide open
spaces. More recently, there’s the deep water Lovecraftian horror of
William Eubanks’ aptly named Underwater (2020).

Trapped on a Ship/Lifeboat/Space Ship

Most notable of these is certainly Christopher Smith’s Triangle (2009), a
movie that falls somewhere between horror, science fiction, and an
exceptionally eerie exploration of the Bermuda Triangle myth. There’s also
Alvin Rakoff’s Death Ship (1980), Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship (2002), or
Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel (2019).
As far as movies that take us in the other direction — stories of
characters trapped in space — we have to go back to Edward L. Cahn’s It!
The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) as the seminal movie of a team of
space explorers pitted against an almost invulnerable Alien Menace on
board an isolated spaceship, along with Mario Bava’s stylishly creepy
Planet of the Vampires (1965). These two movies were later reconfigured as
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) with its ideas, in turn, more fully explored and
developed by James Cameron in Aliens (1986).
For the full-blown “Haunted House in Outer Space” movie, of course,
there’s Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997) and, in a similar mode,
there’s Christian Alvart’s Pandorum (2009).

Trapped in Familiar Spaces/Home Invasion

This has proven to be among the most effective uses of the Sense of Dread:
the transformation of a familiar and comfortable environment into a prison,
a place in which the Protagonists are trapped, rendered helpless, threatened
by forces, either human or inhuman, over which they have no control.
On the human side we have the whole Home Invasion subgenre, which
started with William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), a suitably tense
thriller, but restrained compared to the movies that followed. Among them,
Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear
(1962), both of them re-made, as well as Paul Haneke’s Funny Games (two
versions as well — one shot in Austria in 1997, and an American version
shot in 2006), and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008).
There are, of course, many variations, and many other movies in which
Home Invasions play a much more limited role, including John
McNaughton’s deeply disturbing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986).
On the supernatural side, we have Tobe Hooper’s classic Poltergeist
(1982), which laid the groundwork for the “conventional” haunted house, as
opposed to the more familiar “creepy old” haunted house, in which usually
conventional individuals enter or find themselves trapped in an other-
worldly house of some kind.
In Poltergeist, both the suburban house and its occupants seem
essentially normal and identifiable — yet, somehow, from somewhere, a
supernatural element has entered and becomes ever more menacing.
Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) follows in the same path, using
the “found footage” approach. Seemingly Normal Suburban House, Normal
Couple — and a growing sense of an Intruding Force from Beyond.
Of course, there were six Paranormal Activity movies in the franchise —
which ultimately demonstrates the Law of Diminishing Returns — but the
original movie, and even some of the early sequels maintained a suitably
high Sense of Dread.
One of the most effective examples of this is Ghostwatch, a pseudo-
documentary directed by Leslie Manning and aired on Halloween on the
BBC in 1992. It was hosted by real-life Television Hosts, and was intended
to document the appearance of any supernatural events in the purported
“most haunted house in Britain” — a family home plagued by poltergeist
experiences.
The contrast between the jokiness and banality of the early part of the
show and what happens later, when the ghost (named “Pipes” by one of the
children) starts to show himself in the midst of the drab lower-class home,
makes for one of the most chilling examples of the use of Dread ever made.

Trapped by Nature
There’s overlap here, of course, with Protagonists trapped in or underwater,
but there are other natural environments that are often drawn upon to create
the emotion of dread.
Of course, we normally think of being trapped by situations that enclose
us, that literally “trap” us, in the sense of mines, caves, chasms, crevasses,
buildings collapsed by earthquakes, the rising waters of floods, etc. — and
there is no shortage of such scenes and sequences in motion pictures.
The mirror image of claustrophobia is agoraphobia, the fear of open
spaces. Sometimes that environment can be equally terrifying — broad,
empty landscapes that seem at first devoid of life, and yet may hide
something unseen and deadly.
There are many motion pictures in which Characters may find
themselves trapped in wide-open spaces, as in Open Water, mentioned
above, or the chilling sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest (1959) in which the Hero finds himself pursued by a machine-
gun-wielding crop duster in the midst of wide-open fields.
The desert also offers many opportunities for terror, with movies such as
S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (2015), or Wes Craven’s The Hills Have
Eyes (1977) with its inbred family of Mutants.
Finally, we come back to the terror that haunts the forests, that gives us
the word “Panic.” It is in the deep woods, especially at night, that we
confront our most profound, ancient, and atavistic fears. There is something
in us that remembers when we were only animals, subject to all of the
threats that lurked in the deep woodland shadows — all the things that
stalked and hunted and looked upon us as prey.
Among the movies that explore these fears most effectively are Sam
Raimi’s original The Evil Dead (1981), Eduárdo Sanchez and Daniel
Myrick’s seminal found-footage movie, The Blair Witch Project (1999),
Jason Zada’s tale of the real-life Japanese Suicide Forest, The Forest
(2016), and Robert Egger’s disturbing directorial debut, The Witch (2015).
In all of these movies, the environment itself plays a critical part in
creating the Sense of Dread.
In addition to Natural Phenomena like storms and floods, there is
Darkness, featured in a number of recent movies, as well as perpetual cold
or overwhelming heat caused either by Aliens, the Supernatural, or our
tampering with the Laws of Nature.
Of course, Nature also rebels, in the form of living things turning against
us. Insects, spiders, worms, rats, parasites, normal animals and pets gone
mad, et al. — attacking us at their conventional sizes, or mutated and
rendered gigantic, have filled motion picture screens.

Trapped inside Our Heads/Mind Control/Possession

One of the deepest fears that emerge from our Sense of Dread is that of
losing our selves — control over our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Movies have long explored the notion of hypnotic and psychic Mind
Control, going all the way back to the silent days and Robert Weine’s
Expressionist Masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and the
early sound film Archie Mayo’s Svengali (1931).
Since that time, the concept has been explored in many films, ranging
from Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), with its host of sinister
blonde-haired mind-controlling children, to the cold-war thrills of John
Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), all the way up through
Ehren Kruger’s Skeleton Key (2005) to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2016).
Movies dealing with Possession have likewise made a significant impact
on the horror genre.
One of the most terrifying variations on this theme can be found in Don
Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), when Miles and Becky are
fleeing from a town whose inhabitants have been completely taken over by
the body-snatching pods. Exhausted, unable to sleep (because if they sleep,
they will be taken over), Miles goes to see if the coast is clear, leaving
Becky in hiding beneath a bridge.
When he returns, he kisses Becky, only to recoil in horror, realizing that
he has just kissed something that is no longer human — a thing that no
longer has a soul. In the moment that he’d left her, Becky had fallen asleep
— and become one of “them.”
In all of the canon of fifties science fiction/horror, there are very few
moments as terrifying as this one. It shows nothing — except the loss of
someone’s soul.
In 1973, William Friedkin’s ground-breaking The Exorcist, based on the
novel by William Peter Blatty, laid the groundwork for an entire sub-genre
of movies about possession, in much the same way that George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead did for zombie movies.
Not only that, it also broadly increased the number of people who
claimed that they were actually possessed (in the same way that flying
saucer sightings increased after the release of Spielberg’s Close Encounters
of the Third Kind in 1977).
An interesting point to make about The Exorcist, with its encyclopedic
collection of terrors, large and small, is that one of its most terrifying
images comes from the brief scene in which Doctors are administering a
spinal tap to Regan, and during the procedure, we see a brief spurt of blood
coming from her back as the catheter is slid into her. The sense of her
suffering, her vulnerability, the suffering of her Mother, creates a real sense
of queasy discomfort in the viewer. We are shocked at the sight of the
spurting blood— but also deeply disturbed at the suffering that this child is
being forced to endure — even though it’s a medical procedure.
Possessed Men, Women, Children — even semi-inanimate objects such
as dolls or trees have been featured in a variety of movies to varying effects.
Often the greatest effect in terms of the Sense of Dread comes from the
deep conflict that occurs between what we have come to expect Someone or
Something to be, and what they become after being occupied or taken over
by The Other.
Of course, people can also be possessed by the ghosts of the dead, as in
Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), or inhabited by alien
beings as in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Andrew Niccol’s The
Host (2013).
Inevitably the storyteller, in dealing with the mythology of mind control
or possession must find the means to permit there to be balance in the story.
That is, if the Antagonist is overwhelmingly powerful, whether that side is
the Force of Darkness or an Alien from Beyond, it becomes difficult to
properly structure any kind of real defense, and thus a real story where we
believe that victory of any kind is possible.

EXERCISES

Choose a few scenes or sequences from your favorite Scary Movies.

See if you can identify the way in which elements from the Toolbox
of Dread are used to make these scenes more effective.
Write at least one scary scene or sequence that makes use of the
various elements from the Toolbox of Dread.

OceanofPDF.com
 5
PUTTING THEORY INTO
PRACTICE
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell

Inevitably, many of the elements in the Toolbox of Dread refer back to the
various concepts that we examined earlier in our broader exploration of the
Sense of Dread. All of those ideas are available to you in developing your
Premises, Concepts, Sequences, Scenes, and Beats.
Now let’s see how it’s done — or at any rate, how I’ve been applying
these ideas in my own work.
I’ve chosen an example that was in development for a number of years,
but which ultimately wasn’t ever produced. There are always various
reasons why movies get made and why they don’t. This was a project that
we developed with Charles Band at Full Moon Entertainment back around
2000, that went through a number of different variations. It turned out to be
a bit too ambitious for Full Moon’s budget range at the time and, for a
while, we tried to develop it with an outside producing partner, but in the
end, it just didn’t happen.
Over the course of its development, as is often the case, it went through a
number of title changes and revisions, as well as various changes from its
treatment stage to the final script.
This version was fairly early in the development process.

HORRORVISION.COM TREATMENT
We open in a dank squatter’s apartment in a basement
somewhere, decorated with icons of motion picture and
real-life monsters, posters of the Wolfman, newspaper
clippings of real-life serial killers, blow-ups of bloody
 accident scenes and war atrocities. In the midst of the
nastiness is a young woman, ANGEL BRIGGS, wired,
anorexic, sitting at a computer terminal. She’s typing,
watching the screen with hypnotic intensity, breathing
fast. She finishes typing and hits “enter.”

The screen abruptly seems to dissolve into random

flickers of color. Then, as Angel watches, something odd
seems to happen. The surface of the screen seems to fall
away, becoming a tunnel that plunges to infinity. She
reaches a hand out toward the screen that no longer
really seems to be there. But something else seems to be
reaching out at the same time, stretching out from the
depths of the monitor. It reaches out toward her, a thing
vaguely like a hand, but almost transparent, as if made
from glass. She reaches out to touch it, fingertip to
fingertip. Abruptly, the glassy fingers elongate
hideously, becoming things like tentacles, whipping
around her outstretched arm, her torso, her throat. A
single finger tentacle, its tip now sharp as a glass
shard, plunges straight toward her eye….
A few horrifying elements are introduced here in this opening scene. First,
the dissolution/penetration of the monitor screen. This will be a running
theme in the story and has been used in various forms in a number of
different movies, ranging from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) to David
Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998).
Likewise, the innate fear of having the eye damaged or penetrated.
Later, we meet a tough, working-class woman Police
Detective, LIEUTENANT EMMA BRADLEY, and her partner,
JOHNNY BARNES. They’re visiting the scene of Angel’s
death. The apartment is a scene of incredible slaughter.
Angel was skinned — and there’s no sign of the skin.

Again, the notion of a person being skinned — being reduced to mere flesh
— is intrinsically horrifying. And, of course, blood and gore itself, produces
a shocking reaction. Also, in the finished script, the body is found in the
bathtub; thus, the uneasy contrast between the expected nakedness/intimacy
of “nudity” in a bathtub, and the ultimate nudity of someone devoid of skin.
Yet there seems to be no sign of anyone having been there
other than the victim. In fact, the door appears to have
been padlocked from the inside, and no other way for
anyone to get in or out.

Pursuing the investigation, the computer, covered in

blood and other unpleasant substances, is transported to
the Department’s computer expert, a droll, overweight
character named DRISCOLL.

Investigating the computer, he finds that there’s a

complex program that’s been downloaded from a mysterious
website — horrorvision.com. He can’t say exactly what the
program does, only that it’s a series of graphic and text
puzzles, all relating to aspects of human horror. But the
program also appears to be interactive in a way that he’s
never seen before. The act of solving the puzzles, of
moving through the program, changes it, reconstructs the
program.

And what’s the final form of the reconstruction? No way

to tell -- until you work your way through it. Suspecting
a connection between the horror website and Angel’s
horrific death, she tells Driscoll to work his way
through the program and find out just what it’s supposed
to do.

Curious herself, Bradley taps into the website on her own

computer at home. Soon, she too is working her way
through the program, the same way that Driscoll is.

Following up other clues, Bradley and Barnes locate a

pair of other Horrorvision “users.” They pay a visit to a
black guy, JONAS SCOTT, who manages a “Discovery Zone”
 type kid-play place and explores the Horrorvision
landscape from a computer terminal tucked away in a back
room.
Here, in the final script, I looked to create a sense of unease between the
horrifying and graphic images being depicted on Jonas’ Horrorvision screen
and the innocent children at play, visible on the other side of a two-way
mirror in his office area.
He admits to knowing Angel. Both of them, apparently,
were mutually involved in their cyberspace exploration of
the Horrorvision site. They, like Driscoll, were trying
to work their way through the program. Angel apparently
succeeded. “And that’s why she was killed?” Bradley asks.
It doesn’t make much sense. What exactly is the point of
the Horrorvision site? What happens when you work your
way through the program? What is it? What’s the point of
it? And why would anybody commit murder over it?

Jonas, who seems, if anything, enthusiastic about Angel’s

dramatic dissolution, tries to explain. Somebody — and no
one knows who — created the Horrorvision site.

But it’s more than simply a storehouse. It was designed

as a program that would SEEK OUT horror on the web. In
order to do that, the creator invented a program, using a
new mathematical language that allows human concepts like
love, hate, and fear, to be reduced to equations. The
unknown programmer invented a “horror paradigm.” Anything
that matched the paradigm was copied into the
Horrorvision program. Clearly, the program went looking
in all sorts of places, some of which, perhaps, it
shouldn’t have gone. Now who knows what’s inside? The
only way to find out is to look. Jonas is looking.

When Jonas finds out that Bradley herself is

investigating the site, he gives her a shortcut — a way
to jump ahead in the program. Otherwise, she’ll be
wandering around inside it for months. Bradley gives the
shortcut to Driscoll.

Later, the two cops pay a visit to another friend of

Angel’s — JEANETTE MEKAS, a Computer Nerd who lives alone
in her apartment with her pet snake.

But when they come calling it appears as if Jeanette’s

missing something crucial for a computer nerd — a
computer. It’s clear that Jeannette has recently emptied
her apartment — it looks as if she just moved in. It’s
also clear that she’s terrified. They try to find out
why. Who is trying to kill them? What’s the motive?

But when she answers, she doesn’t talk about killers and
motives. She talks about the web. Only, she says, it
isn’t really a web. It’s more like a growth medium, like
the primordial seas. Things are born in it, grow in it,
reproduce, die, evolve. Monitors and keyboards aren’t
input and output devices. They’re shorelines, the shores
of the cybernetic ocean.

People are myopic. Everybody talks about trying to get

INTO cyberspace — to dive into the ocean. What people
don’t realize is that it’s a two-way street. Just as
we’re trying to get in, there may be things INSIDE that
are trying to break out.

Just as sea life first colonized dry land, maybe there

are things in the cybersea that are doing their best to
cross the shoreline, to colonize dry land — OUR world.

Needless to say, Barnes thinks that Jeanette is a few

chips short of a cookie. Bradley, meanwhile, is
interested in uncovering the creator of the website,
whoever or wherever he is. There are hints that Jeanette
might know, but she seems afraid to tell.

Later, Jeanette receives a mysterious telephone call.

Instead of a voice, she hears the whine of a fax signal
trying to get through.

But there’s something else in the signal — perhaps the

sound of screaming. The call prompts Jeanette to call up
Bradley’s number and leave a message. As she finishes,
there’s a knock at her door.

She looks through the peep hole and sees Angel on the
other side. She doesn’t know what to think. Paralyzed,
she stares through the hole. Angel, silent, stares back,
stares with one eye in particular. Abruptly, a thing like
a shard of glass comes shooting out, through the peep
hole, impaling Jeanette. In a moment, a thing that seems
halfway between gelatin and glass has literally poured
out of Angel’s skin and come through the door….

Later. Jeanette’s death is as mysterious as the first.

Barnes wonders if they should contact the F.B.I.
Everything seems to suggest a serial killer using the Web
to identify potential victims. But Bradley wants to hold
off. She isn’t sure about a serial killer, although she
has no clear alternative. She’s a Detective who believes
that the only way to solve a case is to go where the
evidence takes you. Wherever it goes.

Through Jeanette’s cryptic telephone message, they manage

to track down the initial location of the Horrorvision
site — it’s coming by way of a satellite link-up from an
isolated little desert town named Grazey. Bradley and
Barnes make plans to head out there the following day.
It was clear as I moved to script that two things were missing in this initial
treatment. First, while there are always going to be things left out of a
treatment, there were no real details about the Horrorvision Website itself
and that, especially, would need to be developed. Second, and more
critically, there was very little development in Bradley’s character (who I
would later rename “Wright” — because it’s always a mistake to have two
main characters whose names start with the same letter). She was the
central character, our Protagonist, and Protagonists need a “central tension,”
an internal conflict that relates to the story’s theme and that’s going to be
developed and explored over the course of the story. And Bradley really
didn’t have one. She and Barnes weren’t very different as characters in this
initial pass.
In remedying the former situation, I created a creepy “host” to the
Website in the form of “Pig Girl” — a Pig with a Pretty Girl’s face, thus
giving the environment a kind of diabolical personality, allowing users to
converse with it.
As for Bradley/Wright, I realized that, for her to connect to the larger
story, she needed to be drawn to the website, in her own way, very much as
the earlier victims had been drawn, as opposed to simply doing it as part of
her job. Thus, I introduced the notion that the special shortcut that got you
close to the end of the program required that you had to have experienced
real horror in your own life.
Thus, I gave her such an experience, which she has to confess to the “Pig
Girl” at one point in the story, detailing the death of her child, who choked
to death on a Christmas ornament — on a little Baby Jesus. The story
actually gets much worse from there, bringing her face to face not only with
grief and loss, but also with her own darkest impulses. Suffice it to say, she
gets the “virtual key” that leads her close to the end of the program.
Shortly after making this shocking confession and receiving the “key”
that will potentially lead her close to the end of the program — to the
revelation of the “horror paradigm” — the following scene takes place.
But from this point on, Bradley/Wright is not only a potential victim of
the Horrorvision Program. Having experienced true horror herself, she finds
herself drawn to it — and at the same time is repelled by it, wanting not
only to destroy it but to destroy the impulse it embodies within herself.
 But that night, Bradley hears a knock at HER door. She
looks out through her peep hole. Nobody appears to be
there. But the knocking continues. When she shouts,
there’s no answer. She draws her gun and opens the door.
At first, there appears to be nobody there. Then she
looks back toward the door. A disembodied human hand is
clinging there, but instead of ending in the stump of a
wrist, the thick tail of a snake has somehow been grafted
to it, forming a kind of bizarre chimerical creature.

A few horrifying elements here. First, the notion of a “chimera,” an

unnatural combination, especially of something human and something from
the animal kingdom, creates a distinct sense of unease. Second, of course,
anything related to snakes presses our innate fear of serpents. Finally, the
“softness” beneath the apparently solid body of the creature, indicating that
the thing is, after all, a mere skin on top of something without real form, is
likewise intended to add another layer of horror to the proceedings.

The thing leaps off the door and grabs for Bradley. There
follows a nightmarish battle. The thing appears, as with
Angel, to be little more than a skin holding some
unpleasantly alive gelatin. Ultimately, Bradley discovers
that the stuff, whatever it is, can burn and uses the
fire from the gas range to destroy it.

*Please note that following the Treatment, the Scene in Grazey will be
presented in full, excerpted from the finished screenplay.

On their way out to the desert, Bradley tries to tell

Barnes about what happened, but it’s clear that he’s
shutting this off. He doesn’t even WANT to know.

They reach Grazey, which is just a scattered collection

of mobile homes out in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t
hard to figure out the one they’re interested in — it’s
the one with the big antenna dish out in front. It also
has a man out in front, BARON MUSCOFF, ragged, awkwardly
shaped, wearing cheap, ill-fitting work clothes, doing
his best to keep a motley collection of weeds alive with
a garden hose. They ask to see him inside. He calmly
agrees.

The inside of his mobile home is a nightmare. Like the

basement in the first scene, it’s a collection of
horrors, memorabilia of death and corruption. The house
stinks of decay and is infested with flies. Muscoff
doesn’t seem to mind, doesn’t even act as if it’s out of
the ordinary. When they question him about Angel and
Jeanette he calmly shows them their rolled-up skins — and
the skins of others, apparently gotten in the same way.
The two may have noticed that the town is rather quiet.
That’s to be expected. He’s the only one left.

Barnes is now sure that they’ve caught their serial

killer, but Bradley knows better. She realizes that
something hideous and impossible is going on. She
questions the composed Muscoff. What is the paradigm for
Horror? What is it that the program searched for? Muscoff
tries to explain. What do ghosts and concentration camps
and serial killers and werewolves and mothers who roast
their babies in ovens all have in common? Not death. Not
even violence.

Horror is about the sudden penetration of barriers that

we think of as impermeable. The barrier between human and
beast, between life and death, between good and evil,
between soul and flesh. We think that unbreakable walls
separate those things, but in fact, the barriers are just
smoke. And that smoke is the place where Horror dwells.

Bradley asks, what about the barrier between the world

inside the computer, the world of ones and zeros, and the
REAL world, outside. Is that one of his “impermeable”
barriers?

Of course, Muscoff answers. And if the Horrorvision

program were to find, by some chance, an experimental
program designed to breach that barrier, it would
identify it as such, and absorb it into its matrix.

Then all it would take would be for somebody — anybody —

to execute the program and the wall between the
cybernetic world and our own would simply slip away and
the program would step out, into the real world.

And what would such a thing look like? What does a

program look like when it steps out of the computer?

Muscoff answers that it would be amorphous, at first. It

would need other living things to provide templates for
it to move about. Skins.

But it’s an intelligent program. It learns about its new

home, makes adjustments. And what one learns, it can
teach to others. As more and more people complete the
Horrorvision program, more and more of them will come
through, to colonize.

Barnes, who thinks the whole thing is nuts, has had

enough. He goes to handcuff Muscoff.

Bad mistake.

Muscoff is, of course, one of the things and in an

instant, its gelatin-like tentacles are holding Barnes
immobile. One of his fingers becomes a thing like a
dagger of glass. It becomes clear that Muscoff intends to
skin Barnes alive.

Bradley, who knows from the night before that gunfire is

no use against these things, produces a coke-bottle
Molotov cocktail with a lighter taped to the neck. One
flick of her thumb will ignite it.

It poses an interesting problem. The being clearly has no

experience with Mexican standoffs. But, unnoticed by
Bradley, a solution appears to be resolving behind her.

The flies, buzzing so busily in the air, begin to drop to

the floor, one by one.

They, like Muscoff are, in fact, only hollow shells, each

holding a tiny speck of one of the computer organisms. As
they fall to the floor, unseen behind her, the gelatin of
which the organisms are made begins to flow out of the
fallen flies and recombine.

At the last instant, Barnes spots it and shouts a warning

as the Thing, like a translucent bat, comes springing
through the air like a cannon shot. Instinctively,
Bradley hits the lighter switch and flings the bottle. It
hits the flying Thing in mid-air. It bursts into flame.

Bradley ducks as it goes flying across the air toward

Muscoff and Barnes. Muscoff shoves Barnes toward the
burning Thing and ducks. The Thing, still burning, hits
Barnes with a thud, knocking him to the ground. Its
momentum carries it to the far side of the mobile home.

As it hits the floor it seems to unfold, spreading fire

everywhere. As the fire begins to flow back toward the
stunned Barnes, Bradley grabs him and hauls him out of
the mobile home. She can see Muscoff, the human skin
burning off of him, being consumed by the fire.

In a matter of moments, the mobile home is gone, burned

up. But not the threat. The source of the horror website
has been destroyed. It’s off the net. But at least two
 people have downloaded the Horrorvision program. Jonas —
and Driscoll.

They head back to town. Bradley radios ahead and tries to

get in touch with Driscoll, but he doesn’t seem to be at
his desk and nobody seems able to find him.

She tells his assistant to destroy Angel’s computer.

Wreck it. Burn it. Leave no retrievable data behind. And
every other hard drive or disk she can find in Driscoll’s
office as well. Everything. Every bit of data in his
office has to be destroyed.

Meanwhile, Bradley and Barnes go looking for Jonas. If

Bradley’s right, he won’t be at home. He’ll be at the
Discovery Zone, now after hours, exploring his copy of
the Horrorvision program.

Jonas is, in fact, in his little back room, rapidly

approaching the conclusion of the Horrorvision program.
Bradley and Barnes arrive at the critical juncture. But
Jonas has gone too far. He can’t back out. He enters the
final code and one of the Horrorvision beings comes
pouring out of the monitor as if squeezed out of a
toothpaste tube, tearing him to pieces.

There follows a desperate game of hunter and hunted,

carried out in the darkened confines of the Discovery
Zone.

Bradley has to hunt the gelatin-like organism, flare in hand, through the
intricate network of a multileveled indoor playground complete with ball
room, climbing nets and child-sized tunnels.

As matters become more desperate, Driscoll, now a skin

inhabited by another of the Horrorvision organisms,
appears.
In the finished screenplay, I establish that Driscoll has become one of
“them” in two ways. First, his eyes turn to look at Barnes — one at a time
— something that, obviously, no human eyes are capable of doing. A small
but disturbingly inhuman action. Second, when Barnes pulls away from
him, moving behind a clear Plexiglas wall, Driscoll slips and his face falls
against it, at which point his mouth, nose, cheeks, forehead, all go
completely flat against the transparent surface — confirming that there’s
nothing solid behind Driscoll’s skin.

Ultimately, both of the Horrorvision organisms are

destroyed, but Barnes dies in the process. Bradley
escapes alone and the fire that inevitably follows,
destroys any evidence of the organisms’ existence.

It’s okay with Bradley. She wouldn’t know how to write a

report about something so unlikely. She wants to get back
to her normal life, one where all the walls are up. But
when she returns to her apartment, there’s an unpleasant
surprise waiting on her computer. The Horrorvision
program is still there. It’s not on her hard drive. It’s
still coming in from over the web. It still exists,
somewhere out in cyberspace. As we MOVE AWAY from her, we
can see the site as unwary users tune it in all across
the country, in offices, in homes — everywhere.

What follows is the sequence from the completed screenplay, starting with
Bradley (now renamed Wright) and Barnes arriving at Grazey and finding
Baron Muscoff.

EXT. THE HIGHWAY - DAY

Barnes and Wright are in the car, heading for Grazey.

INT. THE CAR - DAY

Barnes is driving. Wright looks distinctly the worse for wear.

WRIGHT
Look, I know how this sounds, believe me. I mean, can you
imagine me going into the captain and telling him that
this thing that looks like a snake with a hand…

BARNES
(distinctly uncomfortable)
Look, um, look -- Annie. You know whatever the deal is,
I’m going to back you up but, the way I have to look at
it --

WRIGHT
Look, I know --

BARNES
Christ, just shut up and listen to me. I’m telling you
that what happened to you was you being exhausted and
getting confused between what was real and what was a
dream. That’s it. ’Cause I’m thinking the only other
alternative is something along the lines of a mental
breakdown.

WRIGHT
Johnny --

BARNES
-- and then I’d have to take certain actions, in terms of
filing a report, and about you being on active duty and
carrying a weapon and what have you. And I am begging you
not to force me into that position. Okay? So, let’s just
drop this thing.

Wright realizes the quandary that Barnes is in. She softens.

 WRIGHT
Okay. Okay. I see what the problem is. Okay.
(pause)
On the other hand, when we get where we’re going, I think
that you have to go into this with an open mind.

Wright manipulates something that she’s concealing under her

jacket. We hear a clink like glass against glass.

WRIGHT
I know I am.

Barnes looks at her, worried and unhappy.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise even without having read the treatment,

that Wright has brought along some Molotov cocktails which is given away
here by the glass “clink” under her jacket. But that raises another question,
which is just why it is that the Horrorvision organisms are so vulnerable to
fire, a question unaddressed in the treatment.
On a strictly practical level, I needed the Horrorvision organisms to have
some sort of vulnerability or there couldn’t be any sort of dramatic action in
the scenes where our protagonists confront them. Ideally, in any such
confrontation between opposing forces, you want the protagonists to be
overmatched (at least until the end, if then), but not totally overmatched or
“the end” will happen at the very first confrontation. Antagonists need to be
powerful, but not invulnerable.
So the question remains — why fire, in particular? The answer within
the story can’t simply be “because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story.”
There should be an answer that makes sense within the realm of the
narrative itself — so later on, within this scene, I do attempt to come up
with some rationale for the Horrorvision organisms’ vulnerability to fire.

EXT. GRAZEY, ARIZONA - DAY

This is a small collection of mobile homes plunked down in the

middle of absolutely nowhere for absolutely no reason.
There’s a crude water tower, a gas station, a diner, and no
sign of a living soul. The car pulls up and comes to a stop.

Wright and Barnes come out of the car, Wright still wearing her
jacket.

BARNES
Aren’t you hot in that thing?

WRIGHT
I’m comfortable.

Barnes goes to the garage adjoining the gas station. He opens

the door.

BARNES
Hello? Hello, in there?

He steps in. Wright looks around. Nothing. Nobody. A few

seconds later, Barnes emerges.

BARNES
Nobody in there.

WRIGHT
Nobody seems to have bothered putting house numbers on
any of these things.

BARNES
What’s the point? There probably aren’t more than thirty
or forty people in the whole town. Let’s ask at the
diner.

They head across the dusty street to the diner.

It’s dark inside, the door a pit of darkness against the bright
outside. Barnes pushes his way in. Wright follows.

INT. THE DINER - DAY

Like the gas station, it’s open, but empty. No customers.

Nobody behind the counter.

BARNES
Hello? Hello there?

Wright goes to the counter and steps behind it. She checks the
grill.

WRIGHT
The grill is cold.

She’s about to step out when she sees something down on the
floor.

WRIGHT
Johnny.

Sensing the alarm in her voice, Barnes is there in an instant.

She gestures down to the floor. There’s a huge brown stain
there, covering the floor, splattering up onto the tiles and
the inside of the counter.

BARNES
Blood?

She takes up a bit of the dried stuff and examines it on a

fingertip.

WRIGHT
I think so.
 BARNES
I’ll check the kitchen.

He pushes the kitchen door open and looks inside.

BARNES
Annie.

Wright moves to the door and looks over his shoulder.

INT. KITCHEN - DAY

The tiny kitchen is spattered all over with blood, now dried to
an ugly brown like the other stain.

From the time that Wright and Barnes come out onto the main street of
Grazey, I begin to ratchet the tension, at first not by what they see and hear
but by what they don’t. It’s a town without people, without sound or
movement. As they move deeper into it, the indications of violence continue
to grow — the tension continues to ratchet.

EXT. THE TOWN - DAY

Wright, gun drawn, is hammering on the door to one of the

mobile homes. Barnes comes out of the home next door.

BARNES
Nobody. And blood in there, too. Jesus Christ, what’s
going on here?

WRIGHT
Just hold on.

She hammers again, hesitates, then kicks in the flimsy door.

She steps inside.
INT. THE MOBILE HOME - DAY

Nobody there. It’s cluttered with the shabby remains of

somebody’s life. Wright looks left and right.

WRIGHT
Hello? Hello?

She looks at an unfolded bed, soaked with dried blood. She

turns. Nearby, is an empty crib, similarly spattered. Her face
grim, she steps back out.

Drawing on intimate locations here: the bedroom and the bed stained with
blood — and ratcheting again — to the blood-spattered crib, with the
implication of a dire end to its occupant.

EXT. THE TOWN - DAY

She backs out. Barnes is looking pale.

BARNES
It’s the same everywhere. It’s the whole goddam town,
isn’t it? They’re all gone. I mean, tell me something
else that makes sense. I mean, if this makes any fucking
sense--

WRIGHT
(hearing something)
Quiet.

BARNES
Look, we’ve got to --

WRIGHT
(more insistent)
 Shhh!

Barnes freezes, listens, gun at the ready. Wright is listening

hard, too. But what they’re hearing is deceptively commonplace
-- the splash of water.

The goal here is to continue the ratcheting, not with something dire, but
with something both mundane and at the same time out of place, in this
case, the sound of splashing water in the midst of this dry desert town.

WRIGHT
Johnny, I need you to promise me something.

BARNES
Like what?

WRIGHT
Give me some slack. Let me handle it.

BARNES
Annie --

WRIGHT
If you don’t believe anything, believe this. This is my
territory. Just give me some slack.

BARNES
I’ll give you what I can.

Wright draws her weapon, gestures to Barnes to follow. They

circle around, behind the row of mobile homes.

A big mobile antenna dish, some fifteen feet across, aimed at

the sky, dominates one of the mobile homes at the far end of
the row. They move cautiously toward it.
EXT. MUSCOFF’S MOBILE HOME - DAY

The two Detectives move around the big dish of Muscoff’s

antenna. His mobile home comes into view. A shabby little
garden has been planted at the front of his mobile home.

MUSCOFF is standing in the garden, watering it with a garden

hose. He’s late middle-aged, ragged, awkwardly shaped, wearing
cheap, ill-fitting work clothes. He doesn’t seem at all alarmed
when the two Detectives, weapons at the ready, approach him.

WRIGHT
Baron Muscoff?

MUSCOFF
Uh huh.

His perfectly inoffensive response is off-putting. Wright

hesitates.

WRIGHT
Um -- we’d like to ask you a few questions.

Barnes looks at her. Clearly, she’s already in need of “slack.”

MUSCOFF
Go ahead.

WRIGHT
Can we go inside?

MUSCOFF
Sure. Why not?

He turns off the hose, goes to the door and opens it. He
gestures for Wright to enter.
Weapon at the ready, she steps inside.

Muscoff gestures for Barnes to follow. Barnes waves Muscoff in

with his gun. Muscoff shrugs and moves in.

Barnes, aiming his weapon at Muscoff’s back, follows.

Here, again, the meeting with Baron Muscoff, his “shapeless” form, his
mild, bland affect, even what he’s doing — watering his little garden — and
his equally bland responses to their questions, all serve to amplify the
tension of the situation, to continue tightening the spring. Readers know
that something nasty is coming, but the longer they have to wait, the greater
the tension.

INT. MUSCOFF’S MOBILE HOME - DAY

Wright is standing a few steps inside the door, holding her

hand against the smell. Her eyes are wide.

The air is filled with the sound of buzzing flies and the tiny
forms are visible, flitting through the air.

Muscoff comes up behind her, with Barnes a step behind. Barnes

winces at the smell, covers his nose.

MUSCOFF
How do you like it?

Wright moves away from Muscoff, further into the mobile home.

Note that, apart from the buzzing of the flies, which foreshadows what the
mobile home contains, both Wright and Barnes see and react to the contents
of Muscoff’s home before it’s shown/ described.

The inside of his mobile home is a nightmare. Like the basement

in the first scene, it’s a collection of horrors, memorabilia
of death and corruption.

This refers back to Angel Briggs’ basement apartment.

A network of interlinked computers peeks out from the midst of

the collected horrors. Muscoff moves into the midst of his home
and tugs a couple of chairs out.

Barnes meanwhile, is clutching his weapon in both hands, aiming

it straight at Muscoff’s heart. Muscoff, for his part, doesn’t
seem at all perturbed, either by the flies, the smell, the
horrors, or the two Detectives.

MUSCOFF
Have a seat?

Neither Detective budges.

WRIGHT
No thank you.

MUSCOFF
What can I do for you?

WRIGHT
Is this where HORROR comes from? I mean the -- the
website. Is this where it comes from? Is it yours?
Please note, at this point, the screenplay, as well as the name of the website, had been changed from
Horrorvision.com to H-rr-r.com — which was, of course, simply pronounced “Horror.” As often
happened with these projects, they went through a number of title changes during development.

MUSCOFF
Well, this is where it comes from. I don’t know that it’s
really, truly mine anymore. Or anybody’s. Can I get you
something to drink?
 WRIGHT
No, thank you.

MUSCOFF
(to Barnes)
You?

Barnes, still pointing the gun at Muscoff’s chest, shakes his

head no.

BARNES
No. Annie--

WRIGHT
Mr. Muscoff, we’re investigating the murder of Angel
Briggs and Jeanette Mekas. Do you know anything about it?

MUSCOFF
Oh, sure. Hold on a sec.

He goes to a chest of drawers and pulls it open. Barnes steps

forward, ready to shoot.

BARNES
Uh uh!

Muscoff hesitates.

WRIGHT
Please, Mr. Muscoff, we need you to keep your hands in
sight.

MUSCOFF
Well, you asked. What if I just do it real slow? Hmm?
He moves his hand slowly into the drawer and tugs out what
appears, at first, to be some sort of garment. But as it comes
all the way out, it becomes clear that it’s a human skin. He
looks at it.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
I think this is -- no, this isn’t her. Hold on.

He drops the skin on the floor. We can see the face of some
girl we haven’t seen before, the eyes still set in the face but
her skin otherwise empty. He tugs the drawer all the way open.

A swarm of flies come buzzing out.

There are other skins inside, folded like shirts. He begins

going through them, shoving them over, tugging some out and
dropping them.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
No, that’s not even a woman. Just -- okay. Here’s Angel.

He tosses one of the skins onto the floor near them.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
Now, where’s Jeanette? Where’s Jeanette? Where’s
Jeanette?

He begins searching through other drawers. Flies come swarming.

All the drawers are filled with human skins, some men, some
women, some old, some young.

Obviously, it’s not simply the presence of the human skins that inspires
horror, though of course it does, but the casual way in which Muscoff has
stored them, folding and stowing them like so many garments in drawers,
and as we see later, hanging them on hangers. Once again, we look for that
collision between the normal/conventional and the abnormal to intensify the
sense of dread.
Needless to say, the flies also add to our sense of unease.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
I should take better care of these. I guess you noticed
that the town’s pretty quiet.

WRIGHT
We noticed.

MUSCOFF
That makes sense, really. Nobody’s left. Well, sort of.
Do me a favor. Check those closets behind you.

Barnes hesitates, then slides open one of the closets.

Human skins hang there in neat rows. He reaches out to touch

them, can’t quite bring himself to. He goes to the next closet
and slides that one open.

There’s only one thing hanging there, and while human skins
appear to have been the raw material, it looks anything but
human, an aggregate of sewn-together limbs knitted into
something utterly inhuman.

Barnes lifts it out by the hangar and studies it.

Muscoff notices.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
Oh, yeah. That one. I guess we were getting a little
creative there.

Barnes turns the thing, sees rows of eyes knitted into the
flesh of the thing -- eyes of different colors.
Here we’re obviously setting up a new, additional element that wasn’t
present in the treatment — the chimerical being created by sewing together
multiple human limbs — a sort of spider-like human form, seen here, at
first, as simply a “skin.”

He drops the thing to the floor, gets Muscoff back in the site
of his gun.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
Oh, here’s Jeanette. Too bad she’s short a hand.

He tosses Jeanette’s skin on the floor. There’s the bald head,

the ring still through her nose.

One of her hands is missing -- the one used in the ill-fated

snake chimera the night before.

BARNES
Annie? How the fuck much slack do you need?

WRIGHT
Just hold on.

BARNES
Annie, what are we doing here?

WRIGHT
Just -- just shut up, all right? Just stand there and
shut up.

Muscoff stands, watching and listening, utterly unperturbed.

Wright turns to him.

WRIGHT (cont’d)
Mr. Muscoff, what is it that your program searched for?
The Horror algorithm?
 MUSCOFF
You already have the answer, really. You had it last
night.

WRIGHT
Tell me.

MUSCOFF
It’s clearer when it’s expressed mathematically. It’s
related to impermeable barriers. The barrier between man
and animal, life and death,

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
steel and flesh. But the fact is, those barriers are just
smoke. That smoke -- that smoke is the place where Horror
lives.

Wright is thinking now, trying to put things together.

WRIGHT
And what about -- what about the barrier between the
world inside the computer and the REAL world, outside. Is
that one of your “impermeable” barriers?

MUSCOFF
Yes, you understand. Every generation has its own magic,
you see. These programs, the hardware and the software
are this generation’s spells and words of power. Complete
the ritual, reach the end, and the program steps out,
into the real world.

BARNES
Christ, Annie --

WRIGHT
 And what would a program look like when it steps out of a
computer?

MUSCOFF
Yes, well, at first it would be amorphous. Sentient, but
innocent. It would need other living things to give it
form.

WRIGHT
Skins.

MUSCOFF
Yes. That way they can move around without attracting
attention. Learn about the world. They’re intelligent,
you know. What one learns, it can teach to others.

WRIGHT
Others?

MUSCOFF
Of course. The longer the program is around, the more
people complete it, more and more of — them -- will come
through, to colonize.

Muscoff starts to move toward Annie -- slowly, not threatening,

but coming close. Barnes has had enough.

BARNES
Stop! Now!

Muscoff stops, but now he’s very close to Annie.

BARNES (cont’d)
Annie --
 WRIGHT
Johnny.

BARNES
(being “official”)
LIEUTENANT! I believe that we should handcuff this
suspect and take him to the car. Now.

WRIGHT
Dammit, Johnny, you don’t know what we’re in the middle
of!

BARNES
That’s enough. I’m going to handcuff this motherfucker
and take him to the car!

WRIGHT
Johnny, stay away from him!

Barnes takes a step toward Muscoff, who shows no sign of being

disturbed by any of this.

BARNES
Face the wall, put your hands on your head.

Muscoff turns toward Barnes, impassive, staring at him.

WRIGHT
Johnny, stay away from him!

Of course, we’ve known from Muscoff’s first introduction that he was one
of “them” — and that’s part of the ratcheting tension that continues to play
throughout the scene. That suspense is intensified by the fact that, while
Wright understands this, Barnes obviously does not — and so that plays out
as an additional element of concern for Wright.
Barnes takes another step forward and puts his gun to Muscoff’s
head.

BARNES
I said, put your hands on top of your head.

Muscoff stares at Barnes, dispassionately.

Then, in an instant, he raises one hand and grabs the arm

that’s holding the gun.

Barnes, tight as a wire to begin with, promptly FIRES, point

blank, against Muscoff’s head.

The force of the impact shoves his head back, but he doesn’t
fall, doesn’t let go of Barnes’ hand.

Barnes, eyes wide with terror, stares at Muscoff, who now has a
neat hole burnt into the middle of his forehead.

But no blood comes out. Instead, Barnes can see a glistening

spot of transparent gelatin within the tiny disk of the bullet
hole.

It pulses and moves slightly.

Barnes tries to pull away from Muscoff. He reaches up and grabs

Muscoff’s arm with his free hand.

His fingers sink into the soft material of Muscoff’s arm.

Again, there is that unsettling element of something that we expect to be

relatively hard — Muscoff’s arm — yielding as if there were no bones in it
as all, revealing itself to be composed of the gelatin-like material of the
Horrorvision Organisms.
Abruptly, the gelatin flows out of the bullet hole like a
snake, STRAIGHT TOWARD Barnes. Other tentacles emerge from his
fingertips, wrapping around him.

In an instant, the tips of the tentacles solidify into gleaming

transparent blades.

They make for Barnes’ mouth, sliding in.

The mouth, especially the inside of the mouth is particularly sensitive —

so the notion of multiple blades inside Barnes’ mouth, as opposed to any
other place that those blades might be poised to kill, is a choice intended to
amplify the sense of horror.

BARNES (cont’d)
Fuck!

WRIGHT
Stop or you’ll die!

Muscoff turns and looks toward Wright, still unconcerned. Then

the tentacles stop their deadly advance.

Wright is holding out a coke-bottle Molotov cocktail with a

plastic cigarette lighter taped to the neck.

Her thumb is on the lighter. One flick of the lighter will

ignite the cloth wick.

WRIGHT (cont’d)
You know what this is?

Muscoff doesn’t answer.

WRIGHT (cont’d)
I flick this and you’ll make a real pretty flame.
 MUSCOFF
If you throw it, then you’ll burn him alive along with
me.

WRIGHT
If you kill him, then I’ll have no reason NOT to throw
this. And I think we both know just how flammable you
are.

MUSCOFF
Yes, yes, we do. I don’t exactly know why that is.
Perhaps the residual effect of some earlier mythology
absorbed by the program. Purification by fire. Well, it’s
still a problem, isn’t it?

That’s the rationale for the Creatures’ vulnerability to fire, such as it is.
Again, many of these elements tend to be arbitrary — why a stake through
the heart for vampires, or a silver bullet for werewolves? Ultimately, the
more time one takes for such justifications, the more attention you end up
drawing to the thinness of the rationale.

Muscoff’s eyes drift away from Wright, looking up into the

surrounding air. He is looking at the FLIES, which continue to
buzz and flit about.

Unnoticed by Wright or Barnes, the flies begin to fall to the

floor behind her.

We MOVE DOWN to the floor. As each fly twitches to stillness, a

tiny fleck of gelatin crawls out. They, like Muscoff, are just
hollow shells.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
What to do. You want to live. I want to live.
(to Barnes)
 And I assume you want to live. But, at the same time, you
need to kill me and I need to kill you.

WRIGHT
You know, people know where we are, why we came. If we
die, they’ll follow. Your little secret web site is done.

MUSCOFF
Yes, I think you’re right.

DOWN ON THE FLOOR -- the flies continue to fall, their liquid

contents flowing underneath the discarded “skin suit” that
Wright dropped on the floor.

Muscoff is clearly just talking to keep their attention.

Abruptly, Barnes tries to pull free. The glass tentacles

squeeze tighter -- the blades slip a little deeper inside his
mouth.

MUSCOFF (cont’d)
I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Detective.

Suddenly, a humped shape shambles up off the floor behind

Wright. Barnes, unable to speak, gives a sharp cry.

Wright turns to face it. Her eyes go wide in terror.

The skin sack, now “filled,” is a hideous thing, like a spider

woven out of human limbs.

Of course, here I’m drawing on our instinctive horror of spiders, in this case
a chimerical man-sized spider creature composed of human limbs and body
parts. The shape of the thing was implied when the “skin” was first taken
out of the closet and dropped on the floor. Now it’s revealed here in all of
its nightmarish glory.
It rears back and seems to spit. A ten-foot-long transparent
razor-edged tongue SHOOTS OUT, directly at Wright. She ducks
and the razor SKIMS HER SHOULDER.

She rolls down and hits the floor as the “tongue” draws back
in. The Spider-thing starts forward and rears up again, ready
to extrude its blade.

Wright screams, hits the lighter and FLINGS THE BLAZING MOLOTOV
COCKTAIL straight into the maw of the Spider Thing.

It hits and bursts.

In an instant, the thing begins to burn like napalm. It screams

like the hand-snake and starts flailing around, wildly.

It rushes toward Wright, who throws herself down. It goes

pirouetting over her, blind now, heading straight for Muscoff.

Muscoff instinctively shoves Barnes forward, against the

flaming mass, and ducks to the side. Barnes smashes against the
flailing horror.

Barnes rebounds, howling, and hits the floor, his clothes

burning. He starts rolling back and forth on the floor, trying
to put out the fire.

The burning Spider Thing continues on its mindless, destructive

course. It smashes through the computers, setting things alight
left and right.

Muscoff, backed to a corner, abruptly looks straight up and

opens his mouth. The mass of liquid of which he’s made begins
to flow upward, emptying out of Muscoff’s skin, heading toward
a vent high on the wall, leading to the outside world.
In such a cluttered and confined space, the fire itself is terrifying. It’s
obvious that, as the fire spreads, our heroes literally have only moments to
live in such a deadly space.
Additionally, the way in which Muscoff empties himself out — with the
gelatin-like Horrorvision Organism flowing up out of his open mouth,
emptying his body out as it escapes — is intended to resemble a kind of
“inverted vomit,” triggering our natural revulsion.

Wright, seeing the thing escaping, plucks a second Molotov

cocktail out of her jacket, hits the lighter and flings it
across the room.

It hits the floor at Muscoff’s feet.

The FLAMES BLOSSOM UPWARD. They sweep over the escaping thing.
It begins to twist and writhe against the wall.

Its upper edge slides back down from the vent as it’s swallowed
by fire. The Spider Thing, its skin consumed, is losing its
form, splattering, spreading fire everywhere.

Wright, stumbles forward, grabs the struggling Barnes and hauls

him toward the door.

EXT. OUTSIDE MUSCOFF’S HOME - DAY

Wright helps the scorched Barnes out of the house. His clothing
is still burning.

She throws him to the ground, flinging dirt on him. He comes up

on his knees, struggling, his mouth bloody from Muscoff’s
“blades.”

WRIGHT
Are you all right? Can you walk?
Barnes struggles to get up. He gasps out something.

BARNES
…pane tain…

WRIGHT
What? What?

He scrambles up to his feet.

BARNES
Propane tank!

WRIGHT
Shit!

The two scramble away from the blazing house.

Abruptly, the propane tank on the side of the mobile home goes
critical and BLOWS.

The house essentially disintegrates in an earth-shaking

explosion.

BURNING SMITHEREENS go flying up into the air, RAINING DOWN on

the two as they scramble toward the car.

The scene continues briefly after this, with the burning fragments from the
explosion setting the whole town on fire and coming to rest on the nearby
water tower, which abruptly explodes dumping dozens of now-burning
Horrorvision organisms on the street below. They scream and writhe as they
burn.

THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

As I indicated at the beginning of this Chapter, we began to develop this
project around the year 2000 — over 20 years ago. So, what happened to it?
Well, obviously, it was never produced. There are many reasons why
screenplays end up on the screen and many reasons why they don’t.
Sometimes those reasons are related to problems with the script and
sometimes not.
While the final script was quite effective, there were a couple problems
that ultimately prevented it from reaching the screen. First, Full Moon
Entertainment, at the time we started developing this project, was working
exclusively in the Direct-to-Video market, which was still reasonably
profitable back in the year 2000. Even so, for a project to be financially
successful given Full Moon’s budget constraints, it needed limited
locations, cast, effects, et al. And Horrorvision.com, as it continued to move
through various drafts, kept getting bigger and bigger, until it was rather too
big for a Full Moon budget.
At a certain point, we decided to try to take it out and find a production
partner with an eye toward a theatrical release, at which point we ran into
another obstacle.
It turned out that there was another movie in development in a similar
vein called Feardotcom written by Moshe Diament and Josephine Coyle —
dealing with a Detective investigating mysterious murders linked to a
diabolical website.
While there were many differences between the two projects,
Feardotcom had gotten to the market first, had already been acquired and
was in development at Warner Brothers — and the two sounded similar
enough in broad outline that it took the wind out of the sails of our project.
So, it never sold.
It’s unfortunate, but this sort of thing happens a lot, and ultimately, all
you can do is shrug and write another screenplay.
That being said, I think that the work still contains some very effective
scenes and sequences that, I hope, have been instructive as far as the
practical approaches to putting horror on the page.

EXERCISES
Apply what you’ve learned in the above Chapters, using the
techniques of ratcheting, Learned and Instinctive fears, etc., to create
several scenes that will fill the reader with the “Sense of Dread.”
OceanofPDF.com
 CONCLUSION
WHY HORROR?
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are
afraid of the light.
Plato

For those of us who have always loved horror, this is a question that we’re
often asked by those who simply “don’t get it.” Why go out of your way to
scare yourself? What’s the point? Why horror?
More than that, there have always been people who think of horror
stories as quite literally unhealthy, as depraved — the suggestion of course,
being that people who are drawn to horrifying images and activities in
literature or comic books or on the screen will no doubt be inspired to copy
such things in real life.
Does that ever happen? Certainly, on occasion. We can’t pretend that it
doesn’t. On the other hand, Charles Manson listened to the Beatles and
thought that they were telling him to start a race war — which he tried to do
by sending his followers out to commit some of the most heinous murders
of the Twentieth Century. But one can hardly blame that on the Beatles.
In the same token, those who create tales of Horror and Dread, whether
on the page or on the screen, have every intention of inspiring fear, but no
intention of inspiring imitation.
So, is the goal simply to create that emotion? To produce that Sense of
Dread?
Maybe we need to take a step back. Why do we tell stories of any kind?
What purpose do they serve? One thing is clear. Human beings are the only
story-telling animal on Earth. Other animals love, hate, grieve, nurture,
create families, make war, sing, court one another, form pair bonds,
communicate — but they don’t tell stories. That is a uniquely human
undertaking.
We tell stories as a way of understanding ourselves, discovering our
place in the universe, a way of finding meaning. We find stories amongst
our oldest writings, accounts of gods, monsters, and heroes.
But what of horror? How does that enter into our storytelling? Why
don’t our stories simply inspire and enlighten?
That’s because fear has always been the place we go to learn.
We go to the places we fear not only to learn about the dark corners of
the world, but to learn about the dark corners of ourselves, to learn about
that which we fear to question.
Are those around us who and what they appear to be?
Are we who and what we appear to be?
Is the world itself what it appears to be?
Fear is the place we go to seek answers to these questions.
About what dwells in the shadows.
About the nature of our society, our sacred institutions, and the world.
About ourselves.
And what we learn is not always to our liking.
That’s why the Horror Genre is the Cinema of Subversion — because it
is constantly telling us that what we think of as most safe, most secure,
most sacred, most to be trusted and relied upon, may at any time be taken
away from us or revealed to be something other than what it appears to be.
Of all the various kinds of storytelling that have come down to us out of
history, the Tale of Horror is the one that forces us to question the nature of
our beliefs, of the World Around Us, of our Gods, and of Ourselves.
So, keep writing — but keep the lights on!

OceanofPDF.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading horror, watching it on

television, and on the motion picture screen, so first I have to acknowledge
those early influences: the novels and short stories, the TV shows, and the
movies that I devoured during the sixties and seventies.
Thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, M.
R. James, and countless others genre writers of my youth.
Thanks to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone, along with Richard
Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Thanks to Joseph Stefano and The Outer
Limits. Both shows populated my sleep with nightmares.
Thanks to the countless low-budget horror, science fiction, and monster
movies produced by Allied Artists, A.I.P., and others and to all those who
made them — movies like It: The Terror from Beyond Space, Caltiki, the
Immortal Monster, Kronos, Tarantula, Enemy from Space, Atomic
Submarine, and Voodoo Island.
Special thanks to Bert I. Gordon’s collection of “giant” movies — The
Cyclops, Earth vs. The Spider, The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the
Colossal Beast, and The Beginning of the End.
Despite their obvious flaws, they all succeeded in both entrancing and
terrifying countless ten-year-old boys — of which I was one.
Likewise, thanks to Inoshiro Honda and Toho Studios for all of the Kaiju
movies released during the sixties.
As I grew older and reached out to more daring and subtler fare, I must
acknowledge the genuine masterworks of Horror and Suspense and their
makers — Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho, Val Lewton and the collection of subtle horrors that he produced in
the forties, George Romero and his seminal Dead movies, Robert Wise’s
The Haunting, Jack Clayton and his version of Turn of the Screw — The
Innocents.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the modern voices in Horror Cinema,
those who continue to expand the genre and bring new viewers into it:
 Robert Eggers with his chilling premier feature, The Witch, and his
equally effective follow-up, The Lighthouse.
Ari Aster with a likewise terrifying first outing in Hereditary, which he
followed up with his controversial but still effective Midsommar.
Jordan Peele brought his own personal and uniquely chilling perspective
to the horror genre in Get Out and later Us.
Jennifer Kent, an Australian director, brought us a genuinely terrifying
viewing experience in The Babadook, and followed it up with The
Nightingale, a wrenching historical drama that, while not officially a horror
movie, nevertheless manages to terrify the viewer.
My thanks go out to all of the above and countless others, both the
Living and the Dead, for your work and your continuing Inspiration.
I also wish to acknowledge those who have helped me professionally:
Richard Rubinstein, Mitch Galin, and the late Tom Allen of Laurel
Entertainment, Charlie Band of Full Moon Entertainment, David
Greathouse, who we worked with for many years as a producing partner,
and Bob Shaye of New Line Cinema.
Also from the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts at
Maharishi International University, I would like to thank Dorothy
Rompalske for her continuing support, as well as Matthew Kalil and Kathie
Fong Yoneda, who encouraged me to write this book, and of course, the
incomparable David Lynch, both a master of Dread and a unique genre unto
himself.

OceanofPDF.com
SUGGESTED READING

BOOKS ADDRESSING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR

Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson,
9780743247696, Simon & Schuster, Pub. Date: 2005
The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud, originally published in 1919 in German —
currently in the public domain, this book is available on-line at:
https://uncanny.la.utexas.edu/

BOOKS ON WRITING HORROR

Writers Workshop of Horror, Edited by Michael Knost, 0982493916,
Horror Writers Association, Pub. Date: 2009
Stephen King’s On Writing, Stephen King, 1439156816, Charles Scribner’s
Sons, Pub. Date: 2000
How to Write a Horror Movie, Neal Bell, 0367151650 Taylor and Francis
Group. Pub. Date: April 2020
Horror Screenwriting: The Nature of Fear, Devin Watson 9781932907605,
Michael Weise Productions. Pub date: 2009
The Scream Writer’s Handbook: How to Write a Terrifying Screenplay in 10
Bloody Steps, Thomas Fenton 173355453X, Pub. Date: October 2018

OceanofPDF.com
FILMOGRAPHY

The Author acknowledges the copyright owners of the following motion

pictures which were discussed or referenced in this book:

127 Hours. Directed by Danny Boyle. Los Angeles, California: Fox

Searchlight, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Los Angeles California: Twentieth
Century-Fox Film Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
Aliens. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles, California: Twentieth
Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1986. All Rights Reserved.
The Amazing Colossal Man. Directed by Bert I. Gordon. Los Angeles,
California: American International Pictures, 1957. All Rights Reserved.
The Amityville Horror. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Los Angeles,
California: American International Pictures, 1979. All Rights Reserved.
Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard. Burbank, California: Universal
Pictures, 1995. All Rights Reserved.
Atomic Submarine. Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet. Los Angeles,
California: Allied Artists, 1959. All Rights Reserved.
The Babadook. Directed by Jennifer Kent. Adelaide, S. Australia, South
Australian Film Corporation, 2014. All Rights Reserved.
The Bad Seed. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Burbank, California: Warner
Brothers Pictures, 1956. All Rights Reserved.
The Beginning of the End. Directed by Bert I. Gordon. Los Angeles,
California: Republic Pictures, 1957. All Rights Reserved.
The Birds. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Burbank, California: Universal
Pictures, 1963. All Rights Reserved.
The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Eduárdo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.
Los Angeles, California: Artisan Entertainment, 1999. All Rights
Reserved.
Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch. Wilmington, North Carolina: De
Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. All Rights Reserved.
Blood Vessel. Directed by Justin Dix. Detroit, Michigan: The Horror
Collective, 2019. All Rights Reserved.
Bone Tomahawk. Directed by S. Craig Zahler. Silver Spring, Maryland: RJL
Entertainment, 2015. All Rights Reserved.
Buried. Directed by Rodrigo Cortés. Paris, France: Kinology/Studio 37,
2010. All Rights Reserved.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Weine. Decla Bioscop AG,
1920. Released into Public Domain.
Caltiki, the Immortal Monster. Directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava.
1960. All Rights Reserved.
Cape Fear. Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Los Angeles, California:
Universal-International Pictures, 1962. All Rights Reserved.
Cape Fear. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Burbank, California: Universal
Pictures, 1991. All Rights Reserved.
Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Los Angeles, California: RKO
Radio Pictures, 1942. All Rights Reserved.
The Cave. Directed by Bruce Hunt. Culver City, California: Screen Gems,
2005. All Rights Reserved.
Un Chien Andalou. Directed by Luis Buñuel. 1929. Released into the Public
Domain.
Children of the Corn. Directed by Fritz Kiersch. Atlanta, Georgia: New
World Pictures, 1987. 1984. All Rights Reserved.
Children of the Damned. Directed by Anton Leader. Beverly Hills,
California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1964. All Rights Reserved.
Chinatown. Directed by Roman Polanski. Universal City, California: A
Paramount Penthouse Presentation, 1974. All Rights Reserved.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Culver
City, California: Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1977. All Rights
Reserved.
The Conjuring. Directed by James Wan. New York City, New York: New
Line Cinema, 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Creep. Directed by Christopher Smith, Santa Monica, California: Lions
Gate Home Entertainment (U.S. Release), 2004. All Rights Reserved.
The Cyclops. Directed by Bert I. Gordon 1957. Los Angeles, California:
Allied Artists Pictures, All Rights Reserved.
Dawn of the Dead. Directed by George Romero. New York City, New York:
Laurel Entertainment, 1978. All Rights Reserved.
Day of the Dead. Directed by George Romero. New York City, New York:
Laurel Entertainment, 1985. All Rights Reserved.
Death Line. Directed by Gary Sherman. Los Angeles, California: American
International Pictures, (U.S. Distributor) 1972. All Rights Reserved.
Death Ship. Directed by Alvin Rakoff. Los Angeles, California: AVCO
Embassy, 1980. All Rights Reserved.
Deep Blue Sea. Directed by Renny Harlin. Burbank, California: Warner
Brothers, 1999. All Rights Reserved.
The Descent. Directed by Neil Marshall. Santa Monica, California: Lions
Gate Films, 2006. All Rights Reserved.
The Desperate Hours. Directed by William Wyler. Universal City,
California: Paramount Pictures, 1955. All Rights Reserved.
The Devil Times Five. Directed by Sean MacGregor and David Sheldon.
New York City, New York: Cinemation Industries, 1974. All Rights
Reserved.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Directed by John Newland. New York City,
New York: American Broadcasting Company, 1973. All Rights
Reserved.
Don’t be Afraid of the Dark. Directed by Troy Nixey. New York City, New
York: Miramax Pictures, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Don’t Breathe. Directed by Fede Álvarez. Culver City, California: Screen
Gems, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Earth vs. The Spider. Directed by Bert I. Gordon. Los Angeles, California:
Allies Artists Pictures, 1958. All Rights Reserved.
The End of the World. Directed by August Blom. 1916. Released into Public
Domain.
Enemy from Space. Directed by Val Guest. Los Angeles, California: United
Artists (U.S. Release), 1957. All Rights Reserved.
Event Horizon. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. Universal City,
California: Paramount Pictures, 1997. All Rights Reserved.
The Evil Dead. Directed by Sam Raimi. New York City, New York,
Renaissance Pictures, 1981. All Rights Reserved.
The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin. Burbank, California: Warner
Brothers Pictures, 1973. All Rights Reserved.
The Exorcist Part II. Directed by John Boorman. Burbank, California:
Warner Brothers Pictures, 1977. All Rights Reserved.
The Forest. Directed by Jason Zada. New York City, New York: Focus
Features, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Funny Games. Directed by Michael Haneke. U.S. Distributor: Attitude
Films, 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Funny Games. Directed by Michael Haneke. Burbank, California: Warner
Independent Pictures, 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. Burbank, California, Universal Pictures,
2017. All Rights Reserved.
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2002. All Rights Reserved.
Ghostwatch. Directed by Leslie Manning. Westminster, London, England:
British Broadcasting Corporation, 1992. All Rights Reserved.
The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Universal City,
California: Paramount Pictures, 1974. All Rights Reserved.
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Pictures, 1978. All Rights Reserved.
The Haunting. Directed by Robert Wise. Los Angeles, California:
MGM/UA Entertainment, 1963. All Rights Reserved.
Hellraiser. Directed by Clive Barker. Atlanta, Georgia: New World Pictures,
1987. All Rights Reserved.
Hellraiser: Deader. Directed by Rick Bota. New York City, New York:
Dimension Pictures, 2005. All Rights Reserved.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Directed by John McNaughton.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: MPI Home Video, 1986. All Rights
Reserved.
Hereditary. Directed by Ari Aster. New York City, New York: A24, 2018.
All Rights Reserved.
The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Wes Craven. United States of America:
Vanguard Releasing Group, 1977. All Rights Reserved.
The Host. Directed by Andrew Niccol 2013. Los Angeles, California: Open
Road Films, All Rights Reserved.
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Twentieth Century Fox, 1961. All Rights Reserved.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. Los Angeles,
California: Allied Artists, 1956. All Rights Reserved.
Island of Terror. Directed by Terence Fisher. Burbank, California: Universal
Pictures, 1966. All Rights Reserved.
It Follows. Directed by David Robert Mitchell. New York City, New York:
Radius TWC, 2014. All Rights Reserved.
It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Directed by Edward L. Cahn. Los
Angeles, California: Allied Artists, 1958. All Rights Reserved.
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All Rights Reserved.
Kronos. Directed by Kurt Neumann. Los Angeles, California: Twentieth
Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1957. All Rights Reserved.
The Lighthouse. Directed by Robert Eggers. New York City, New York:
A24, 2019. All Rights Reserved.
The Manchurian Candidate. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Los Angeles,
California: United Artists, 1962. All Rights Reserved.
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Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster 2019. New York City, New York: A24,
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neal Marshall Stevens has been a working professional in the entertainment

industry for over thirty years. He began his career at Laurel Entertainment,
where he wrote multiple episodes of the anthology series, Monsters. He
worked as senior story editor for Laurel’s productions of several miniseries
(Stephen King’s The Stand, Stephen King’s The Langoliers, and Stephen
King’s The Golden Years), and made-for-TV movies (Precious Victims, The
Vernon Johns Story, and several others). He then worked for Charles Band’s
Full Moon Entertainment, specializing in direct-to-video productions. Over
the course of his association with Full Moon, he worked on over 50
produced motion pictures, including six entries in the popular Puppetmaster
series.
He also wrote and directed the feature, Stitches, and worked with
Charles Band to produce several recent web series, including Trophy Heads
and Ravenwolf Towers.
Among other projects, Neal sold the original screenplay Deader to
Dimension Pictures, which was subsequently produced as Hellraiser:
Deader, and wrote the screenplay for Dark Castle’s feature remake of
Thirteen Ghosts.
In addition to his work as a screenwriter, Neal has taught online for eight
years for Script University, and is currently an associate professor at the
David Lynch Academy of Screenwriting at Maharishi International
University.
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ABOUT CHARLES BAND

Producer, director, mogul and renowned “B-movie” showman Charles Band

has been the first name in low-budget, high-concept genre entertainment for
over 40 years.
After forging an early career producing cult classics like Tourist Trap
(one of Stephen King’s favorite horror movies), Mansion of the Doomed
(with Gloria Grahame and a young Lance Henricksen), and the 3D shocker
Parasite (the first feature film to star Demi Moore), Band started his own
studio, Empire Pictures. Through Empire, he produced, often directed, and
distributed cult classics like Re-Animator, Ghoulies, Trancers (the first
movie to star Helen Hunt), and Troll, while also acting as a pioneer in the
home video market with his now iconic Meda (later renamed Media) Home
Entertainment and Wizard Video labels.
Later, in 1989, Band created (aided by a distribution deal with
Paramount Pictures) Full Moon Features, the juggernaut direct-to-video
horror and fantasy studio that was responsible for the hugely successful
Puppet Master franchise, Subspecies, Cannibal Women in the Avocado
Jungle of Death (Bill Maher’s first film), Head of the Family, Pit and the
Pendulum, Castle Freak and hundreds of others.
Along the way, he invented a thriving merchandising empire, a popular
streaming channel, multiple TV series, a line of clothing and toys, comic
books, a popular film magazine, and much, much more.

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IN A DARK TIME, a light bringer came along, leading the curious and the frustrated to clarity and
empowerment. It took the well-guarded secrets out of the hands of the few and made them available
to all. It spread a spirit of openness and creative freedom, and built a storehouse of knowledge
dedicated to the betterment of the arts.
The essence of Michael Wiese Productions (MWP) is empowering people who have the burning
desire to express themselves creatively. We help them realize their dreams by putting the tools in
their hands. We demystify the sometimes secretive worlds of screenwriting, directing, acting,
producing, film financing, and other media crafts.
By doing so, we hope to bring forth a realization of ‘conscious media,’ which we define as being
positively charged, emphasizing hope, and affirming positive values like trust, cooperation, self-
empowerment, freedom, and love. Grounded in the deep roots of myth, it aims to be healing both for
those who make the art and those who encounter it. It hopes to be transformative for people, opening
doors to new possibilities and pulling back veils to reveal hidden worlds.
MWP has built a storehouse of knowledge unequaled in the world, for no other publisher has so
many titles on the media arts. Please visit www.mwp.com, where you will find many free resources
and a 25% discount on our books. Sign up and become part of the wider creative community!

MICHAEL WIESE, Co-Publisher

GERALDINE OVERTON, Co-Publisher
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