Extended Research: What Makes Horrors Scary

This looks at a few films and notes the scariest scenes and why it is the audience find them scary.

The Strangers

‘The Strangers’ is a film about a couple that get invaded by a trio wearing masks. Starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman; ‘The Strangers’ has been acclaimed to be ‘Terrifying’ by the Sunday Mirror and ‘Undeniable Horror’ by the Empire film magazine. The horror in this film is not due to blood and gore, but to the cunning of the ‘monsters’ and concealment of their faces. It is a common fear to be scared of masks, because it is impossible to recognise what the masked person is feeling, neither can you see what they look like. There is one particular scene close to the start of the film when the victims do not realise they are being attacked. The woman (Tyler) walks into the kitchen and behind her the audience can see a man in a scare-crow like mask in the room behind her. He stands there for a long time and the woman does not notice, when the shot angle changes to look into the kitchen, and then changes again to reshow the room behind her the man has gone. The audience are wondering where and what he might be doing.

We decided to try and use ideas like this in our film, the idea of the monster being a clown (to help conceal it’s face) and to try and do a shot where he was there and a second later he is not.

30 Days of Night

Starring Josh Hartnett, ‘30 Days of Night’ was described by London Lite to be ‘The Best Vampire Film in Decades’. Set in the small Alaskan town of Barrow, a place where for one of the twelve months of the year the town suffers no daylight, this due to the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. the town becomes invaded by vampires, who have there own dialect, and although do not look terrifying they are scary because of their abnormal looks. Vampires are one of the oldest myths, and backs up a lot of the ideas used in horror genre films dating back almost to the beginning of the film industry. Perhaps one of the most horrifying scenes in this film is when the character played by Hartnett is going up to a dark building looking for someone. Again this is relatively close to the start of the film and the audience are starting to expect something scary to happen. Whilst Hartnett is looking for the individual he draws his gun and torch, looks around, to very suddenly find a head on a stick. This is not only a grotesque image but because of the speed at which it is found the audience is made to jolt in retaliation.

Resident Evil

Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez star in this action packed zombie horror film. After waking up with amnesia the character played by Jovovich is taken by some sort of covert armed force into a massive underground base under her home. An incident has happened killing all the employees in this underground base, as the film progresses it happens that the base belonging to the ‘Umbrella Corporation’ is infested with the living dead. Again zombies are a very recurring theme in the horror genre, they have been before and certainly are more so now. The scariest scene in my opinion happens at the start of the film when they are first going into the underground base. The group come across a flooded room which they can see into because of the large windows, in this flooded room there is a dead woman floating. The group notice and acknowledge this but continue on their mission. The camera zooms on to the dead women’s face and very suddenly her eyes open. This is scary because the audience do not expect her a drowned body to open it’s eyes and this is the first clue to the film being a zombie film, for audience members who did not know before beginning to watch it.