Components of a Good Horror Movie (spoilers included)

I dabble in horror movies. My old therapist said it was good for me, said the adrenaline rush was helpful for my depression. The jolts of jump scares could get me out of a mood and soon I was torrenting movies on my laptop that were not so much horror but gobs of gore. I’ve seen it all- slasher films, monster movies, paranormal thrillers, and everything in between. Today I will try to pinpoint the components of a good horror movie using examples I pulled from several horror movies: Smile 2, Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 1974 movie), and the Ring. These are some of my favorite movies probably because they incorporate at least one of these components. I should also indicate that there will probably be spoilers.

Components of the Perfect Horror Movie: 

• Jump scares. You either love them or hate them. My boyfriend hates them. He almost broke my hand gripping it during the last horror movie we watched together. Smile 2 (and the first Smile) was built on jump scares.  Smile 2 is about a pop star just getting back in the game after a drug problem. She contracts a curse when she sees a friend commit suicide in front of her. She starts hallucinating, seeing disturbing images everywhere including a very creepy smile. Fans of the first movie know she has several days before the curse drives her crazy and makes her kill herself. I consider myself a seasoned horror pro but some of the scenes were so creepy (particularly when her entire dance ensemble was smiling at her) it kind of got under my skin. The biggest scare of all was not a jump scare,  though. It was that you didn’t know what was a hallucination….and what was a terrifying reality.

• Unsettling Content. Smile 2 definitely has unsettling content but so does Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A group of five friends are driving through Texas when they run out of gas. Classic cross country trips. Anyway they stumble upon a group of cannibals, one of them wielding a chainsaw. He takes a girl and hangs her on a hook then goes chasing another girl through the house, with bones crouching underfoot. The lamps and home decor are made of human skin. This is actually based on a real person, Ed Gein, who used human skin to decorate his own home (a detail that makes it all the more unsettling). The iconic last scene of the movie is when the final girl climbs into the back  of a pick up truck to escape the maniac and his chainsaw. 

• Gore. Saw (and the 10+ sequels it has spawned) are full of gore, though the first one is relatively tame compared to the rest of them which try to top the previous one. In the first movie, two men are in a dank bathroom with no idea how they got there. There is a dead man in front of them and a TV who asks them (infamously) if they want to play a game. The men are chained up but they find saws. However these saws do not slice through metal. They do saw through flesh. The rest of the Saw sequels take this gore and up the ante. Jigsaw, the killer, enjoys setting up these games so people can prove how much they value their life. In one movie he takes two overweight people and challenges them to prove how much fat they can saw off (measured by a scale). The person who chopped off the most would survive while the loser would suffer a painful death by having screws drilled through their skull. Now I’m going to skip lunch.

• Mystery. Alot of horror movies revolve around a mystery. In The Ring a mysterious videotape catches the attention of Rachel Keller, when her niece dies under odd circumstances. She is told that if you view a certain videotape you will have seven days left to live. Rachel happens to be an investigative journalist (handy) so she starts researching the videotape. First she views it herself then goes about trying to figure the mystery out. Along the way creepy and disturbing things happen to her as her time starts to run out while figuring out how to stop not only her death, but the death of her son (Hint: For future reference don’t leave the video lying around where your son could get to it).

• Twist endings. Several of these movies have twist endings. In Smile 2, Naomi (the singer) is not able to break the curse and she kills herself onstage during a concert in front of thousands of people by bashing a microphone into her head. The ending means, of course, that she has then spread the curse to thousands of people. At the end of the Saw movie, you realize that the “dead man” in the bathroom was not a dead man at all. He was the one who orchestrated the whole thing and he leaves the bathroom, abandoning one of the two men to die (the other man had severed his ankle and crawled away, passing Jigsaw’s sadistic test). In the Ring, Rachel figures out how to stop the curse and save herself and her son (though sadly not her estranged husband). If you make a copy of the tape (we’re talking VHS here) so that someone else might see it you save yourself (at the risk of putting someone else in danger).

Here are some other components of horror movies:

• An atmosphere of dread/ fear

• Satanic or paranormal activities

• Antagonists that seem beyond our power to defeat

It is rare a movie would have all these things (indeed I think that would be overkill) but one or two could turn an average horror movie into a good one.