How to write a flawed genre – the slasher July 11, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in Die Hard, Friday the 13th, Halloween, High Tension, Horror, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Slasher, Switchblade Romance, Theory.5 comments
As I’ve mentioned in the past, as well as working on a light and fluffy romcom I am also writing the most brutal slasher film ever written, because I’m complicated like that. 
One thing that soon becomes apparent though from watching all the endless mediocre slasher films from the 80s is that most of them are inherently flawed at the very core of how they are written. These films don’t suck because they are trashy or have clichés, or even because they were made quickly to cash in on a craze, they suck because the way they are structured is inherently flawed.
In contrast the slasher films that have become critically acclaimed like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream all have one thing in common, they all avoid falling into this same inherent flaw.
So what is the flaw I’m talking about?
Most slasher films completely ignore the screenwriting story paradigm.
Something disrupts the character’s world. The character seeks to solve the problem. An antagonistic force tries to stop them, the protagonist engages with this antagonistic force and overcomes it.
The key part here is “engages with”.
Most of the bad slasher films completely ignore this idea by having a bunch of teenagers totally unaware that anything is wrong, and hence not engaging with the antagonistic forces at all. They spend the whole time smoking dope and talking shit with their buddies, completely unaware that they are in danger, being picked off one by one. The only time they actually engage with the killer is when the killer’s blade is piercing them and they are dead.
Then in the last 15 minutes, once the Killer has bumped off everyone except for the final geeky girl, that girl then finds the bodies, realises what has been going on and is now forced to engage with a disruption to her world. This lasts about 15 minutes and the film is over.
Sorry but you can’t write a film like that and expect it to work. There is a certain amount of tension in watching someone from the Killers POV, knowing the victim is unaware of the Killer, but you can’t sustain a whole movie on that.
The Slasher films that work, the ones that are acclaimed by the mainstream film press and not just horror fanatics are the ones where the hero is forced to react to the changes to their world created by the Killer, and do this throughout the entire movie rather than just after all the horny kids have been bumped off.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Halloween is down on my list of critically acclaimed movies that avoid this, yet that is a movie where the protagonist only finds out in the last sequence that all her friends are dead. Halloween being copied beat for beat by every other Slasher is how we ended up with all these trashy horror movies that sucked isn’t it?
It’s fair to say Halloween’s structure was very much the basis for all these movies that followed, but Halloween is doing stuff that the other movies are not. It’s like all these other movies copied Halloween without really understanding how it worked.
Let’s compare Halloween to Friday the 13th, a movie where the producers fully admit to just cloning the structure of Halloween in order to cash in on Halloween’s success.
In Friday the 13th the Geeky Girl is working at an abandoned summer camp, doing it up so it will be ready to open. The Killer in this movie basically doesn’t want the camp to open again, that is their motivation to kill people, but whatever, that’s besides the point
The Geeky Girl and a bunch of other teenagers finish doing up the camp for the night and play monopoly inside to keep out of the rain, one by one they are picked off as they go to take a leak, go make out, go to brush their teeth, meanwhile the Geeky Girl is totally unaware anything is wrong. It’s not until about 55 minutes into the film that the Geeky Girl and the one remaining kid start to wonder if something is up and go to look. They find a bloody axe and the phone lines have been cut, but rather than panic its more of a “what on earth is going on?”. About 70 minutes into the film she discovers a dead body and is now forced to start dealing with the killer.
So basically, its not until an hour into the movie that her world is remotely disturbed by the Killer, the point at which she stops playing Monopoly and wonders if something might wrong.
Conventional wisdom would have the protagonist’s world being disturbed at 15 minutes into the movie, the so called inciting incident, but as you see in Friday the 13th the inciting incident is really an hour into the movie, because before that the protagonist was happily playing Monopoly in the cabin unaware that her friends were being killed.
Compare this to Halloween.
In Halloween the Geeky Girl almost runs into the Killer in her first few scenes when she drops a letter off by the house he is hiding in. From that point the Killer follows her at school and on her way home again. She sees him several times and is spooked by this creepy guy that is seemingly following her. This isnt just some twist at the end of the movie that “OMG there was a creepy guy running around town and I didnt even know it” like in Friday the 13th and many other movies. She is engaging with a disturbance to her world from the outset.
Secondly, unlike so many slashers, she has a very specific goal. Rather than be playing Monopoly with her friends to pass the time like Friday the 13th she is instead baby sitting two kids. Now normally this wouldn’t be a very dramatic goal, but when you have a Killer after you the fact that you have been left with some kids to look after becomes a big problem she is going to have to pro-actively engage with. There are stakes involved in what she is doing.
What further makes this baby sitting story over lap and engage with the Killer is the little kid she is looking after sees the Killer several times out of the window and thinks that it is the Boogie Man. By her trying to calm the kid and tell him that there is no such thing as the Boogie Man it means she is having to deal with consequences of the Killer yet further.
So long before the Geeky girl in Halloween finds her friends have been killed she has been dealing with the Killer in one way or another for the entire movie!
If you think this is perhaps a little subtle, then also consider the charater of Sam Loomis, the Killer’s Doctor.
Halloween differs from most other Slasher movies by having a second protagonist with his own story that intercuts with that of the soon to be killed teenagers. The Killer’s Doctor, Sam Loomis is a character trying to track down the escaped Killer before anything bad can happen. Having a character trying to track down the Killer is obviously chockablock full of engaging with the killer. (A character doesnt have to be on screen with the Killer in order to be engaging with the problems that the Killer is creating in the world.)
In Halloween therefore you get two inciting incidents very early on in the movie. The Killer escapes and his Doctor vows to track him down before something bad happens. The Geeky Girl almost stumbles into the Killer hiding at the house and Killer decides to follow her for the rest of the day, something that freaks her out.
Compare that to Friday the 13th where the true inciting incident of that movie is more like the 60 minute mark. Halloween actually adheres to some theories on how film narratives should be structured!
Examples of other films
Think about the movie Scream. I would argue that the success of that movie was only partly down to it’s famous post modern irony. I would say that actually the reason why that was such a successful Slasher was because it actually understood that to make an engaging story you need to disrupt the characters world and have them engaging and dealing with that disruption throughout the entire movie.
Had the characters been totally unaware of any danger but still did all the dialogue deconstructing Slasher films then I don’t think the movie would have worked to the same success.
In fact, all those slasher films from the 90s had silly post modern gimmicks like the wonderfully entertaining trash Cherry Falls where the Killer only slays virgins and the teenagers organise an orgy to try to stay safe; but what all these gimmicks have in common is that the character’s worlds are disrupted by the Killer from the outset, they are aware something is up and they are dealing with it throughout the entire movie.
So what am I going to do to combat the problem in my slasher?
The best horror film I’ve seen in recent years is a French movie called Switchblade Romance. This movie turns the Slasher conventions on their head to create a much more “normal” structured movie that could almost be described as a thriller, hell it’s not that far apart from the set up of Die Hard. In Switchblade’ the surviving girl sees everyone else getting murdered in the inciting incident in the first act. The killer is unaware that there is another person in the house still alive and thus the rest of the movie is her then trying to avoid also being killed while trying to do something about the Killer.
She has to engage with the situation and pro-actively do the following things:
A. Keep out of sight while the Killer is still around.
B. Get help without him finding out.
C. Stop him killing the other people they come across without giving herself away as being there.
D. (Eventually as her character arc kicks in) Try to kill him.
See how much more interaction she has with the Killer? I’m basically ripping off this structure in my movie!
Rather than have the piss poor writing of having the Killer be the one in the know as the geek girl is totally oblivious to what’s going on, I’m going to instead have the girl be the one in the know and the killer unaware there is still one last person alive.
Switch Blade Romance uses this gimmick so wonderfully. Though it helps that the direction, and in particular the sound design is amazing. I tell anyone who will listen that this movie has edge of your seat tension as good as you will find in any movie of any genre, not just horror movies.
There’s one moment where the girl is walking through a large toilet with multiple stalls and the Killer may or may not be in one of them. She needs to get to the other end of the room so she has to tip toe past all the stalls and you are sure that at any moment the Killer is going to leap out. Man, something as simple as that and it is totally edge of your seat stuff. Great movie. Go watch it!
Conclusions
Most 80’s Slasher films suck not because they follow a set formula, but because the set formula they follow is inherently flawed. At least in “mainstream” movies the set formulas they always follow are engaging and have been proven to work.
If you want to write a Slasher movie that doesn’t suck then you need to make the story engaging by having characters dealing with the disturbance that the Killer entering the world creates. Just because it is a horror film with it’s own set of rules is no reason to abandon what makes for an engaging story and what you know is good writing. The horror films that work are the ones that are able to operate both within the conventions of a horror movie and the conventions of good story telling.
LA Features Draft 2 January 10, 2008
Posted by James D Hartland in Horror, LA Features, Rewriting, Romcom, Wendall Thomas.1 comment so far
Well today was the day I was supposed to get some notes from Wendall Thomas on my second draft of my LA Features script, and sure enough when I woke up this morning there was a 12 page set of notes from Wendall waiting for me in my inbox.
It’s full of loads of things I need to change, but in a way it was a kinda positive thing to read because her list of problems are for the most part ones I am all too aware of; things that I felt needed changing anyways or all the bits I knew I was kinda fudging and hoping no one will notice. It’s nice to know you aren’t way off the mark in your own personal judgement.
Of course knowing where the problems are and knowing how to fix those problems are two different things and that’s where Wendall is going to be invaluable to me. Some of these problems have been in the screenplay since day one and I’ve yet to find solutions for them, but already just reading the notes has given me a bunch of ideas for things I’ve never thought of before but which might well be the answer to all my problems.
I could go through all the other major points of interest like how my character’s aren’t flawed enough, how I need more conflict in the end of the script and much more, but I’m not sure exactly how much use that will be to anyone, or if anyone even cares. But I guess if I stumble upon some major discovery like I feel I’ve worked out the secret of how to write flawed characters or something then I guess I’ll write a blog entry about it.
One note I do wanna mention though, because it’s a bit more general about me as a writer rather than the specific script, was her comment that my writing style is too dense.
I had already suspected that my writing style was perhaps a bit too dense with me writing very detailed descriptions when it wasn’t always needed, which is why I decided this year I’m gunna make a concerted effort to read more screenplays and get a better sense of economy in my description. (As mentioned in my new year resolutions.) It’s nice to finally know one way or the other if I’m worrying over nothing or as I suspected it’s something that I need to address in order to work in the LA industry.
I’ve now got 42 days or 6 weeks until I need to hand in the 3rd draft, so I guess from today I need to stop working on my horror film and get back to work on my LA Features romcom.
I’m pretty pleased with my horror film so far, but there’s a long way to go with it yet. The bit I’m struggling with at the moment are the specifics. Like it’s easy to say “right at this point I want her to be chased by the killer”, but to actually fill in the specifics of that is very hard. It’s such a set piece kind of a moment that you’ve really gotta think moment by moment what is gunna happen and how that can be original and engaging.
I think I’m gunna stop worrying about it so much and just put something down even if it sucks. Writing is rewriting after all.
Christmas News Update December 23, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in Christmas, Horror, Keyboard, LA Features, Romcom, Wendall Thomas.1 comment so far
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here so without further ado here is some news from my life.
LA Features
A few weeks back I handed in the second draft of my Romcom as part of the LA Features scheme. For a bunch of personal reasons I wasn’t really able to get as much work done as I would have hoped so I’m kinda kicking myself. But that said I think in a few key areas I’ve improved the script, I think it’s just a case that the changes arent as polished as I would have liked them.
There is one section in particular that I wrote at the very last minute after deciding to make a big change to the structure with only a couple of days to go, and boy is that section clunky. It pains me to know that sequence is out there, but hey, as negative as it might sound I am being I am actually looking forward to getting back to work on it and getting everything polished.
Had you asked me if I was looking forward to getting back to it a few weeks ago though I wouldn’t have been quite so enthusiastic, which goes to show what a few weeks away from a script can do.
One thing I need to do to improve my involvement in the scheme is to take more advantage of Wendall Thomas. NFM have provided a wonderful resource in having her be available to help with our projects when ever we need it, but I haven’t really used her as much as I should of. I should be biting her hand off! This is the other big thing that I’ve been kicking myself over, because this truly is a wonderful opportunity for me and I’m just not taking advantage of it enough.
I’ve warned her though that next year to make up for lost time I’m gunna be hassling her with questions and suggestions non stop. 
Horror Film
The thing I’ve been working on since sending off my second draft of my romcom is a horror film. It’s a project I’ve been trying to get started for a while but whenever I find myself with any spare time to work on it something else always comes up.
I’ve set myself the aim of getting 30 pages of treatment done by January 10th when I start work on my romcom again. At the moment things are going OK to achieve that goal, but obviously with the festive period fast approaching I might find myself in a situation where I’ve not done any work in days.
I’ve promised myself that I will get at least a page done on Christmas day as punishment for all the times I’ve procrastinated over the past year. But more on this next week when I write some New Year’s Resolutions.
New Keyboard!
Whitey, the keyboard I’ve had for 10 years (see here) has finally been replaced! Of late the “E” key just hasn’t been working properly, so I’ve bitten the bullet and started using another keyboard.
Though I did think later that maybe I just needed to clean the keyboard out as perhaps a stray piece of toast was blocking the “E” key. Now that I’ve gone and changed keyboard I’m too lazy to find out.
I’m not sure about the long term use of this new keyboard though, I bought pretty much the cheapest one I can find since us Writer’s are poor folk. I dont think it will last as long as Whitey.
What’s hot today
More observant readers may have noticed that now at the bottom of the side menu there is a new section that lists the top 5 most clicked blog entries today. I thought it might encourage people to check out some older blog entries, but regardless its kinda fun to see what other people have been reading.
I really like these free wordpress.com blogs but it’s kinda frustrating that if you click on the blog’s tags at the top of each blog entry you are taken to a page contained all wordpress.com blogs with that tag rather than just the ones in my blog. Luckily I have a tag cloud which shows the 30 most used tags on my site. Using the search box is probably people’s best option though for finding specific things.
What have I asked Santa for?
I wont bore you with a word for word account of the entire list that I sent Santa’s way, but the main thing I asked for was an external hard drive. I’m always butting up against the limits of this 80GB drive in my computer so I’m looking forward to having to some breathing space.
Spectacle over suspense September 14, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in Horror, Rants, Suspense, Theory, Thriller.2 comments
I have this theory about summer blockbusters that I wanted to share with you guys and see if you agree.
People often talk about the sorry state of Hollywood blockbusters as evidence that movies are getting worse and while I would agree that the blockbusters are pretty crap at the moment, I wouldn’t say that movies in general are getting worse.
But lets address this specific point… why are the big action movies getting worse?
I think it can be summed up in one line… “Spectacle over suspense”
I believe that basically we have gone through a shift in the past few years where suspense and thrills which were once the dominant story tool in action movies has been replaced with a more less powerful one… spectacle.
Take Die Hard for example. That movie might have had the spectacle of the Nakatomi plaza blowing up, but it also has comedy, it has drama, and most importantly it has edge of your seat suspense. It has actual proper engaging story telling in other words. I’d like to be able to say I’ve seen the new Die Hard out this summer so I can give you a definite before and after, but I’ve not seen the movie. Would I find more suspense than spectacle though? I doubt it.
Nowadays its all about spectacle. It’s how many things will blow up and fly across the screen in front of you. It’s how how many guys you can take out with one mid-air kung fu kick. It’s how close the CGI car can land next to the hero.And there in lies the problem I think. CGI.
Special effects have always been a driving force in marketing films and getting bums on seats, but with the advent of CGI film-makers now found themselves in a situation for the first time where apecial effects were so advanced they could do anything they wanted. The result of this was these effects sequences became even more pushed to the forefront of a films main selling points, while the aspects of traditional story telling that the film makers had previously relied on to engage an audience to the point that they would ignore the ropey model effects and guys in rubber suits was no longer needed.
And hence we find ourselves in a situation now where going to a big summer action movie like Transformers is basically akin to going to a firework display. It looks cool and it makes a bunch of noise and then you come home.
I’m not saying that every action movie that used to be made was great, a lot of them weren’t, and similarly I wouldn’t expect every action movie to come today to be great either. But there has definitely been a shift in the tone of action movies from thrills and suspense to pure spectacle, and there has also been a general lowering of the number of watchable action movies each year, and these factors are hardly unlinked.
The good news is I think audiences are already beginning to cotton onto the same fact that the film makers cottoned onto a few years back, which is that you can do anything with CGI, to the point that they becoming desensitised to all this stuff. “Big woop if something flies across the screen, its not even real”. So hopefully in a couple of years from now we find big action movies that rely on slow pacing and suspense rather than lots of thing going crash bang.
The reason I chose to write about this now though is not because I’ve just gotten back from a bunch of terrible action movies however, but rather because I am writing a horror feature film at the moment.
I have deliberately decided to think of my horror film almost as a thriller/edge of your seat suspense movie since I believe the days of ‘the masked killer’s POV shot looking through a window at the unbeknownst girl’ are behind us, and really what an audience would get a big kick out is a horror film which spends 90 minutes showing someone struggling to stay alive. And in that respect I have actually been studying movies like Die Hard just as much as I have been looking at 80s Slasher movies. Doing so really made me appreciate just what a powerful tool suspense can be. When John Maclaine is sneaking around desperate not to be discovered by the terrorists that film is infinitely more engaging than when he has to confront them with a gun or make something blow up.
Like I say, I think approaching a horror film with none stop suspense in mind is where its at; seeing someone desperate not to be discovered and to survive is way more engaging that seeing a monster stalk someone or someone having to fight the monster off.
Busy little bee June 24, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in Career, Horror, Personal, Romcom, UK Film Council, Writer's Lifestyle.add a comment
My apologies for not writing anything lately. The truth is I haven’t really thought about my blog hardly at all over the past few weeks. I did start writing a big long theory based post but I decided to ditch it, and hence there’s been no updates.
I guess this lack of blog posts is because of my new found busy schedule. After working more or less on one project since the start of the year I have now decided I am far enough along in that feature film’s development that I can start some new projects.
The other week I started work on a horror feature film, and in addition to getting my basic plot beats down I have been watching a whole bunch of horror films. It is making me realise just how fond of schlock I can be, since even a fairly pants horror movie can still be entertaining.
I’m pretty pleased with the speed of which I was able to get the basic structure down for the horror film after it taking me months to get to a similar place with my romcom, though obviously there is still a long way to go. Especially since I have yet to come up with any logical explanation for the sci-fi element of this horror film, or to put it another way; I’ve got a kick ass hook, but no reason to explain why this hook should happen besides the fact it’s kick ass.
The other thing that is taking up my time is a new short film I’m writing for a particular UK Film Council scheme. I’m a bit concerned that the budget might become an issue with this film, which is kinda making me think stuff like “well I can’t have that scene take place where I want it to because that’s a whole other location”; but whatever, I’ll just write it and see what can be changed later.
Both of these projects are in addition to also working on the romcom (which I’ve been working on since time began it seems). I’m hoping to reach another landmark in that films development in the next month so it’s not like I’ve taken my foot off the accelerator with this film.
So there you go… a short insight into what I have been getting up to lately. I’m off to a screening of the Film Council short I directed last year in a couple of days, so my next blog will be about that no doubt.
Anyways, I now must get back to the writing. I’ve promised myself I’ll get this short film finished today.
48 hour screenwriting challange May 30, 2007
Posted by James D Hartland in 2 day Screenplay, First Draft, Horror, John Hughes, Rewriting, Writer's Lifestyle.Tags: , 2 day Screenplay, First Draft, Horror, John Hughes, Rewriting
1 comment so far
If you look at the trivia for all of John Hughes’ teen movies at some point you will be told that he wrote the movie in two days. 16 candles, Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Ferris Buella’s Day Off… all of these movies were apparently written in just 2 days each.
Now firstly, is this trivia accurate? I could believe it maybe once, but its listed for several of his films…. so has it somehow been confused over the years which films he wrote in 2 days, resulting in all of them now being thought of as 2 days films?
Secondly, what the hell does that even mean to write a screenplay in 2 days? I presume that means the first draft, but then how long can one rewrite that first draft and still claim it was written in 2 days? If I wrote a first draft in 2 days and then spent 2 years rewriting it then its not a 2 day movie. And I cant believe he didn’t rewrite the scripts at all, he must have at least tweaked them?
And lets say that he didn’t do any rewrites, did he at least have the idea all thought out before he sat down to write it? Or did he really just splurge out a whole screenplay from scratch in just 2 days?
I’m not sure I believe any of these two day statements to be true. I mean, why is it always two days? Why isn’t it three days for at least one of them? Why always two? Is this just some urban myth? I must admit I don’t really know enough to say one way or the other.
But it’s got me thinking…
Just how much work could you do in a single weekend?
If you had the basic idea for a film, possibly the main story beats planned out, and you sat down first thing on Saturday morning and just wrote and wrote and wrote all weekend, just what could be the result of that?
I think for most of us the result would probably stink, but then again, you would at least have the basis of a story which you could then rewrite.
As someone who has spent months index carding and planning a film, the idea of just bashing out something in a few days sounds terribly exciting, and you never know, it might just work. And hell, even if it doesn’t, maybe it will purge your soul ready for another 6 months of index cards and planning!
I’ve got this idea for a really cheesy horror-comedy, (Think “Snakes on a Plane” or “Black Sheep” but more comedic), and you know what? …. Since its supposed to be shlocky, and since I dont need beautifully rendered character arcs, and since being dumb is part of its charm; I think I might just try this 48 hour challenge and see how far I can get.
I don’t think I would attempt to write a whole screenplay in that time with full dialogue and the works, but I would like to think that I could bash out 50 pages of crude treatment style description, and that would be enough to get the ball rolling.
The Problem with the UK Film Industry November 17, 2006
Posted by James D Hartland in B-Movies, Genre Movies, Horror, Rants, Romcom, Thriller, UK Film/TV industry.add a comment
I think the problem that stops the British film industry taking off and getting a string of money making hits together is actually the very thing that the British Film industry does to try to compete with other territories; This thing they do to compete actually stops them from competing.
What am I talking about here?
This idea we have that we can’t compete with Hollywood in terms of making mainstream popcorn entertainment, so let’s instead make film that are uniquely British and aim to offer something audiences can’t get from Hollywood.
I think this is a BIG problem because we are basically aiming to avoid making movies which might have mainstream appeal. We are avoiding making movies that might appeal to the young kids who go to the cinema and who buy DVDs.
Let me put this another way… I think the problem in the UK is we don’t make good B-movies.
Take for example Sex Lives of the Potato Men. That movie was despised by critics. However on Richard and Judy, Johnny Vegas was asked about the hatred of the critics for that movie and he replied (quite rightly) with something like; “the critics can moan all they want but the film was one of the few British movies that year to make any profit”. He went on to add that the critics should make up their mind whether they want classy intellectual drama or whether they want a profitable industry that can become self sustaining. I couldn’t agree more.
But let me stress something here… I’m not saying that we should make bad movies. I’m not saying we should make more bad movies like Sex Lives of the Potato Men. What I am saying is that we should be aiming to make what I would describe as “B-movies” but make really great “B-movies”. The better the movie the better chance it stands of making money and it doesn’t matter if you are making a porno or Citizen Kane 2, you should be aiming to make it as good as possible.
What I am simply saying is that the British film industry should realise that Hollywood makes money, not because it has more money to spend, but instead because they are more than willing to make 20 “B-movies” for every “A-movie”. They don’t make money from intellectual dramas aimed at middle aged people, no, they make their money from B-movies
What do I mean by B-movies?
Here I’m talking about horror films, teen/sex comedies, pulpy/sleazy thrillers and other films like that; basically the sorta stuff that doesn’t aim to be the next Billy Elliot or Mrs Henderson Presents. Stuff you might wanna go see with your teenage pals, rather than watch on BBC1 on a Sunday evening.
Two British film makers I greatly admire are Keith Bell and Neil Marshall, the producer and director respectively behind Dog Soldiers and The Descent. I believe they have hit the nail on the head in terms of what the industry needs.
I’m sure they didn’t make these movies with the idea of showing the British film industry what they are doing wrong. I’m sure they just grew up watching horror movies and loving them, and deciding naturally that this is the direction they should go in. But in doing so they have shown that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. If you make a really great B-movie you can make money. And not only that, you can compete with Hollywood. As demonstrated by the fact the Descent did much better than the Cave, a Hollywood movie along the same lines.
Because you know what? You don’t need Tom Cruise or millions of SFX shots to do a sleazy erotic thriller, or to do a gross out comedy or a gore infested horror movie. B-movies don’t need mega resources, they just need talented film makers behind them.
This is exactly the sort of stuff that fits the British film industry perfectly in terms of the budgets it deals with. But for some reason I don’t see the British movies in the cinema being these sorts of movies.
So why not?
I’m not sure if I believe that I am the only person the country who believes that this is what we need to be doing, and that everyone else is looking for the next Billy Elliot. But maybe that really is the case?
I think it’s far more likely that we just aren’t producing films of this sort to a high enough calibre. The reason the Descent was the only British horror movie of note the other year was because all the other ones being made must have been stinkers.
I think maybe there is an argument that respectable film makers, i.e. those with any talent, basically don’t want to be associated with these sorts of movies, hence the only people who make them are the talentless hacks. Everyone reading this blog probably knows some guy who has a camcorder and is currently making another low budget horror feature film, but how many established and talented up and coming film makers want to work with these movies?
Even I am guilty of this. I have an idea for a really kick ass horror movie, but I feel like if that is the one and only spec script of mine that someone reads they will think I am a sleazy guy with no breadth or depth in what I can write.
Maybe that’s stupid? Maybe if I write a really kick ass horror script it wont matter if the person reading it is really grossed out by the death scene involving the hot poker, they will still be able to see that I have a future ahead of me, writing tender and moving works. Somehow I don’t see that being the case though.
So even I, the guy who is ranting about us needing to make B movies, would prefer that he is seen to write stuff other than B- movies. So just what chance does the British film industry ever have of getting over itself and making any money? Because that’s basically the problem. We need to get over our selves and get off our intellectual high horse and go make some kick ass sleazy movies.
We need to ignore our heritage of Shakespeare and other illustrious artists and we need to realise that getting down and dirty and making rank and file movies that appeal to teenagers who never read movies reviews IS the way forward, and that there is nothing shallow, or inartistic about doing that.
Alien is one of the greatest movies ever made, and it is no different from Saw. It is just a horror movie aimed at scaring movie goers shitless and creeping them out long enough that they tell their mates about it…. This is why I reaspect Neil Marshall and Keith Bell so much. They want to make the next Alien. And like I say… we should be aiming to make the greatest B-movies we possibly can.
