The Art of Scary

Recently I've been examining the most fundamental, root principles that make a movie scary. By "scary" I don't mean suspenseful or surprising in the Hitchcockian sense, but rather: eerie, creepy, dreadful, spine-chilling, terrifying.

It turns out that several famous authors--indeed, veritable gurus of terror--have written short treatises on the subject. Let's examine these, and see how they might apply to modern-day movie making.

Edgar Allen Poe

One of the early masters of the terror tale, this author needs no introduction. Poe set forth his philosophy of writing in an obscure review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales," published in 1842 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Poe explains:

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents–-he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.

Poe believed that this "single effect" was ideally suited to the short story form and could not be sustained for the duration of a novel. In this he has been proven wrong. But his notion of the "single effect" is a powerful one. In a sense, it is an organizing principle, dictating a "grand design" for a script or novel, much in the same sense that the movements of a symphony should all work in accordance towards a unified feeling or spirit. With such unification comes greater impact and power. An example of a film that accomplishes this masterfully is William Friedkin's The Exorcist, in which every scene--even the most innocuous archeology bits in the beginning--are designed and calculated to elicit a feeling of dread.

Movies that attempt to bring out multiple effects often fail. Examples of this include Spielberg's 1941, which tried to combine action and comedy. The sequels to Lethal Weapon and The Terminator also attempted to weave comedy into the action, with the overall result being a weaker, more diminished film compared to the original. Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow notably tried to combine terror with comedy. In this case, the "multiple effects" worked against each other, to the extent that the film produced little "effect" whatsoever. A character who acts goofy or nonchalant in the face of a terrifying event, and does not suffer the consequences of it, often divests the event of any fear (or even drama) that it might have inspired.

M. R. James

The famous English ghost story writer M. R. James summarized his "rules" for the eerie tale in his 1929 essay "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories." Some of his points can now be considered erroneous, such as number five: that the setting must be "Those of the Writer's (and Reader's) Own Day." This "rule" has been proven false by many successful movie examples, including those set in the past (The Others) and even some set in the future (Alien and Solaris). Some of James's rules, however, still apply (the following are summarized by Prof. Frank Coffman):

Rule 4: No "Explanation of the Machinery"
James writes, "the greatest successes have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who, when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of [the] theory of the supernatural."

A very important point: mystery is crucial. A lack of knowledge and detail is often responsible for causing much of the fear...show too much, and it dissipates. The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown. The shark in Jaws was scariest when it was just a lone fin disappearing beneath the waves, or an obscured grayish-white mass moving beneath the surface of the water. The same goes for ghosts. When you show or explain too much about the apparition, it ceases to be scary. As soon as the Headless Horseman (in Burton's Sleepy Hollow) placed a skull on his head and transformed into a roaring Christopher Walken, all sense of fear went out the window.

Above: The shark from"Jaws"...scariest when you could barely glimpse it.

H. P. Lovecraft

Perhaps the best explication of the art of terror came from the eccentric writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In this regard he was lucky; he had the shoulders of giants to stand upon. In his lengthy essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," written between November 1925 and May 1927, Lovecraft accomplishes the mighty task of surveying more or less every specimen of the "weird tale" and piece of horror fiction ever written.

Lovecraft pretty much echoes all of the above points--especially the "fear of the unknown"--which also touches upon the explanation of the machinery. Following is the most pertinent section of Lovecraft's essay, and I will leave it as the final word on the subject for today:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown...

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them...

This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

Above: Ridley Scott's "Alien"...very Lovecraftian.