The anatomy of a horror film: the perfect recipe for a great fright flick

It was The Masque of the Red Death – which I now declare to be the greatest horror film ever made. It was wild, terrifying, demented. A man in a gorilla suit was burned alive by a dwarf, Death walked the Earth, nobles partied within the walls of a castle as the plague raged outside. It blew my tiny mind and scared me witless, but I kept silent, hidden behind the sofa, as I knew it was taboo and if my parents realised I was there, they’d send me to bed.

On screen was an actor I would come to love – Vincent Price as the evil Prince Prospero. My parents only discovered I was there when the National Anthem started playing, and they turned on the lights and found me, goggle-eyed like some creepy imp in flannel pyjamas.

I’ve spent the rest of my life watching horror films – so as the witching season approaches, and the latest Halloween movie gets ready to open in cinemas, I thought I’d give you a guide to the secrets of the genre – and tell you what really makes a fright flick tick.

THE WOODS

It doesn’t have to be the woods – though it often is – but location is as important to a horror movie as it is to Kirsty Allsopp and Phil Spencer. Think of Jonathan Harker’s journey to Transylvania – a scene which opens countless Dracula films. The mountains, the inn, the forest, the wolves, the fog, the night ... the castle. A Dracula movie would be as naked without its classic location as the count without his cape.

A great location doesn’t have to be some gothic throwback either. Look at An America Werewolf in London – it fetishises both the English countryside and the grungy grimy London of the early 80s – or the spaceship in Alien, which becomes a white, pared-back, claustrophobic hunting ground.

The ballsiest horrors find the most unlikely location and just go for it – all great horror films take enormous risks with everything from script to casting and lightning to sound – so how about: a creepy ballet school for girls, soaked in vivid technicolour, in Dario Argento’s Suspiria; a ski lift in Frozen (be warned, that’s not the Disney movie); inside a grave in Buried; a railway carriage in Train to Busan (probably the best zombie film every made); a punk rock venue in The Green Room, or a locked house in Don’t Breathe.

None of these films would work if the director had chosen another setting – the setting is as important as the characters, the killings, and the creeps that the films wring from you.

THE JUMPS

Have you ever caught the Luton Bus? Or rather the Lewton Bus? If you’ve watched the 1940s movie Cat People by Val Lewton then you’ll know what I mean.

In one scene we see our heroine being hunted by a killer we expect to turn into a panther at any moment. The tension builds and just when we’re sure it’s all going to end in blood and fur, a bus screeches by making viewers leap from their seats. There’s no murder, no mayhem – but it is famously the scariest part of the film. If you don’t jump at least once in a horror movie, what’s the point, most fans would say? We come to be scared.

Bad directors use music to make you jump – a screeching violin is not a scare – or cliche, like Jason Voorhees – the killer in the Friday the 13th franchise – leaping up from the dead just when we think we’re safe. Great film-makers like Lewton use your mind to make you jump, nothing else.

What a good jump scare depends on is sudden unexpected movement – tapping into that fear we have of something unexplained glimpsed from the corner of your eye. Look at the "Sloth" scene in Se7en: the camera lingers over a shrivelled body which police have found tied to a bed. Suddenly, the "corpse" moves, struggling in its bonds. The entire set-up is overturned – a body we thought was dead, isn’t.

The switch itself implies something ghastly: whatever is on the bed has been suffering for months in agony. In one split-second, David Fincher physically and emotional terrorises us.

Perhaps, the greatest jump scare is in the much underrated The Exorcist III where a satanic killer is on the loose. One two-minute scene features a static long shot of a hospital hall. A nurse is making her rounds at night – her red cardigan the only colour on screen.

Nothing else happens – but we know something has to happen, this is a horror movie. Just as the audience is lulled into a sense of calm, a shroud-draped man with a giant pair of medical shears – the kind used for amputations – charges at the nurse from behind.

I remember audibly screaming in the cinema in 1990 at this scene ... I loved it.

THE MONSTER

There are three main types of baddie in horror films: the Monster, the Psycho, and the Thing. Let’s start with the monster.

First of all, the Monster isn’t human and that’s what’s frightening. Whether it’s the shark in Jaws, whatever the hell is in the woods in The Blair Witch Project, the house in The Haunting of Hill House, giant ants in the 1950s creature feature Them!, the xenomorph in Alien, or the demons from The Mist – these monsters are relentless. They will not stop – and we cannot fathom what drives them, beyond a desire to kill, yet they also possess a preternatural human-like intelligence.

Monsters create unanswered questions – and ignorance means fear: Why is this shark out for revenge? What is running wild in the woods? Why won’t the house stop shaking? Why are those ants the size of a Ford Focus? Why is that alien hugging my face? What are demons doing in a suburban supermarket?

The Monster works on the fear of the unknown, or the ugly – fear of the non-human. The Monster plays on those deep-seated fears we experience as children – the creature under the bed at night, or something beneath your feet when you’re swimming.

THE PSYCHO

The Psycho, however, works on the opposite emotion – the fear of fellow humans, that behind our smiles and civilised cappuccinos lie salivating lunatics eager to kill.

What better place to start with the Psycho, then, than with Hitchcock’s Norman Bates. The original Psycho was based on a real murderer – a necrophile, mother-killing, grave-robbing Wisconsin weirdo called Ed Gein (who also inspired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Quite the muse).

The roots of the Psycho always lie in reality – that’s the fear factor. Could we one day meet such killers in real life? Might we already know a Hannibal Lecter, the urbane cannibal psychiatrist with a nose for good perfume and an eye for cheap shoes; a Patrick Bateman, the boardroom American Psycho; a Jack Torrance from The Shining – the intellectual family man about to snap and kill.

THE THING

When it comes to the Thing, it’s all about the Uncanny Valley – the psychological theory that when something resembles a human being closely, but just not quite enough, it elicits a horrible feeling of dread.

Think of Nosferatu’s spindly long-fingered decaying fiend, the creature in the attic in Rec, Frankenstein’s creation bolted together from scraps of corpses, any zombie, the demonic Cenobites from Hellraiser, the baby in Eraserhead, possessed Regan in The Exorcist, even Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These creatures almost look like us, or in Hal’s case sound like us, but we know they are not us – and so they scare the daylights out of us.

THE SALLY

It was once standard operating procedure in horror films that there would always be a survivor – usually a woman, known in the industry by the slightly sexist term "The Last Girl".

I prefer to call this survivor character "The Sally" in homage to the female lead in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sally Hardesty, played by 70s scream queen Marilyn Burns. Texas is loved and hated in equal measure. Horror fans hail it as the darkest and cleverest of the ultra-violent classic slasher films.

PhDs have been written on Texas. It’s even been interpreted as a comment on Watergate – the deranged hill billy cannibal serial killers do live in a big "white house" after all. People who don’t watch horror films, though, detest Texas as little more that snuff-inspired torture porn.

Director Tobe Hooper put his Sally character through hell at the hands of Leatherface, grandpa and the rest of the slavering clan. When I first watched Texas during the 80s video nasty era, I felt physically broken afterwards – the violence, the terror, the bestial nature of what was happening on screen literally overwhelmed me.

But Sally survived – and because Sally survived, good won the day. Horror films often rely on such simply fairy tale tricks – make me feel scared but then offer hope that what scared me will be defeated and the result is Pavlovian, punters come back for more.

Sally led to Laurie Strode, the lead character in the original 1978 Halloween. Now Laurie is different to Sally. Sally does a lot of running and screaming and crying – Laurie does a lot of running and hiding and trying to breath quietly in cupboards, but then something very important happens: Laurie turns on the killer, the villain Michael Myers.

In fact, at one point, we think she’s killed Myers, clad in his creepy William Shatner face mask (masks are very important in horror movies .... what lies beneath?). But, in a tradition that Halloween basically forged, the bogeyman lives to kill another day. Nevertheless, he was still vanquished, for the time being at least, by the female protagonist who remains standing.

Sometimes, though, The Sally doesn’t survive – a development seen increasingly in films with a strong artistic bent. In the nihilistic masterpiece Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s Pinteresque descent into hell, the end is one of deliberate despair – no-one will live, and the killers are coming for you next.

THE SEXES

Unsurprisingly, given that horror exploits our real fears, most villains are men. Horror movies draw very heavily on a primordial battle of the sexes theme: the brutal killer, often a mere personification of evil, versus the sparky, clever woman pushed to the limits of endurance.

However, not all horror films conform to the genre. Some switch, and the female villain is far from unknown – but when you analyse why the woman is a killer, it’s for very different reasons to the men.

Women don’t pick up chainsaws and go on mindless murder sprees – women killers tend to act out psychologically, and that can can often create the greatest of screen villains. For proof, enter Annie Wilkes from Misery, an obsessive fan with a fine line in moral rectitude ("you dirty bird") and a taste for torture.

In recent decades, more women began to pop up who should have been put in a straitjacket from birth. There’s Lola Stone in The Loved Ones – a girl you don’t want to invite to a house party; Tina, a murderous National Trust nerd, in Ben Wheatley’s black comedy of modern manners Sightseers; and Marie, the worst best friend a girl ever asked for in the French new wave horror Switchblade Romance.

Carrie is probably the most nuanced female character in any horror film – she is both villain and victim. Abused by a religious maniac mother, bullied and sexually humiliated by her classmates, Sissy Spacek as Carrie becomes the revenge prototype of teen female anger.

Increasingly, we’re beginning to see men enter the role of the victim. Take the Belgian movie The Ordeal. Instead of a woman held captive by a male predator, it is a man who is imprisoned and tormented: a good way to bring home to the audience that often the gaze in horror films is on female suffering.

THE MEANING

A great horror film has to say something – an awful horror film just drips blood all over the cinema seat and leaves you as unsatisfied as a ten pound box of popcorn. By "saying something", I don’t mean art house pretension – I mean that a horror movie must resonate with its times.

Horror is the most mutable of genres, apart from comedy. People have fallen in love for the same reasons since time immemorial, people have sought revenge for the same reasons since time immemorial, but jokes change from one day to the next. Horror also changes, not because what scares us changes (a bogeyman will always be a bogeyman) but because for horror to work it must relate to you and the fears of the time in which you live.

You’ll not be scared by Little Red Riding Hood, but centuries ago it terrified your ancestors. What's needed to scare modern viewers is something that echoes in our real lives – think of all those 1950s B movies riffing off the unseen menace of reds under the bed like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; or Cronenberg’s body-horror movies, like The Fly, driven by the fear of technology; there was even a spate of post-60s hippie horrors in the wake of the Manson family killings like Last House on the Left.

Probably the two best examples of horror movies tapping into modern fears come in the shape of Eden Lake, and Ils (French for Them). Eden Lake uses fear of the dispossessed to get its hooks into viewers. It makes the viewer wonder if the poor, the uneducated, the forgotten will one day rise up and kill them.

This is the horror of the housing estate. It is a brutal take on what happens when the suburban middle classes rub up against the "underclass".

Ils – Them – is similar in tone but here it is children who are the terror. It prods at the hidden adult fear that children could quite easily kill if they wished. We’ve seen terrible crimes committed by bored, abused, forgotten children unfold in our papers and on the TV news – this film seems to say, if you beat a dog long enough it will bite you back, no matter how weak it is.

I’m not trying to convince anyone that horror is art – though as a fan of horror movies, I do think the genre is capable of high art when at its very best.

In a strange way, what horror can do is make you feel alive because it makes you confront death. That’s probably what I realised in my four-year-old mind back in the early 70s when Vincent Price scared the pants off me in The Masque of the Red Death.

As the old toast goes from The Bride of Frankenstein: "To a new world of Gods and Monsters!"