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Writing The Horror Movie: The Inner Psychology of Se7en, Drag Me To Hell & Dawn of the Dead

By Jacob Krueger

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There are two kinds of horror movies.

There’s the basic gross-out horror movie, which is really just about creating a progression of increasingly horrible images and getting a high body count. These movies have a very simple formula: Establish a bunch of characters and relationships, then kill those characters off, one by one, with the greatest efficiency and bloodiness. All the creative work in those movies just goes into creating the most horrible of horrors. It’s about making the most disgusting, horrible, frightening, “This is going to haunt me in my dreams; I can’t unsee that” kind of moment.

But the best horror movies try to do something much bigger. They are either psychological commentaries, political commentaries, or sometimes both.

 

For example, Dawn of the Dead is actually about consumerism. There’s a reason they’re stuck in a shopping mall. The horror of their situation is really just a metaphor for the horror of consumerism and the way it makes zombies of us all.

This is important because most of us are never going to find ourselves in a real-life horror movie situation. We’re never going to be chased by a zombie, haunted by a spirit, or pursued by a serial killer.

If a horror movie is going to do more than just gross us out, if it’s truly going to scare us in a way that shakes us to our core, it should relate in some way to the experiences of our lives, our real fears and anxieties.

And that becomes a guiding principle for you as a writer. It can help you stimulate your creativity. When you realize, “This is what it’s really about,” you can start to get even more creative about the horror moments.

Se7en is a great example. Se7en is about sin. It just so happens that Se7en has seven of the most gruesome horrors ever shot on film. (Technically, you can argue that Se7en is a cop movie or a thriller or a serial killer movie more than a horror movie.)

But Se7en, despite all its genre elements, despite each crime that grosses you out more than the last one, is actually about sin. Why? Because it’s called Se7en; it’s about the seven deadly sins.

As cool as that hook may be, you don’t want to build a movie like this just around an external hook. I promise you that before Se7en was ever created, 500 other writers also wrote a seven deadly sins movie. It’s not that original of an idea!

But you don’t want it to just be about how a serial killer recreates the seven deadly sins because you’re going to end up writing one more seven deadly sin movie, just like all the others.

If you’re writing a movie like Se7en, you want it to be an exploration of the real role of sin in our lives and who we really are in relation to sin.

That’s where you’re going to find the creativity and the truthfulness that makes your film stand out from the others in the genre.

The thing that makes Se7en a great movie is not that it’s a seven deadly sins movie. The thing that makes it a great movie is that it’s a movie about sin. It’s a movie that asks the question, “Are the sinners different from us? Do we all carry sin within us? Are we all capable of true evil?”

 

If you think about Se7en, you realize that’s actually the structure of the main characters’ journeys. There are two main characters, played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, and they go on parallel journeys.

Morgan Freeman’s character, Somerset, begins the movie believing the world is full of sin and there is no difference between “us” and “them” — the sinn...