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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Movies  |  Bad Movies  |  What Makes a Truly Scary Movie « previous next »
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Author Topic: What Makes a Truly Scary Movie  (Read 20451 times)
CoreyHeldpen
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I think these komodos need to leave this cruise.


« Reply #30 on: February 09, 2007, 11:59:02 AM »

Now about the Demon:

I haven't even started writing the script yet, I figured I'd come here for advice first. I have done some concept art, as follows:

1st Version: Kind of looks like a bald werewolf. Probably not going to use this, kind of bland.
2nd Version: The classic demon, with bat wings, devil horns, etc. Might use it.
3rd Version: Now this one is pretty out there. Pretty much a humanoid bat with a satanic symbol on its forehead. Not going to use this, too silly.

Could someone give me some advice as to what the Demon should look like? Keep in mind, it should be simple, yet freaky.
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Doc Daneeka
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« Reply #31 on: February 09, 2007, 04:06:02 PM »

Do you have a scanner? BTW,
Quote
1st Version: Kind of looks like a bald werewolf. Probably not going to use this, kind of bland.
What does a bald werewolf look like?
Quote
2nd Version: The classic demon, with bat wings, devil horns, etc. Might use it.
Kay, aside from the cliche it could work
Quote
3rd Version: Now this one is pretty out there. Pretty much a humanoid bat with a satanic symbol on its forehead. Not going to use this, too silly.
I think the bat idea sounds like the coolest (think Fright Night Part II!) IF you have the cash to pull the makeup off.
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zombiedudeman
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« Reply #32 on: February 09, 2007, 04:18:52 PM »

you should make the demon a spirit that possess people so you won't have to show it, it will be more troubling/upsetting for a character to kill it, and also it gives more opportunity for surprises and scares, might be a zombie movie cliche  but imagine a group of people locking themselves in a room cause they thought someone possess was chasing them when suddenly one of the people they're locked in with is possessed, they must kill their possessed friend or try to escape but time is running short  Buggedout
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ulthar
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« Reply #33 on: February 09, 2007, 04:22:23 PM »

you should make the demon a spirit that possess people so you won't have to show it, it will be more troubling/upsetting for a character to kill it, and also it gives more opportunity for surprises and scares,

That approach was pretty effective in THE HIDDEN.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Hathaway:  I noticed you stopped stuttering.
Bodie:      I've been giving myself shock treatments.
Professor Hathaway: Up the voltage.

--Real Genius
Doc Daneeka
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« Reply #34 on: February 09, 2007, 04:38:10 PM »

Quote
you should make the demon a spirit that possess people so you won't have to show it, it will be more troubling/upsetting for a character to kill it, and also it gives more opportunity for surprises and scares
It could, but there might be less of a feeling of imposition (imposingness?). You could go the jason goes to hell route and have the possessed just get so beaten up he looks inhuman by the end.
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CoreyHeldpen
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I think these komodos need to leave this cruise.


« Reply #35 on: February 09, 2007, 06:22:25 PM »

you should make the demon a spirit that possess people so you won't have to show it, it will be more troubling/upsetting for a character to kill it, and also it gives more opportunity for surprises and scares, might be a zombie movie cliche  but imagine a group of people locking themselves in a room cause they thought someone possess was chasing them when suddenly one of the people they're locked in with is possessed, they must kill their possessed friend or try to escape but time is running short  Buggedout

Hey... That could work!

Thanks for all the advice, you guys really know what your talking about!
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Dave M
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« Reply #36 on: February 09, 2007, 11:39:57 PM »

I lost this thread somehow and started asking about it in the movies for a cold night thread. So, if you saw me begging for directions there, I'm OK, I found it again.

Some blog had some ideas about a new Friday The Thirteenth movie that I think could apply: http://x-entertainment.com/updates/2007/01/10/a-new-friday-the-13th-flick-yase-yase/

Meant to mention before that if I sometimes talk like you're a mountain dew swilling youtube retard, it's only because I've seen so much low budget horror made by mdsytrs. You don't come off that way (or you'd be calling people fags for saying stuff should be subtly implied and stuff).

Alrighty, I was going to keep numbering my notions for easy reference, so that even the really unoriginal one's would be immortalized under my name. People on movie sets would say "Employ Munger's cinematic horror principle five!" But now the original poster's using numbers, so I'll go to bullets or something.

- How about a monster that looks pretty much human, but with horns instead of eyes? Simple (just stick horns with pinholes to see through over the guy's eyes, maybe some fake blood if they're supposed to have grown through the eyes of a regular person who's transformed) Then you kind of combine the traditional archetypal underwood deviled ham devil with the freaky, "it has no eyes, yet can see me through some weird, otherworldly means" thing from Alien.

- Like the idea of giving it a better than usual motivation for killing people. Always thought that when they call the monster a demon, that kind of implies that they're trying to accomplish some larger purpose for their master, Satan, like the cursed thingies in the Friday 13th TV series. Maybe driving the hero insane is part of this? Maybe it could act a LITTLE like the T-1000 in T2, fond of exploiting the hero's concern for people close to him. Speaking of the hero going insane, maybe the catalist for that is a combination of the stress/ sleep deprivation/ despair/ etc of fighting the demon, maybe you could do the old Lovecraft standby of having the demon expose him to some Ultimate Truth that man was never meant to know. Also, maybe in order to keep his strength up, he does some meth or something, that would make it more believable to me that he could loose his mind. Again, you might suggest that the hero is unstable to begin with, forshadows the madness, and misdirects viewer to expect the "he was crazy and hallucinating the whole time" ending.

- Not showing the monster is a little overdone lately, IMO. Showing it too much mainly hurts you through the cheapness of the monster. That's mainly if it's cheap in terms of effort as well as money. In Alien (which is usually what people are trying to emulate with underlighting and not showing the monster), they do SORT of show you the monster quite a bit, just a hand, the mouth, is that a tentacle or a tail? Maybe if you just show the hand in one scene, you can go all out on your hand makeup effects, then all out on the face make up in scenes that just show it's face. Then maybe a shot or two of the whole thing in silhouette, just see enough to be able to tell that it's weird, not just a guy in a gorrilla suit or something.

- If you know any guys who are already kind of scary looking, or at least big, that could minimize the effort neccessary to make them into a monster. Like that Barrymore guy or Rondo Hatton. They don't have to be THAT weird looking though, maybe just a really big guy.

- Could the demon be harming people close to the hero through some indirect, magical means? Like when it gets the hero, instead of killing him it drinks a little of his blood or something, and then that somehow causes something bad to happen to someone else every time. Like it's reading his mind to pick it's next victim, who breaks out in terrible boils and dies, or becomes possesed or something. Maybe it could all be the hero's fault, so it's that much more awful.
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ulthar
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« Reply #37 on: February 10, 2007, 07:21:40 AM »

On the Hero:

I like the idea of an anti-hero, someone who when we first meet him, we think he's unlikely to 'rise to the occasion.'  Perhaps also overdone lately, but Carpenter used just th right amount of this in THE THING.  MacReady kinda resisted being the hero through the whole thing, and just found himself thrust into a bad situation.

Something like that makes the main antagonist MUCH more believable as a real character.

Sorry if someone's already mentioned this.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Hathaway:  I noticed you stopped stuttering.
Bodie:      I've been giving myself shock treatments.
Professor Hathaway: Up the voltage.

--Real Genius
CoreyHeldpen
Bad Movie Lover
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Karma: 19
Posts: 204


I think these komodos need to leave this cruise.


« Reply #38 on: February 10, 2007, 10:54:49 AM »

I lost this thread somehow and started asking about it in the movies for a cold night thread. So, if you saw me begging for directions there, I'm OK, I found it again.

Some blog had some ideas about a new Friday The Thirteenth movie that I think could apply: http://x-entertainment.com/updates/2007/01/10/a-new-friday-the-13th-flick-yase-yase/

Meant to mention before that if I sometimes talk like you're a mountain dew swilling youtube retard, it's only because I've seen so much low budget horror made by mdsytrs. You don't come off that way (or you'd be calling people fags for saying stuff should be subtly implied and stuff).

Alrighty, I was going to keep numbering my notions for easy reference, so that even the really unoriginal one's would be immortalized under my name. People on movie sets would say "Employ Munger's cinematic horror principle five!" But now the original poster's using numbers, so I'll go to bullets or something.

- How about a monster that looks pretty much human, but with horns instead of eyes? Simple (just stick horns with pinholes to see through over the guy's eyes, maybe some fake blood if they're supposed to have grown through the eyes of a regular person who's transformed) Then you kind of combine the traditional archetypal underwood deviled ham devil with the freaky, "it has no eyes, yet can see me through some weird, otherworldly means" thing from Alien.

- Like the idea of giving it a better than usual motivation for killing people. Always thought that when they call the monster a demon, that kind of implies that they're trying to accomplish some larger purpose for their master, Satan, like the cursed thingies in the Friday 13th TV series. Maybe driving the hero insane is part of this? Maybe it could act a LITTLE like the T-1000 in T2, fond of exploiting the hero's concern for people close to him. Speaking of the hero going insane, maybe the catalist for that is a combination of the stress/ sleep deprivation/ despair/ etc of fighting the demon, maybe you could do the old Lovecraft standby of having the demon expose him to some Ultimate Truth that man was never meant to know. Also, maybe in order to keep his strength up, he does some meth or something, that would make it more believable to me that he could loose his mind. Again, you might suggest that the hero is unstable to begin with, forshadows the madness, and misdirects viewer to expect the "he was crazy and hallucinating the whole time" ending.

- Not showing the monster is a little overdone lately, IMO. Showing it too much mainly hurts you through the cheapness of the monster. That's mainly if it's cheap in terms of effort as well as money. In Alien (which is usually what people are trying to emulate with underlighting and not showing the monster), they do SORT of show you the monster quite a bit, just a hand, the mouth, is that a tentacle or a tail? Maybe if you just show the hand in one scene, you can go all out on your hand makeup effects, then all out on the face make up in scenes that just show it's face. Then maybe a shot or two of the whole thing in silhouette, just see enough to be able to tell that it's weird, not just a guy in a gorrilla suit or something.

- If you know any guys who are already kind of scary looking, or at least big, that could minimize the effort neccessary to make them into a monster. Like that Barrymore guy or Rondo Hatton. They don't have to be THAT weird looking though, maybe just a really big guy.

- Could the demon be harming people close to the hero through some indirect, magical means? Like when it gets the hero, instead of killing him it drinks a little of his blood or something, and then that somehow causes something bad to happen to someone else every time. Like it's reading his mind to pick it's next victim, who breaks out in terrible boils and dies, or becomes possesed or something. Maybe it could all be the hero's fault, so it's that much more awful.


You've got some really good ideas there. I particularly like the "horns replacing the eyes" bit! And I can assure that I am not just some mountain dew swilling YouTube retard, those guys really tick me off.

Again, thanks for all the advice!
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Dr. Whom
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« Reply #39 on: February 10, 2007, 11:15:08 AM »

And when you have your hero go mad, or possessed or whatever, try screwing with reality a bit. Keep the imagery realistic ( ie no warped 'monster vision' or coloured lense effects), yet disturbing enough, so that the viewer will go 'did I just see that?'. Don't overdo it, but insert a couple a sequences, just to keep everyone off balance.

As for the showing the monster: it should be there alright. There is a world of difference between something that is just seen partly, or glimsed too briefly on the one hand and something that isn't seen at all. In Alien you saw plenty of the monster, you just didn't see everything at the same time.
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BoyScoutKevin
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« Reply #40 on: March 08, 2007, 09:00:54 PM »

Fear of unknown

This time I agree with dvix712. "Descent" for me was far scarier, when I didn't know what might be down in the cave. One I did know what was done there, I could deal with it.
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JPickettIII
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« Reply #41 on: March 10, 2007, 12:28:10 AM »

You know what scares the pi$$ out of me is the unknown.  The mind can be the scariest place of all.  You should use the viewers thoughts against them. 

John
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