10 Golden Rules For Making The Perfect Horror Movie

10. Suspense Is Far Better Than Surprise

Every film student is acquainted with Alfred Hitchcock's principle of suspense: A bomb that goes off in the middle of a conversation is much more engaging to an audience when we know it is there from minute one. It's safe to say the man who directed Psycho knew a thing or two about drawing an audience to the edge of their seats and keeping them there for 2 hours.

There are a lot of complaints in contemporary film discourse about "Jump Scares", and while I won't harp on this too much, I believe the conversation is somewhat misdirected. Jump scares are not the problem in modern horror films, but a symptom of the real problem.

A jump scare is a blanket term for any startling moment in a horror film that is unearned. When you make a cat hiss loudly at the camera, or a man with a chainsaw leaps out of a cupboard without any sort of buildup. These sort of scares startle - especially when a violin in the soundtrack shrieks in surprise - but they leave an audience feeling cheated, and they never stick with you.

The key to making your horror film effective in a moment to moment basis is not by withholding information, but rather by giving the audience enough information to terrify themselves with anticipation of the scary moments.

Directors like Hitchcock (or James Wan, to use a contemporary example) know viewers are anticipating scares from the get go, and feed you information that only heightens that anticipation as the film progresses toward its most shocking moments.