10 Tricks Horror Movies Use To Scare You

10. Dramatic Irony

It's a classic literary device that often gets taught alongside the legendary likes of pathetic fallacy, both techniques being ways to appeal to the reader's involvement with a narrative outside of the characters' understanding. It's also one of the most important ways to build tension, giving your audience or reader the knowledge to work out what is going to happen next, and then letting them watch in terror as the characters stumble blindly forward.

One of the very best examples of this being used in horror is the old pantomime favourite: "he's behind you"!", in which our hapless characters know nothing of the awful fate approaching them from the background. Now pantomimes aren't scary (depending on how you feel about participatory theatre) but the same theory applies: the audience are frustrated and on edge because the characters can't figure out what we know.

Hush is a film that works so well using this concept in its beginning, making the audience all too aware that our deaf protagonist is being targeted by a masked man who has just killed her friend but then making us wait for ages before she becomes any wiser to it.

Films like Terrifier utilise it in a different way too, using the audience's own awareness of the film's genre and contrasting it against the characters' blasé approach to things (and people) we know are dangerous. Even goofier movies like The Evil Dead II do this same thing, building tension from the fact we know something bad is going to happen imminently even though the characters just think they're going on a nice holiday in the woods.