10 Golden Rules For Making The Perfect Horror Movie
7. Confine The Action As Much As Possible
Every horror film is about being trapped. Even ones that have nothing to do with claustrophobia.
How many classic horror films are globe-trotting adventures? The Omen and the first chapter of The Exorcist have their adventuring moments, granted, but I'll get back to those.
Everyone finds the idea of being trapped in a room with a dangerous entity scary. But our empathy with this setup has its limits. If your film cuts away from the hypothetical danger room scenario, you risk completely diffusing the tension.
Limiting the audience to a subjective viewpoint makes the danger feel more immediate. There are no easy ways out. Some filmmakers have toyed with this rule - in The Shining, Kubrick cuts away from the Torrence family once, in order to establish Halloran as a possible savior, only to bring the claustrophobia back in full swing when Halloran shows up at the Overlook Hotel.
Confinement doesn't have to only mean location either - it can also mean confining the chronology of the film. Halloween works like gangbusters because it takes place in one night, trapping the audience in the same head space as Laurie Strode. The examples I listed earlier, The Omen and The Exorcist both confine their audiences by making the worlds their characters take place in feel tiny compared to the demonic forces they're facing.
Without confinement, we have no reason to believe the characters can't get on a plane and fly to South America at a moments notice. And there's nothing scary about that. Except maybe the Zika virus.