10 Golden Rules For Making The Perfect Horror Movie

There are people who like Eli Roth movies. I am not one of those people (unless you count Ingourious Basterds).

See, every time I watch an Eli Roth movie, I get a sinking sensation that it is missing something (besides a basic understanding of subtlety). I walk out dissatisfied, wanting an answer to why his films shock me, but don't scare me. The answer is a sense of empathy.

I am aware of the thriving market for horror films where awful things happen to awful people, but frankly, they do not scare or even disturb. A horror film that does not empathize with its characters is an incomplete piece - trying to have its cake without putting anything underneath the icing. Torture Porn films like The Human Centipede have uniquely creative concepts, sure, but they almost universally suffer from skewed perspective. And skewed perspective can lead to deeply flawed storytelling.

Horror films that lack characters we can empathize with can be shocking, but they can never be truly artful. Without a sense of hope, the audience is either left ambivalent to the violence or (even worse) yearning for the picture to be over. The way to get an audience through the bleakest of nightmares is to give them a person who they want to see make it out alright. If that person isn't there, the horror (and thus the film itself) is just red-colored white noise.