Halloween is over, and in the past month I’ve seen more than my fair share of horror films to suit the season. As the minutes passed, turning my eyes into crusty orbs of slime, I kept jerking my head back in annoyance, muttering, “Oh come on!” Never have I seen such vapid and ridiculous characters running about doing things that, more often than not, encourage their own destruction. Why have so few filmmakers attempted to match the raw power and excellence of films like the Exorcist, The Omen, or Halloween?
What am I talking about? I’m talking about the idiot who goes off alone into the woods to check out a noise AFTER they’ve found out there’s a monster lurking about killing people. The soldier who loses his cool and threatens everyone after the zombie outbreak, even though soldiers are trained to handle stress while we civilians aren’t. The fact that everyone always turns their backs on a killer/zombie/monster once they think they’ve killed it, so that they don’t see the thing get up again to attack them. I’m talking about realistic character action.
It may look like I’m picking on horror movies unfairly, and this is true, because you can see signs of this kind of bad writing in every genre, except drama. In a drama, you don’t often have car chases, explosions, people dying violent deaths, or monsters to heighten the story. In drama, all you have is character, and it seems to me that writers who are interested in stories that don’t contain larger than life plots take character much more seriously than genre filmmakers do. There are always exceptions, but for some reason, genre film is where writing is at it’s worst.
I think there are a lot of reasons for this problem, because of overproduction, people who shouldn’t be writing are. Production costs are going up and there’s less time to work the kinks out of a story before going into production. The world has become such a complicated a place, I’m not sure writers have the knowledge they need to write believable characters. But the real reason is that I’m older and less patient with bad writing than I used to be.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say, “Hey, what do you want? It’s a zombie/monster/action movie!” I don’t think genres should take their characters any less seriously than drama does. Sadly there’s a whole generation that has never seen a film before Michael Bay hit the scene, and they don’t expect more. To many, a film is nothing more than an amusement park ride - it’s an experience. One need only look at the success of films like Paranormal Activity, where their idea of suspense is the long wait between ‘jump’ scenes. Getting your audience to ‘jump’ doesn’t take skill, real suspense does, and it’s more effective. Seen Kubrick’s The Shining?
If a film is intended for a human audience, then the characters must be relatable to a human audience. If a character in your outline does something that is clearly against their best interests (like going upstairs, alone in the dark knowing the killer is probably up there), don’t force it. These turning points are among the most interesting challenges a writer faces. Sometimes you devise creative roadblocks that realistically forces them to do what they normally wouldn’t. If you can’t come up with an appropriate roadblock, let the character make their own decision. It often takes the plot in a more creative, interesting direction. The control must always be a balance between the writer and the character.
A good example is this summer’s Predators. Clearly they didn’t have a big budget, and one thing that can save an underfunded action movie is an engaging script, but alas they failed. In one scene a character recounts a tale she heard about her countrymen facing a Predator, and that they were able to avoid detection by smearing mud on their skin (an obvious reference to the original Predator film). So what do the characters do? They wait until everyone is dead, except for two people, before they use the mud. I’m sorry but that’s just plain bad writing. What they could have done was gone with the mud right after it’s mentioned. They start getting an upper hand in battling the alien threat, but then the Predators would quickly react, “Crap, they’re using the mud against us!” Then the predators would find a way around this problem. This way you have a constant battling of tactics that ups the game and dramatics, without upping the budget.
Another thing I need to single out, is the military. When writing these characters, for God’s sake do some research. It looks really bad when soldiers don’t use the most basic of tactics. Soldiers and Police have ways of advancing and clearing rooms safely, but you’d be hard pressed to see them do that in most films. It makes my eyes and head loll back when the soldiers start to die because they don’t use these tactics. I’m not in the military, but with all the zombie movies I’ve seen in the past month I thought I’d get whiplash from how many times I rolled my head muttering, “Oh come on!” Soldiers and police are often portrayed ignorantly, but no one is more stupid than a soldier in a zombie movie. Zombie film writers must really hate soldiers?!
If your characters are smart, then you need even smarter villains. If you can’t get smarter villains (as in the case of zombies), then you need to add conditions that give the threat the upper hand, but something believable and not arbitrary. Having smart characters is a good thing. It keeps the audience guessing. It engages the viewer’s mind. It’s as important to get them by the brains as it is to get them by the heart. It all comes down to suspension of disbelief. If the characters aren’t believable, how can I be expected to take the monster/killer/zombie seriously?
