In this Halloween edition of Blueprints, Jorge Molina looks at one of the most iconic opening sequences in horror film history. Do not hang up...
Creating and building tension is one of the most important things a successful horror movie has to accomplish. It’s done, among other tools, through a combination of music, camera angles, and juxtaposition of light and shadow; that is to say, it’s done almost entirely audio-visually.
But every successful horror movie was first a successful horror script. How does a writer project escalating tension, that dreadful atmosphere so vital in horror, in the page, with nothing but words as a weapon? Let’s take a look at our favorite scary movie to find out.
Scream
Written by: Kevin Williamson
[You can read the full script here. I will be talking about these pages and this scene.]
At the writing stage of the filmmaking process, all there is are the words that the screenwriter has put on the page. The entire world and characters exists solely in Courier font. And yet it has to feel like the reader is watching the finished movie as they read through it. They have to hear the dialogue, see the camera pans, feel the fear.
1996’s horror satire “Scream” has earned its place as an all-time great in part because of Kevin Williamson’s script that parodies the horror genre while at the same time being a worthy entry within it. Apart from the murder mystery structure and a group of iconic characters, Williamson (who is rumored to have finished the script in a three-day binge) finds a way to use writing devices like punctuation and sentence structure as a mood-building equivalent for pregnant pauses, camera reveals, and music cues.
At the start of the iconic opening sequence, his writing style is very straight forward. Calm and determined, with full and short-stop sentences. Just like the scene of normalcy he’s depicting: just another night in the life of Casey, an all-American teenage girl. She happens to get a wrong call. But nothing to worry about.
But then things start to change. Something is wrong.
Capitalized, onomatopoeic sounds (the RINGS and CLICKS of the telephone) interrupt the flow of Casey’s tranquil evening. The sentences start to get more fractured. They don’t end at full stops anymore. Williamson starts to use ellipses; open-ended, unfinished, ready to be interrupted.
This escalation of tension grows gradually through the page, until it is clear that Casey is being chased by a psychopath. By then, the writing has become as frantic and dispersed as Casey is feeling in that moment.
Ellipses are usually used to signify the trailing of a thought, a hesitation, or the omission of information. Williamson uses them in all three ways at once, separating every clause with them (they’re not even full sentences at this point), as if every thought was unfinished, quickly being taken over by a more pressing one. It creates a feeling of hyper-alertness; whatever is chasing Casey could jump out of the page in the next line. It makes the reader feel like a viewer.
Towards the end of the scene, Casey’s parents show up. They’re still living in a state of blissful ignorance and normalcy, so the sentences briefly return to a full-stop, mostly coherent format, before launching again into chaos when they discover Casey’s body.
When it comes to the dialogue, most of Williamson’s lines translate almost verbatim into the finished sequence, but they wouldn’t have the same ring or urgency if he also hadn’t built the mood to back them up from the start.
"Scream" is famous for having one of the most unexpected and trope-bending opening sequences in horror history, and it’s safe to say that it all started in Williamson’s keyboard (typewriter? notebook? café napkins?). His ingenious use of grammatical syntaxis managed to charge the written version of the movie with as much dread, uncertainty, and horror as Drew Barrymore looking out her patio window.
Now tell us below. What’s your…
favorite…
scary movie?