Tonight, the BBC will be broadcasting what is – to my mind – the scariest film ever made. Indeed, I would go further than that, I would say this movie is the scariest human artwork in any form – and that includes novels, plays, stories, the lot. This film beats them all, and by a distance. What is it? Of course, I’m not going to tell you that straight off, that would break all the rules of scary suspense writing. First, I want to examine the underlying questions: why do we like being artificially scared? And what makes a particular ghost story or Dracula remake genuinely frightening?
The questions sound simple; they are not. Psychologists, biologists, philosophers – they’ve all tried to work out why some of us like synthetic chills, but the solutions come in bewildering variety. Some claim it is simply the thrill of arousal. Fearful experiences trigger specific physiological responses: a racing pulse, a surge of adrenaline, sharpened senses – as if a predator is on the prowl and you’ve caught the scent. Watching a horror film, you get the thrills without the spills, as we do with a roller-coaster. Learning to master these fears is an evolutionary advantage.
This explanation, however, has problems. What if you don’t actually master fear, but merely get habituated to it, by watching too many Hammer Horror flicks? That might be disadvantageous. You don’t want to be saying ‘been there, done that’, if a proper vampire enters the room, fangs gleaming.
For this reason, various other hypotheses have been advanced. Some claim we enjoy the pro-sociality: sharing ghost stories around a camp-fire is a bonding experience. Other thinkers point to morbid human curiosity: scary art allows us to explore taboo or terrifying subjects – death, rape, injury, murder, cannibalism. Another theory posits that our attraction to fear is a form of masochism, we enjoy the mental and physical pain – or maybe the relief that comes after the pain.
In truth, the answer is probably a complex mix of all these factors, and it will vary from person to person: we all know people who enjoy properly dangerous experiences – visiting war zones, glacier skiing – and we all know people who can barely stomach Nightmare on Elm Street.
Let’s turn then, to the subsequent question: what makes an artwork scary? As a pro thriller writer, this question mildly obsesses me. Indeed, when I first began thriller writing, I set out to learn the answer in practical terms. I taught myself how to chill readers (I hope), by reading all the frightening stories.
That sounds like the project of years, it barely took three weeks. There really aren’t that many books – to my mind – that give you sincere goosebumps. Writing scary is hard, possibly even harder than writing laugh-out-loud funny. In the end, I discovered five stories that gave me a frisson. And each of them taught me something different.
First, The Monkey’s Paw. Penned by the otherwise wholly obscure W. W. Jacobs, this classic Victorian chiller concerns a hideous talisman, the severed paw of the title – which allows the owner to make three wishes. The devilish twist is that these wishes always turn out to be a curse: the owner pays a horrible price. The story is a mere five pages long, yet in those pages, Jacobs invokes an atmosphere of pervasive dread. The lesson here is the value of a creepy high concept. If the core of your story is terrifying, that’s a good start.
My next success was The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood, a celebrated short story from 1907. This lacks a scary concept, and yet it still gave me shivers – because it works with mood, using small details of weather, landscape, location, and making them ominous – but not overdoing it. The takeaway here is that, as a writer, you don’t want to blast everything with a tornado; instead, have your characters gaze into the fog, or the wintry drizzle, or the bending riverside trees, seeing things. The imagination will do the rest.
The third book to offer a proper freak-out was The Woman in Black, Susan Hill’s beloved novella of a historic, rural haunting. Here the cleverness is in the plot; it is tight, taut, twisty, and it has a chilling and brilliant coda. Every writer knows that endings are important, it is possibly extra true for scary books. You want your readers to put the book down with a shudder of relief. Then they won’t forget it.
After this, I discovered The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. This classic haunted-mansion novel has now been made into two Hollywood movies (a great 1960s movie, a terrible 1990s remake). Jackson is good at flawed, flaky, unreliable characters. What I learned here is that you don’t want heroes – let alone superheroes – in your scary book or movie. Make ’em all human and vulnerable.
Finally, I read what is, to my mind, one of the finest but most underrated novels of the 20th century: The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. I’ve always loved the movie made from this book, but I had not encountered the original novel. When I read it, I realised that much of the film’s Satanic energy is sourced directly from the novel, like a kind of hellish electricity. Blatty’s genius was to give the possessing demon, Pazuzu, a personality. The demon is a living, breathing character, with a dry wit, even a horrible foul-mouthed charm, like a clever but nasty stepmother on the Lidl brandy. That makes it feel weirdly plausible. The everyday urban Washington location is another stroke of genius. This could happen to anyone.
All of which brings us back to movies, where we began. For many years, The Exorcist – which I ill-advisedly watched aged 14, sneaking into a London cinema on a school trip – was the scariest movie I had ever seen. Over the years, I’ve seen a few others which properly chilled me – Blair Witch Project, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Ringu. Nonetheless, The Exorcist reigned supreme.
Until, that is, the winter of lockdown, 2021, when I was so bored I took the advice of friends (‘honestly, you’ll never forget it’) and I watched Threads, the movie being re-broadcast by the BBC tonight. I won’t say too much in case I spoil things, but the movie is about an ordinary family in ordinary Sheffield in the deeply ordinary, shabby, early 1980s, who – along with the rest of the world – are thrust into nuclear holocaust. The bomb drops.
The film is horrifying, and it is genius. Apparently, it had a budget so small they had to use Rice Krispies and tomato ketchup to fake facial lesions from radiation. Perhaps the severe limitation of that budget forced the filmmakers (director/producer Mike Jackson, and his team) to be especially creative. The script, by Barry Hines (Kes), is likewise excellent – and cleverly naturalistic. The movie also applies most of the tricks I learned from reading scary books: e.g. the ending is so desperately, twistingly bleak it makes the denouement of The Woman in Black look like Happy-Ever-After. Apart from that, I shall say nothing. Just watch the movie. I won’t be joining you: once is definitely enough.
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