In life it’s easy to be scared. At any moment you could get attacked, injured, maybe even die. I think it’s fair to say that every person has experienced profound horror in their lives. So if it’s easy to be scared, and we all know what scares us, why is it so hard to make a scary movie?

Is it it hard to make scary movies? This is one of the first questions that I asked myself when we began to brain storm our movie ideas. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies that have terrified me to my core, so initially I thought the making a scary movie wouldn’t be a challenge for us. As we began to brainstorm different ideas my perspective quickly began to change. Many ideas that I thought about seemed so scary in my mind. I could picture myself in those situations and imagine how I would feel. When I had to share these ideas with my piers or teachers is when the problems begin. Transferring the sense of fear my idea gave me to paper or into words was really challenging. Later in this project, as we filmed and started editing, once again ideas we had tried hard to make scary we’re turning out to not be scary. With all this experience I had with my ideas “flopping”, I was curious if there was any information I could find to explain why this was happening.

In my reading I discovered that good horror is regarded as the hardest movie genre to make. One of the reasons that writing and directing experts agree on that is because of how abstract true horror can be. It’s decidedly hard to try and find the difference between something that just gets you scared in the moment, and something that gives you the sickening feeling of horror. Another reason is the difficulty of the filming needed. Many of our scenes might have been scary with better lighting, angles, sound, acting and much more to help build suspense. This is something even big movies can struggle with when intense horror scenes have to balance clarity with chaos.

I also tried to do some reflection on my own ideas. What was different when I took them from my mind and moved them to paper? To me the main difference was the sense of realism. In my mind my ideas had perfect acting, animation, lighting, sound, Camera angles and locations. When I had to write them out or film them some of these things could not be made perfect. By taking away the sense of realism it removed the feeling that the same thing might happen to me. This took away from the fear of the idea.

Overall I think that horror is the hardest genre to create. Even though we have all experienced it before it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was scary and then have the skills to create that exact idea. My next blog post will be about the creation of my class horror movie, so check that one out to see how we did.