ABSTRACT
Horror movie writers have many sources they can draw from, in fleshing out a story that embodies the fear they’re writing about. “True-life” news items are one; Ed Gein, for example – the 1950s serial killer who also collected dead bodies – has inspired movies as different as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. Folk tales and urban legends also yield up scary material – from “Bloody Mary” (the demon at work in several modern movies), to deadly chain-letters (updated to a videotape in the 1998 film Ringu).
A writer’s own experience is another rich vein to mine – as Ari Aster, director of Hereditary (2018) has suggested, speaking about how ‘personal material’, when pushed through a ‘genre filter’, can emerge as a newly inventive kind of story. Literary forebears are infinitely adaptable – for instance, in modern vampire films like the Twilight series (that build on what the novel Dracula started, long before), or the eerie Frankenstein-makes-a-robot AI movie, Ex Machina. And other horror movies themselves can offer a creative spark. Writer-directors like John Krasinki (A Quiet Place) have gone on record as seeking guidance, from classics like Jaws and Alien.
