As many of you guys already know, I have always been a huge fan of the horror film genre. Even when I was probably way too young to be watching people gutted with a machete, hehehe! I was the kid with the ‘Fangoria’ monthly subscription and the B-Movie fetish growing up! But I loved every minute of it! Those flicks were just plain fun to me, you know? Excessive gore and all! The more blood and guts, the better!

Well, it wasn’t until a couple of my college roommates actually made the big move out to California and wanted to make a real go at being action/thriller/horror writers in the industry that I noticed something different. They were so proud of what they had written together, with dreams of it being one of those new classic movies that people would be talking about decades later as one of the best. But you know what? All of the studios they offered it to turned them down. But not for the reasons that you might think. The biggest complaint that they had was, “Your characters are too likable, too memorable, and relatable for a horror movie.” Ummm...what? But this was their major issue with the story as a whole. You simply can’t have likable people getting stabbed and chopped up and tortured! That would be traumatizing! Which is a really weird way to look at it (I mean, is anybody who is really deserving of a horribly gruesome death?), but that’s what they kept telling them as writers. Which is why, when you see most horror movies, the victims are either unlovable, brainless, or simply lack much personality if any at all. And that gave me a slightly different perspective on how these stories are written and how they are made in this day and age. Not just for horror stories...but for stories in general. It is the same in every genre. The connection to the characters and the situations that they are involved in can allow you to use your writing to turn the dial up and down as necessary when it comes to how you readers to feel about what’s going on. That relatable quality greatly influences the weight and impact of their journey and how your reading audience reacts to it. And that’s the topic for the day. Creating weight and impact, and how to moderate it. When to turn it up to 10...and when to maybe dial it back down to a 2.

It’s not an exact science, but it’s something to think about, no matter what it is that you’re writing about. So, let’s get started.

When talking about horror flicks, there’s this sort of trope of having what I would call a ‘horror movie memory’. This is when you’ve got a bunch of people running from the masked killer, or the demon, or the monster, whatever...and, naturally, casualties happen along the way. And it’s shocking to the other characters on the screen initially, and they scream out, “Noooooo!!!” Hehehe, and then two scenes later, it’s like it never took place. I mean, shock and survival instincts aside...didn’t your brother, sister, parents, best friend, boyfriend, JUST get violently murdered right in front of you less than an hour ago??? That’s kind of a big deal, don’t you think? But the movie has to treat this extreme incident like, “Oh well...that just happened. What’s next?” In order to lessen the overall terror involved with such a thing. WTF???

This would be an example of an event with little weight and less impact. Great for a gore fest of a horror movie...but not so much with other stories in other genres when you want to bring attention to the emotional battering of a serious or even devastating scene in stories of your own. Heartbreak, parental divorce, suicide, being outed at school against your will...these things all have drastic consequences that I always feel should be dealt with in ways that takes up more than a few random paragraphs in an author’s story. If you’re not going to really concentrate on it...then why add something so apocalyptic in your plot to begin with? There are smaller problems for your main characters to deal with that you can use for dramatic effect and still get your readers engaged with their situation. If it’s going to be the kind of issue that you want your protagonist to get over and move past in a rather short amount of time, then maybe not have him burn down a house full of screaming orphans! Obviously, that has lingering consequences that are going to last a lot longer than one or two chapters. You need to find a way to gauge your problems and solutions in your stories where they ‘question and answer’ of it all kind of match up at some point. Otherwise...you’re just going to end up with a bunch of WTF moments that can’t be undone later without some kind of a miracle. And miracles are lazy. Hehehe! So let’s not, shall we?

Psh! Like I’m one to talk!

I’m not saying that you can’t still use this strategy of a ‘horror memory’ in some cases to navigate your way through your story quickly and efficiently in order to keep things moving and avoid any lag time in your pacing...but take a moment and think about how that would be in real life. I mean, I could meet a total stranger on the bus...and if he got off and was suddenly hit by a truck and killed after I just spent the last two or three minutes talking to him, that would kind of mess me up emotionally. And that’s a random STRANGER! Imagine if it was someone that I knew extremely well and spent time with on a more personal level. But that’s just how movies go sometimes. “He’s dead, oh well. I mean, I can’t stop now. We’ll be fine.”

Hehehe, really? Will you, though? No intense, paralyzing, fear is setting in? No emotional distress, no trauma? Years of therapy, maybe? No? Ok then. Good for you, sole survivor of a horrific tragedy.

If you’re just looking for people to kill off or punish emotionally in your story, that’s your choice. But the real question is...how much weight will it have, depending on relatability, time spent with the character, and the severity of the actions both leading up to and coming after the dirty deed is done? All of these things matter. Lord knows, I definitely put my own fictional characters through the RINGER sometimes! But there are levels to manipulating the impact that these events are going to have on the rest of the story, you know?

This is the space that you’ve been given where you can play with the scale or weight and impact and set it to have the desired effect that you were going for. This can be a matter of infidelity from a beloved partner, or the betrayal of a trusted friend? A hidden secret brought to light, or the loss of a long time pet. It’s all in how you write about these things before they happen that will determine their impact. What kind of meaning do you want this action to have in your story, and how can you adjust your dial accordingly to have it seem natural? You can’t just toss in some drama for drama’s sake, and then gloss over it as though it didn’t happen. When writing a story, I think it’s important to have a clearly defined idea of how powerful you want certain moments to be, and how to emphasize your intentions in a way that makes sense.

A few examples to see if I can emphasize how sensitive (or desensitized) your pallet might be for the level of emotion that you’re trying to bring to parts of your story, or to your story as a whole...

In the 1968 movie, “Night Of The Living Dead”...it starts off in a graveyard, with one of the main female characters and her brother, Johnny. Now, we don’t really get introduced to these characters beforehand outside of some back and forth banter and dialogue...and we don’t have any real reason to care about them, to be honest. But we do. And when they’re attacked, and Johnny meets his end...his sister is completely and utterly traumatized by what happened for the rest of the movie! And it makes perfect sense. I mean, wouldn’t YOU be? This movie all happens in a single night, so watching your brother getting killed right in front of you seems like a pretty heavy burden to carry...even while fighting for your life.

This is that opening scene...

And that’s just one person...one that you didn’t even know anything about really before the movie started. And yet, that death has such an impact on the other character that she gives it meaning and depth, and a certain significance is born out of her reaction to it. One that people watching the film can understand and relate to. Especially back in 1968.

The weight and impact of that scene is turned way up on the dial with the goal of having it impact its audience in a major way.

Now...take a look at this...

This clip comes from the movie “2012”, about the end of the world (Basically), and a massive, unprecedented, earthquake hits Los Angeles as our protagonist rushes through the city to save his family from being lost forever. The focus is greatly shifted towards just that small group of people and the tension and terror is provided by giving the audience a much more manageable focus as they try to flee the wreckage. However...I want you to notice the difference here.

This is Los Angeles!!! Take a look at this! Millions upon MILLIONS of people are dying here! Being crushed and maimed and blown up and falling to their death into chasms of an almost infinite depth! All of them have lives, have families, have children...and they are running, crying, screaming, bleeding, burning to death, and suffering, with an unfathomable amount of pain. BUT...how traumatizing would it be for you to actually zoom in and focus on that all at once while it’s happening? It’s almost too much for anyone to handle. So they made the right choice here. Keep them unknown, faceless, casualties. You’d probably be curled up in a breathless ‘panic coma’ somewhere if you had to mentally calculate what was really happening in this chaos.

But that’s not the point of this scene, is it? Or the movie in general. It’s special effects and explosions and this one family that you can cheer for who’s trying to survive it all. (As thought everyone else on the street isn’t trying to do the same thing) You may cringe or gasp here and there, but ask yourself...do you care? Imagine a majority of the population of America’s BIGGEST city, men, women, and children alike, being completely decimated in a matter of minutes by being swallowed up by the Earth itself! This is a situation when the weight and impact dial is turned way waaaaay down, so as to be more ‘entertaining’ than terrifying.

Check it out...

Do you see the difference? Can you feel it? If “Night Of The Living Dead” had treated Johnny’s death as a simple casualty with no lasting effects...then he would have so much less of an impact on the story. Like….he died. So what? You know? Then having his sister pretend to be all broken up about it for a few minutes and just move on...it wouldn’t have come off as being authentic or believable. And yet, if in “2012”, we had been introduced to a bunch of characters and their families, knew about their dreams and their ambitions, and really worked to humanize them...only to have them be driving home and have the bridge collapse, or fall out of the top floor of a building...that would have been tragic in a way that would have taken away from the kind of ‘thrill ride’ that scene was trying to take us on.

There’s a dial. Understand? Learn how to use it in your benefit. Learn how to fine tune it to regulate the feelings that you want your audience to have to the characters and events of your story. It helps to create the desired effect, once you learn how to recognize it and add it to your skill set. Cool?

I hope this helps! And, as always, I like to have some fun with these! So the last clip is just to make you smile! ::Giggles:: Remember to use that dial correctly with whatever you’re putting out there, k? Happy writing! And I’ll seezya soon!