Clichés in horror films that must die

Demonizing the clichés in a genre would be to deprive it from those elements that found a place in the heart of the audience and that have been there for a long time, mostly out of their desire. However, horror, just like everything in life, must also evolve at the same time its fans do, and there are certain clichés that no longer convince a mind from the 21st century. Here’s a list of some of them, I believe, should disappear or turn up a notch.

Running out of battery

When cell phones first appeared in movies, they gave us the perfect excuse to trap our characters in dangerous situations and became another obstacle of those that must swarm the main storyline. What happens is that technology has progressed and so has the audience’s ability to buy that excuse. We learned the lesson: we must charge our battery fully and, if possible, have one of those portable ones. So you, the screenwriter who must put the character’s life upside down, have to come up with something better.

A variant of this cliché is the ‘there’s no signal here’ line, which we can still squeeze a bit more because it’s true there are certain spots where the signal is low or none at all (You don’t have to climb Everest. There are some coffee shops in my town where cell phones are useless, except for taking a picture of your lunch). In this case, the important thing is that word I love to throw there as much as possible: PLAUSIBILITY. If your main character’s phone has no signal, it must happen in a believable way.

Jumpscare in the mirror

Yes, at the beginning of times it scared the life out of us when the character in question was washing their face and looked up to find a ghost on the mirror, or when they closed the bathroom cabinet and saw the demon that was tormenting them. But those times are a thing of the past. “Are you saying we cannot use a mirror to scare anymore?”, I hear you scream. God, no. It won’t be me who deprives the horror genre of that wonderful element of fear. But I do challenge you to find another angle to use it from. There you have the gauntlet if you want to pick it up…

It might be the wind

Alright, if my bedroom’s door slams closed itself and the window is open, my rational mind will put two and two together because it’s wired to do so. It will do it even if the window is closed in an attempt to hold onto physical evidence. However, if I hear someone whisper my name, the appliances in my house start working out of the blue or everyone around me begin to die in strange circumstances, maybe (just maybe) I will consider the option of something beyond rationality happening. Deniers exist but we have already seen too many inexplicable phenomenons on TV news, movies, and books to entertain the idea of something weird happening to us at least for a short while.

What are you saying? That this is making your life as a writer more difficult? Well, welcome to the wonderful world of telling stories in the 21st century, after thousands of years of having told a huge amount of them. It’s your turn to sit down and think a good plot twist.

The backseat

Year 2020. Who sits down in the car without looking at the backseat before, specially if you are being chased by a vindictive demon you just woke up by opening a box you shouldn’t have touched? Please, let’s find something else. The mirror is in the right position (it’s the character’s car, they know). It’s not necessary to turn it round to see the killer reflected on it.

My kid draws weird stuff but it’s okay

Children are another wonderful element of horror that it’s still being used in the right way. But there are still some writers who must have been locked up in a cabin in the mountains without knowing that, after so many testimonials in TV shows like the Oprah show, we already learned that if a kid draws people with their head off, there might be something really wrong going on.

Despite this being a great resource that when done right will surely add some creepiness to the story, I challenge you to use different elements to let the audience know the child is witnessing some paranormal activity. If you want to learn how not to use this element, please watch Mary (Michael Goi, 2019) and Voices (Angel Gomez Hernandez, 2020).

The car won’t start

From the creators of “the phone is out of battery”. Let’s think about this for a minute. When you are planning to go up to the isolated house in the lake your parents have (mine didn’t have any but it seems in movies every parent does. Lucky them!), what’s the first thing you do? Charge the phone battery, fill up the tank and buy some food. So if you only drove your car to the house, you still have fuel left to go back home. Don’t tell me the car won’t start.

Could it have broken down? Of course! It happens in real life but this is fction, and then again, here it goes my favorite word: PLAUSIBILITY.

The killer is slower than you, and yet…

I have the feeling horror films killers come out of a Marvel’s comic book (or DC’s. I choose no side) because they have the superpower of walking more slowly than a 80-year-old lady and yet they catch the poor fool who thought he could get away by being the star of the track team. I insist: villains deserve to have a couple of brain cells as well.

Following this, let me talk about another version of the slow killer: the indestructible murderer. Unless we talk about the Devil himself (and we would have a lot to discuss on this), we the real people are all mortals. If your killer has just been lighted on fire, it’s only logical he dies, just like any of us would do in the same situation. You don’t want his end to come so soon? Well then, you must think and search in your twisted horror writer’s mind and find something good to shock the audience.

I’m not leaving this (haunted) house

Personally I love a good haunted house story. In fact, I would be one of those people who would gladly spend a night in one like in The Haunting (Jan De Bront, 1999). But if in the house I just bought, some obvious paranormal phenomenon begins to happen and a family member is suspiciously weird (I don’t know, he might have just strangled his daughter. Things happen…), maybe it’s time to find another place to sleep. Yes, I know I invested everything I had in this house and I have nobody in the whole world to turn to. But there are still motels and benches in the park, anywhere but in the haunted hideout of a psycho ghost.

Two good examples of how to convince me to stay in a hauntd house are The haunting of Hill House (Mike Flanagan, 2018) and Housebound (Gerard Johnstone, 2014). For everything else, Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012).

Not now, it’s better at night.

Night time and darkness are two essential tools to scare people and I won’t be asking you to stop using them. Now, when the story has already advanced and the horror manifestations are obvious and are increasing, it’s ridiculous to accept the character in question will wait for the most dangerous time of the day to face the monster (unless you justify this a very good way). You can’t have the poor ghost working hard all day to manifest and your character not noticing until 3.15 a.m. Show some respect for the afterlife!

If there is any other cliché you would like to add to the list, please let me know. If you liked this post, you can subscribe to my blog to receive my monthly newsletter (and you’ll also be supporting this horror writer trying to scare people). Whatever you decide, thank you for reading my blog!