Horror has been embedded in western culture for quite sometime. It is often associated with one’s ability to turn someone’s darkest fears and anxieties into a concrete form. The important question that rears its head most often when creating and observing a movie would be, what makes horror films scary?

 

Garry Leonard is a professor at the University Of Toronto and has been teaching horror film studies for more than 20 years. He believes that any scene in a film that includes pop outs can make an audience jump, but the sense of dread that films tap into that produces fear, is largely because the source of fear from within is unknown.

 

“You’ve got the people doing the music, people doing the sound, people doing the direction, people doing the lighting and the actors, so it’s very hard to say that great horror is great acting or horror is a great soundtrack, the best horror movies are when they all come together,” Leonard said.

 

Wes Craven is a legendary director and writer in the horror film industry. His first movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street, was released in 1984. Craven continued to deliver screams to the hungry horror audiences with the release of the 1996 horror film Scream. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Craven initially didn’t have as much of a budget which can be a weird advantage because you are forced to take it back to basics. Over budgeted horror films can fall apart in a way because they will have too much. A Nightmare On Elm Street, the first one, was quite ingenious, it’s much better than the sequel, they tend to get bad but Craven didn’t do all of them,” Leonard said.

 

According to Leonard, Craven was successful in the horror film industry because his scare tactics ran deeper than surface scares.

 

“That is the moment when I sit there and say ‘that is a great movie’. You’ve got this movie which is actually about divorce, being a teenager with a mother who has a drinking problem, your father is emotionally distant and unavailable, neither one of your parents have dealt with their issues and you’re now getting haunted by things that aren’t yours. How do you fight someone else’s monsters?”  Leonard said.

 

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Wes Craven was director Nick Simon’s mentor for many years and to work together on The Girl In The Photographs, Craven’s last production before his death on August 30. When working on the film, Simon gained horror inspiration from his mentor and the film’s executive producer.

 

“He helped me understand audience directing and horror audience directing. He would say ‘I know what you are trying to do with this piece’ that was in the movie for a long time ‘but this is really not working you should just get to this part faster’. He was great in that sense,” Simon said.

 

English actor Luke Baines played Tom in The Girl In The Photographs, the main antagonist in the film. He said he went the extra mile to ensure that his character was the scariest, creepiest, most believable serial killer he could portray.

 

"My favourite part of the process is the research. I love diving into a character and getting under their skin, finding out who they really are and developing a character. I spoke to a criminologist at John Jay College in New York and he works for the FBI and profiles serial killers. The best part about it was that it was true to life. I was giving him examples from the script and he was giving me examples from real life,” Baines said.

 

Check out an interview with Nick Simon and actor Kal Penn below: