From Issue 15, March 2004:

Supernatural Horror

by Nic Ransome

(Complete Article: From time to time we will publish full articles on our website, particularly when connected to an event, promotion or scheme.)

Nic Ransome, who teaches a Horror genre screenwriting seminar, looks at Supernatural Horror, a sub-genre in the UK Film Council’s fourth 25 Words Or Less scheme.

From the damp patch on a Tokyo apartment’s ceiling (Dark Water) to the tidal wave of the army of the undead sweeping Sauron’s army before them on Pelennor field (The Return Of The King), Supernatural Horror tropes are again at the centre of the contemporary film narrative. Not only is there obvious international box office potential, but Supernatural Horror is more Euro-friendly than other Horror sub-genres (Slasher, Urbanoia, Body Horror, Cannibal) because of its roots in folklore rather than in urban legend or the modus operandi of serial killers. 

The Supernatural dwells behind, beside, above, beneath; it seeps in, slips through, bursts out, rises up and drops down, it is everything that monotheistic religion, cognitive psychology and global capitalism have pushed out to the margins. Animistic, atavistic and archaic, the spirits, ghosts, djinns and elementals drag us shaking and screaming back to our quintessential selves, back to a landscape where society, culture, economics and military hardware count for nothing.

Turn to p.23 [of Issue 15] for a moment and you’ll read Nigel Kneale’s opinion of Robert Wise’s The Haunting (‘junk’); clearly he was unimpressed. The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson on the other hand stated in a recent Guardian article (30.01.04) that he was so frightened by the same film that he was too scared to move his hand in order to switch channels. Apart from The Haunting remake, for which you’d be hard pressed to find an advocate, Supernatural Horror is arguably the most subjective of all sub-genres, the fear response being so determined by cultural, social and historical factors. Although the underlying, archetypal sources of fear cut across geographies and epochs, their narrative and visual representation can range from a white-faced woman (A Chinese Ghost Story) to some pulsating green blobs (Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape).

While the edict ‘show, don’t tell’ covers 95% of all narrative screenplays, Supernatural Horror sits in the 5% for which this rule doesn’t quite go far enough. The unwritten rule of Supernatural Horror is ‘suggest, don’t show.’ In the age of CGI-for-all, more than ever we live in a world where everything is shown, from the inner dance of molecules and the firing of synapses to the colliding of worlds and the mass infection of the population. Supernatural Horror is inherently reactionary; it dismisses five thousand years of human progress and asks how we would act if we came face-to-face with the shadows on the cave wall.

So what are the primary building blocks of Supernatural Horror? Anyone who’s come across John Truby’s 22 Step program will know that ‘The Ghost’ is what Truby calls that part of the protagonist’s back-story that still haunts them (for example the murder / suicide in The Others). In Supernatural narratives this haunting is literal. The protagonist’s inner and outer dilemmas are closer together than in any other genre, the inner dilemma often literally personified by the antagonist, who also, as usual, personifies the outer dilemma. So, stop the antagonist – usually by sending it back from whence it came – and both dilemmas are solved; but that’s not where true Supernatural Horror ends, hence the prolific use of twist and sting-in-the-tale endings.

By definition, the Supernatural cannot be contained, circumscribed or erased. Horror, at its most fundamental level, plays out Freud’s return of the repressed, and as all humanity is only too painfully aware, you can’t ever fully destroy the repressed, the best you can do is repress it again – whether it’s for a lunar 28 days, an illuminated 23 years (Jeepers Creepers) or an apocalyptic 2 millennia (Lost Souls); or until the studio decides to green-light yet another sequel or remake.

In 1957, Jacques Tourneur directed the masterful Night Of The Demon (from the story Casting The Runes by M. R. James; scripted by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester) creating one of the classics of the Supernatural Horror sub-genre. The protagonist, Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) is a psychologist. In the up-coming Gothika (written by Sebastian Gutierrez) Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist. This is no spooky co-incidence. By making the protagonist an empirical scientist, you instantly set up a conflict between the known and unknown worlds, forcing the protagonist to traverse irrational terrain with the mind-set of a rationalist: instant drama.

Ghost narratives sit between the Supernatural (what Todorov named ‘the marvellous’; tangible but inexplicable) and the Cognitive Uncanny or Fantastique (in McKee’s terminology ‘the Super-Uncanny’; is it all in the mind?) As with the paranoid identity crises and memory relativity of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian Sci-Fi, Supernatural Horror tears-up our paper-thin sense of reality; punctures the membrane between the everyday and the extraordinary. In other Horror sub-genres the fear is specifically of physical pain, of disease, of penetration, of inbred backwoodsmen. In Supernatural Horror the defining fear is of madness, of reality not being as definitive as we believe.

In 1942, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur pre-defined Todorov’s Fantastique with the seminal Cat People. In Tourneur’s masterpiece, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) may be a woman who turns into a panther, or may be a woman stalked by a panther, or may be a woman going mad imagining the whole thing. Most Supernatural Horror films play out their entire narrative in the realm of the marvellous. Some start in the realm of the Fantastique and resolve in the Supernatural. Rarely, a film dwells in the Fantastique for all twelve reels.

What Lies Beneath – along with Final Destination one of only a handful of genuine Fantastique narratives made in recent years – cleverly takes the idea of the back-story ghost – Dr Norman Spencer’s (Harrison Ford) murdered mistress – and has it haunt his wife Claire (Michelle Pheiffer) rather than Spencer himself, thus splicing Supernatural Fantastique Horror with Drama (Claire’s daughter has just left home; her marriage is falling apart) and Thriller (mystery plus jeopardy). It is the haunting that drives the plot forward. Supernatural Horror splices well with Thriller because there is either a literal mystery (What / who is the antagonist? What is its / their motivation?) Or, in Fantastique, a literal plus an ontological one (Is the antagonist real at all?)

Supernatural Horror also has much in common with Psychodrama – something in the past ‘haunts’ the psyche of the protagonist – and is often spliced with it. The Others and The Sixth Sense are both Family (by Family I mean the story genre where the dilemmas of the adult / parent and the child are symbiotic) Psychodrama splices. Remove the Supernatural element (i.e. omit the major reveal) from these films and you’re left with Family Psychodrama.

There are three basic approaches to the Supernatural Horror premise: take a known malevolence and place it in its traditional setting, invent an unknown malevolence and place it in an original setting, or re-imagine a known malevolence and place it in a contemporary setting (although I’d personally love to see a Xenomorph alien hive discovered in the wine cellar of a Regency-era country mansion, or, for that matter, of Regency House Party).

Supernatural Horror, due to its focus on the protagonist’s state of mind, can in theory be set anywhere in any period, but within that setting there must be an isolated location in which most of the action occurs, whether it is the space ship of Event Horizon (Supernatural Horror-Sci-Fi splice), the WWI trench of Deathwatch (Supernatural Horror-War splice) or the Glasgow sink estate of Urban Ghost Story (Supernatural Horror-Drama splice).

Thematically, Supernatural Horror is at core about the mutability of sanity and reality. This thematic resonance is heightened by a loop or ambiguous ending. Even narratives that end in redemption, the re-establishing of the status quo, a return to normality or the end of a psychotic episode hint that the world is a far darker, scarier and ultimately less knowable place than we could ever imagine.

Of all the Horror sub-genres, the Supernatural and Fantastique definitively require a solid grasp of certain specific screenwriting techniques: suspense (especially where the origin is concealed or off-screen), hypnagogic and hypnopompic transitions (my terminology for a character entering and leaving dream reality within a film narrative), the ‘startle’ and portraying the interior thoughts and feelings of your protagonist without writing prose.

Dark Castle Entertainment (Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver) are the reigning kings of the Supernatural Horror, um… castle, not only producing remakes of William Castle’s back catalogue such as Thir13en Ghosts and the wonderfully vicious House on Haunted Hill – an artfully knowing re-imagining of Castle’s milieu – but also Ghost Ship and Gothika.

The Hollywood remake of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water – adapted by Rafael Yglesias and starring Jennifer Connelly – is already on the way, surely a box-office shoo-in after the global success of the Hollywood remake of Ring (adapted by king-of-the-twist Ehren Kruger). Kruger has also adapted Ring 2, filming in spring 2004 and again starring Naomi Watts. All three films are based on novels by Kôji Suzuki, an indication of the importance of literary inspiration to Supernatural Horror. Prose can be the perfect medium for the elliptically suggestive, the creeping menace and the first-person psychology so central to this sub-genre.

England also has a rich history of ghost stories and the haunted gothic, from Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, M. R. James and Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw through Daphne du Maurier to James Herbert and Clive Barker. The success of Harry Potter has also prompted a remarkable renaissance in the UK publishing industry, many of the current slew of Supernatural-themed children’s books being more than accessible to adults.

UK development mavens Terry Ilott and Lizzie Francke have both gone on record (see ScriptWriter Issues 6, 7 and 12) to state that Supernatural Drama (or, in Soho-speak, Gothic or psycho Horror) is their preferred sub-genre of Horror. The UK Film Council have now followed suit. So the challenge is there: an original, suspenseful, slow-burning, British, Supernatural Horror; big on mood, small on bytes.