Horror is red-hot at the box office, but what is up next for the genre?
Ideas flowed freely at the San Diego Comic-Con panel for Bold Voice of Contemporary Horror: Tenth Anniversary Edition, which took place on July 24. Panelists included both actors and behind-the-camera talent, including Dan Stevens, star of AMC series “The Terror”; Deborah Ann Woll, star of Shudder’s upcoming thriller “The Cycle”; director Zachary Wigon, who helmed Bleecker Street’s “Victorian Psycho”; and Dave Boyle, who directed SXSW audience award winner “Never After Dark.” The discussion was moderated by Michael Lerman, the co-founder and director of film programming at the genre-based Overlook Film Festival, and was curated and produced by Rachel Walker.
What were their thoughts and theories? Read more below.
Keeping audiences on their toes by not being boxed into one type of genre.
Touching on different tones is a great way to keep viewers discombobulated and primed for a scare.
“I mentioned ‘The Descent’ as being one of my favorite movies. Part of the reason for that is that it shifts,” Woll said. “You’re not always quite sure what kind of horror movie you’re in. Is it a psychological thriller? Is it a survivalist thriller? Is it a creature feature? To me, films that can play with genre in that sense are often the most engaging. When I read this script [for ‘The Cycle’], that immediately made me say, ‘I have to do this.’”
Bring in ideas from other types of storytelling, even if they’re not fully reflected in the final work.
Creatives should take from everything they’ve ever worked on — even if it doesn’t immediately seem transferable.
“I think that the thing that really prepared me to jump into the genre was working on action, just because of how precise and communicative you have to be,” Boyle said. “There are so many moving pieces, so many things to think about and keep track of. Working in Japan for the first time, it’s interesting; Japanese scripts leave half the page blank. Then the director actually draws in the cuts where each cut is gonna happen, so that you have a real sense of how the movie’s going to come together, and there’s a real precision to it if you use that system and lean into it. That’s what prepared me to jump into my favorite genre, which is horror.”
Horror mixed with humor continues to be on the rise.
This goes even beyond the influx of funny directors like Zach Cregger and Curry Barker making their mark on the industry.
“Something I’m pleased to see spreading at the moment is horror with more humor attached,” Stevens said. “I find that humor is so powerful in horror and can often be overlooked. It’s sometimes a scary word when you mention that to producers: ‘I’d like to bring some humor into this.’ ‘It’s not a comedy.’ ‘I know it’s not a comedy, but by bringing some humor in, by bringing elements of humor, you bring in humanity, which I think exists in even the most batshit of situations.’ That can really ground a story sometimes. I’ve really enjoyed seeing a proliferation of those kinds of movies recently.”
Revel in withholding some information from the audience to make for even bigger payoffs.
Conjure up interest by dropping some clues that don’t get solved right away.
“I feel like horror is a subgenre of mystery,” Wigon said. “When I think about horror storytelling, it’s almost like you have a patchwork quilt, and you can’t see what’s in any of the patches at the beginning of the movie. Then as it goes along, you start to reveal that this is one little patch, that’s one little patch, and you’re creating mystery because the audience doesn’t understand how these patches connect to one another, and that’s the game that everybody’s playing. Then as it goes along, you start to realize that you’ve been looking at one image the whole film, and the pleasure is in seeing how these seemingly disparate pieces of information come to connect.”
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