1. Keep it short!
As in keep it to 90 minutes, give or take a few. No one is interested in your two hour (and counting) “horror films” because they are full of bloated writing. That almost always mean that you’ve wasted 30 minutes to an hour in the first act of your film on a red herring. And that leads to...
2. Skip the first act twist, we saw it coming half an hour before your dramatic reveal. Or, please don’t flatter yourself by calling your flick a psychological thriller
Horror films aren’t meant to be the cinematic equivalent of War and Peace. They won’t win writing awards. So spare us the incredibly protracted, unsubtle, red-herring filled first act that ends with an ‘unexpected twist’. We saw it coming because you made your actress over-act, and you accompanied her mugging with a soundtrack that would embarrass even a slasher flick. (Well, we felt the same way too about Leo in Shutter Island too.)
3. Make sure your story has a twist that matters
Or your twist basically just said to me, “You didn’t really have to step into the cinema until this point, where the real story begins.”
That said, you could watch Triangle and learn from Christopher Smith, a budding horror-meister. The bare bones premise is as cookie cutter as it comes. Five people end up on a deserted ocean-liner. They die, one by one at the hands of a masked slasher. Will the Last Girl survive?
Yet what the film does is to turn this seemingly average, undistinguished genre film into the 12 Monkeys of slasher flicks. Yes, there is a twist in the tale right at the end of the first act. No, the twist doesn’t invalidate anything you’ve seen so far. The twist – involving the nightmare of eternal regress – enhances the sense of horror, especially when you’re watching the Last Girl attempt to escape the Slasher again and again and again, playing different tricks, adopting different roles each time just to break out of the hellish cycle.
And to top it off, the twist occurs again, and again, and again – each time changing the story and the nature of the horror in the film. Now that is what I call truly inspired horror film writing, one that doesn’t waste the time of the audience.
Triangle is a low budget indie horror film with an excellent script that makes the best of its 90 minute running time. Together with Moon (another indie horror based on the fear of infinite regress), it marks the beginning of the return to form of British horror.