Screenwriting Insights | Writing Pandemic Horror

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By Neal Bell

In traditional horror movies, there’s a fairly simple formula: ‘normality’ is threated by the monstrous (from bug-eyed alien to crazed human being)… The ‘normal’ fights back – and the story ends when the monster is either destroyed, or it lives to run amok again.

But how does one create horror when there is no ‘normal’ anymore? When a pandemic has already killed over six million people worldwide – and shows no signs of subsiding as the Covid virus mutates one more time?

This is the challenge horror filmmakers have faced since 2020 – a challenge that’s both financial (Covid safety measures are estimated to add 20 to 40% to a film’s budget) and artistic. As the director Ben Wheatley puts it, “There’s a line in the sand, like pre – and post-Covid… and if you’re making stuff that doesn’t reference it, it feels really odd.” [1]

Early in the pandemic, Netflix had a surprising success reviving Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion – a 2011 film about a deadly virus out of control. (On March 6, 2020, Contagion was also the eighth-most-popular film on iTunes.) Instead of dodging fears of disease, audiences seemed to want to confront the ‘new normal’ we were all living in. And a number of indie horror films have done just that, in the last few years.

Host [2020] was one of the first to acknowledge how Covid was changing our day-to-day life. Set entirely in a Zoom meeting of friends (so all we ever see of the world is someone’s computer screen), the word ‘Covid’ is never mentioned; but the friends are so used to Zoom that they plan to hold a séance over it – old magic vs. new. And all is well – till the friends realize that a spirit has entered the Zoom room – and it isn’t a friendly spirit.

In the second half of this very short film, all hell breaks loose. And that’s when the weight of that unspoken nightmare – Covid – bears down on the story. Because all the characters (linked as they are by technology) are alone in their homes, unable to help (or even comfort) each other.

The pandemic began by isolating us all, as we went into ‘lockdown’ – and isolation, in Host, plays out in a way that’s truly chilling. What’s makes it even scarier is that – with five people facing the unknown alone, each in their own little Zoom box – you don’t know where to look, on the screen. All five are in jeopardy, at the same time but separated in space. So, you can’t prepare yourself for the next big scare, which could come from anywhere – like the Covid virus itself, which could infect anyone, at any time.

Director Ben Wheatley, who mentioned how Covid created a ‘before and after’ for storytellers, solved the problem of virus-protection on set, by shooting his pandemic film, In The Earth (2021), almost completely outside. There are only four main characters; it feels like the world is emptying out. And nature itself has turned hostile; in this film, Covid’s equivalent are clouds of spores that send the hapless humans on bad psychedelic trips.

Like In The Earth (which started as an antidote to the restlessness the writer/director felt, trapped at home in lockdown), the movie He’s Watching began as a kind of DIY project. Filmmaker Jacob Estes enlisted his children Iris and Lucas to make a ‘home movie’ about a house (their own home) that’s slowly becoming haunted. Two kids whose parents are hospitalized begin to videotape their lockdown, waiting for Mom and Dad to come home. And as they wait, strange things start happening – lights dim and flicker, objects appear in oddly random piles on the floor, TVs turn off and on by themselves… and – even scarier, videos that the kids didn’t shoot begin to show up on their cameras. Someone is taping them sleeping, which is creepy as hell. And creepier yet are videos of a clown with a big meat cleaver, who may be the one who’s leaving threatening messages for the kids – signed “The Closet Creeper.”

One wants to scream: “Get out of the house!” But outside of the house there’s nothing – an occasional car or jogger, unsettling shots of people dead in their homes… and back in the haunted house itself the horrible feeling that something is stalking the children, and there is no one who can help them. Something unseen but ever-present. Resisting any attempts to make sense of it – like this ‘home-made’ film has tried and consciously failed to do, with its unnamed viral subject.

This movie doesn’t end so much as just stop – because there is no end to the menace it’s made palpable. It’s deeply disturbing – and may be the best of the Covid horror movies so far.Screenwriting Insights | Writing Pandemic Horror

[1]  Anton Bitel, “I wanted to write something that fits the moment: Ben Wheatley on In The Earth”,  6/16/21https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/ben-wheatley-earth-post-pandemic-forest-horror, accessed 10/10/22.

Screenwriting Insights | Writing Pandemic Horror

Neal Bell is a writer and professor of play and screenwriting at Duke University and has received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Winner of an Obie Award for sustained excellence in playwriting, he’s been a script consultant for HBO, and also received an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play for Spatter Pattern.

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