Even if you aren’t a budding horror maestro itching to lens your first indie testament to terror, you will learn a lot about how good movies get made, not just horrors, in Sara Caldwell’s Splatter Flicks: How to Make Low-Budget Horror Films. The reading is smooth as pâté spiced with essential experiences and guidance from pros in the field who worked themselves through and upward in their filmmaking craft.
I have watched quite a few horror movies over the years, beginning with Shock! Theater and the television horror hosts. I was seven when my parents, short of a babysitter, took me to The Terror. I sat between them, barely comprehending the movie (which I found out, years later, no one else did either), and never forgot watching the love interest melting like a wax candle in the arms of Jack Nicholson at the end. With movies like that, you kind of wish this book was available back then.
There are so many elements that go into making a worthwhile, an entertaining, and a good movie, especially one that aims to scare you. Caldwell breaks it down logically and concisely, outlining the functional aspects involved with making a low-budget horror film: the dynamics of the miniscule budget you are working with; what should be in the script and what to keep out; the joys and sorrows of funding your magnum opus on a shoestring; the essential pre-production phase; the often nail-biting production phase, and getting a grip on the whole enterprise from team members, props, catering, permits, insurance, actors, to eventually realizing your inner directing goals through the camera and editing.
Even if the goal is to make a quick buck-or-two sale to a streamer, at least make it watchable. I can’t believe how many movies I channel surf to, start, and within five minutes toss the remote at the screen. Whether due to clumsy direction, an awkward script or a poor actor in the wrong role, the movies were duds.
This book will help keep you from making duds. While not exhaustive—no one book could be—Caldwell provides a complete and essential foundation to be aware of and to build on, especially because of that low budget. More importantly, it is a fun read with important explanations and definitions that will elevate you up a notch from being a pure newbie to a more knowledgeable novice.
To begin with, the Script to Scream chapter stresses and clearly explains the elements of a good script. Adding overused clichés and tropes without reanimating them with a novel twist or sucker punch to create an original or clever spin is a common fail point to be avoided. So many horror movies retread the same tires without, at least, changing the ride.
Caldwell points out how Jordan Peele’s subversion of “tired conventions” works to create a “profound narrative” in his movies. She goes on to discuss the story structure using The Shining’s three-act setup. Then she adds input from Ruth Atkinson, a script consultant and story editor, to finetune the early work from imitation of others to finding one’s own voice.
There is so much to learn in this chapter alone, like balancing between suspense versus gore (It Follows), moving from the familiar to the unsettling (Midsommer), remembering the budget in your visuals (Paranormal Activity), and characterization and theme (The Sixth Sense). She uses many more movie examples and script excerpts too. Add the numerous quotes from professionals throughout each chapter and you have a wealth of their practical experiences to ponder while you learn.
But budding directors and their early movies get reality checked once they get the script decent and shootable. That’s where the chapter on Digging Up the Money brings it all back to earth. Funding, investors, pre-sells, loans, film festivals, there is a lot more to it and more than one chapter can cover, but her outline provides a solid starting point to worry and fret over while more knowledge and experience set in. Imagine you are a contestant on Survivor: that will give you an idea of what is needed when dealing with budgeting and just about everything else mentioned in this book. Do you still really want to be a director?
Of course, gore is always a perennial go to for horror, especially when young victims are involved. Planning for Gore lays out the pre-production essentials to consider and keep abreast of. Did you know that “the industry measures scene length in fractions of eights?” Every scene in a script needs to be broken down into a bunch of categories including cast, extras, stunts, special effects, etc. So, the budget and shooting schedule must both jive or else. This chapter also covers the key players to work with, like costume designer, production designer, location manager, and more. Toss in the permits needed, insurance needed, and location scouting before shooting that needs to be done too. Caldwell pulls a sneaky maneuver here. She goes well beyond gore and gives the lowdown on shot lists, blocking, set dressing, props, rehearsals, embellished with those working professionals again talking about their hard-earned experiences to add insight and tips. And I bet you thought those Apple commercials where some hotshot shoots an entire mini-movie commercial with his iPhone was all you needed, right? Not quite.
The fundamentals of lighting, creating fear in your audience, being a director, finding the emotions in your actors to convey onscreen, all that camera movement, hiring the right people to work with you in the first place, and yikes!, that looming post-production and editing grind, is covered in the remaining chapters.
Like in those infomercials where the actor says, “but wait, there’s more!” scoring, the poster art, the tagline and marketing, the distribution, the key roles, and the jargon to know are all in here too. Her explanation of the three types of special effects, nicely short and sweet, will help impress everyone else on set with your directorship prowess as you banter the subjects around with an authoritative air. For the first movie, practical effects will win out budget-wise, but knowing about SFX and VFX are essential too, because good directors usually get bigger budgets eventually.
What readers get from Sara Caldwell and her professional contributors is an easy-to-understand basic course on how to make a decent movie on a shoestring. This book needs to be read by a lot of would-be directors, based on my current viewing experiences, so let us hope they get the hint.
Sure, her title implies creating a low-budget splatter film. For someone doing their first movie, a horror can be more sellable and cheaply produced. But everything in this book is about making a movie that is watchable and even good. Hopefully, its screening will scare the pants off viewers too. Reading Splatter Flicks: How to Make Low-Budget Horror Films can easily up the ante for success by reaching those goals. Even if you are not a director to be, you will learn about what goes into movie-making, and that will make you appreciate movies even more while, oddly enough, making you hate bad movies even more too as you recognize what they should have done in the first place before wasting your time.
This review was written as staff book reviewer for The Horror Zine.