Horror movies depend on a lot of factors to set them apart from the rest that are delivered year after year. Like all films, they need a good story, good writing, plot, direction, and one of the most important factors is performance from the actors. What would John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ be if not for Jamie Lee Curtis’s amazing performance as Laurie Strode? In slasher movies, performances from the actors and character development are crucial to making the story believable and, to making the audience care about the movie. This is why, in movies such as the many ‘Friday the 13th’ sequels; the audience laughs when a character dies instead of emphasising with them. If the characters are one dimensional, simply introduced, behave horribly and are then killed – no-one cares.

A character’s death in a horror should be scary and tense, your audience should know that character well enough to want the character to escape and survive. This is where so many recent slasher movies and re-makes are getting it wrong over and over; because the audience has no chance to bond with the actor or character, be that because the acting is poor or because the character simply isn’t likeable or developed, or is developed in a negative light.

After recently watching ‘Final Destination 4’ I got thinking about this subject; the characters in it were flat and boring, most of them couldn’t even act very strongly and the ones that could played unlikable characters.
It doesn’t have to rely on the amount of screen time that the character owns at all; the opening sequence in Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’ with Drew Barrymore’s character is proof of this. We are only with Drew’s character, Casey Becker, for just over twelve minutes, but when asked about the movie, the majority of people remember this opening sequence because of how harrowing it was to watch. Not many actresses could have pulled this off, but Barrymore’s performance really pulls at the heart strings – the audience want her to escape and can empathise with her. The same can be said for Janet Leigh’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho.’ Even though her character is only in the first half of the movie, she makes the most impact. The reasons for this in both these cases are due to the actresses’ performances, which are so powerful, and their death scenes which are so painful and upsetting to watch.

In the movie ‘I Know What you did last summer,’ the star actress is Jennifer Love Hewitt, but it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character of Helen which is more tragic and memorable to an audience. This is due to a few factors; firstly, the character of Helen fight’s for her life for well over fifteen minutes of screen time, the character has been with us from the start of the movie and has been well developed, Sarah Michelle Geller acts her socks off – and most importantly – we don’t actually see her get murdered. In recent slasher re-makes such as RZ’s Halloween movies, we are shown the character getting stabbed over and over, and thus, they tend to loose their humanity. Kevin Williamson (who also wrote ‘Scream’) new that by the audience only catching glimpses of Helen’s death and us witnessing her fear before hand it would be much more unsettling to watch. What an audience can imagine is far scarier and disturbing than what we are usually shown.

When I went to watch the re-make of ‘Friday the 13th’ there was lots of laughter from the audience whenever a character was killed. A sane person doesn’t usually do that (hopefully); we don’t laugh in ‘Alien’ when John Hurt’s character’s chest burst’s open because we like the character, we care about the character. The reason an audience will laugh is if they care nothing for the character, or if the character is in an embarrassing situation. Several women in the ‘F13th’ re-make were killed while topless, while nearly every character was represented as drug users, having promiscuous sex or just being annoying – so most of the time the audience was made to feel the characters were “jokes” and that their death’s were meaningless; just something to gross us out. Usually their death’s were just there to gross us out. It’s far more unsettling to watch someone get stabbed, than to watch them topless and getting an axe in the head with a daft look on their face.
This was the major difference between the terrible ‘Final Destination 4’ and the original, ‘Final Destination.’ The characters in the original, most importantly could act; but were also well developed and most importantly – likeable. The same goes for Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street;’ the characters in the film have a large amount of innocence around them and then, likeability. The death scenes are not funny; they’re brutal, scary and haunting.

Hollywood has for the most part, has lost its ability to scare, even when creating re-makes they now strip away the characters so that all they are is a body for the killer to dismember in some comedic way. If a horror is to be taken seriously, you have to take your character’s lives seriously. After all, there’s nothing funny about death.