Rather than going straight to character set up, use a scary set piece to suck in the audience. An American Werewolf in London is a great example of a film with likable characters that audiences care about, which makes the movie an emotional journey as well as a great scarefest. Take the time to tell us about your characters give us reasons to care about them. There’s nothing worse than watching a movie with one-dimensional characters that get picked off one by one and we don’t care because they exist purely for the purpose of being killed.
The best horror movies have characters we root for and care about. If you write a horror movie about a billionaire or a supermodel, it may be difficult for audiences to relate to and sympathize with the characters’ experiences.
Making your characters relatable means there will be a wide audience for your story. Hollywood loves stories about characters with whom the audience can relate most haunted house movies are about families trying to protect each other from evil forces (think Insidious, The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror) and slasher films often show teenagers who are just trying to have a good time ( Halloween, for example, and the upcoming Hell Fest). An internet search will give you a list of preexisting intellectual property you can use (just don’t forget the advice about subverting old tropes, as these stories have usually been used countless times before). Lovecraft’s stories are in the public domain, as are stories by Edgar Allan Poe. There are plenty of well-known characters and stories in the horror universe that are public domain. Use well-established tropes, but give audiences something they’ve never seen before. Warm Bodies subverted the zombie mythology by making it a romantic comedy. For example, The Lost Boys was a new spin on vampire mythology, with vampires who were super cool like rock stars. It’s okay to use these tropes, but think about new ways you can tell the story. Horror is a genre with tropes we see again and again: The band of survivors who come together after the apocalypse, the creepy kid who may or may not be possessed or demonic, the toy that comes to life and devastates the family. If your film requires say, a monster to destroy an entire city like in Godzilla, it may be difficult to get a producer interested. Keep your script low-budget by thinking about ways to cut costs as you write it. For Get Out, the budget was $4.5 million and at the box office, it earned $250 million. The film went on to gross over $100 million in the United States alone. Paranormal Activity, for example, was made on a budget of $15,000. Producers and studios love horror movies because you can make them for little money - many low-budget horror movies have gone on to make millions at the box office. Is it a monster movie like A Quiet Place? A slasher film like Friday the 13th? A supernatural thriller like Mama? A horror-comedy like Shaun of the Dead? Here’s a handy list to help you decide on the subgenre that fits your story best.