Q&A with Eric Red discussion

There's a lot of effective techniques in the mechanics of engineering terror, tension and suspense on the page. Let's discuss some of those.

I'm a fan and influenced by comic book style along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's style. Are you familiar with those, and do you use them, too?

Comics certainly. When I did my comic series CONTAINMENT, it involved telling a horror story in largely visual terms using the paneling. It required writing incredibly detailed terror and gore images and atmospherics for the artist to render. The process was reminiscent of film storyboarding and like writing a screenplay and director shot list at the same time.

I sometimes feel that both comics and novels are able to pull off terror in a way that film can't. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge film nerd, but prose always hits closer to home with me. So, when I heard you were writing a book I got all sorts of excited. Can't wait to read it Eric.

Excited to hear what you think, Donny!

One of the coolest things for me about writing a novel as opposed to making a film is that readers bring their own pictures to the prose, instead of you giving them those pictures in a movie. In that sense, people interface with books more than films. In the case of horror, readers bringing their own personal and private images to the story can be much scarier, can't it?

Myself, being someone who only broke into screenwriting (and is staying) at the indie-level...Sir, you hit the nail on the head why I keep scripts simpler and my books get expansive. I never feel that sense that I can guarantee an audience will "see" my huge prose stories on a screen anywhere, but the few location/few characters stories of my scripts, I think have the better chance. Even with your level of success, Sir, do you still feel the same? Especially in the horror field, which has gotten very congested..?

In terms of the horror market in films presently, there's no question that the financiers have a hard-on for contained genre pieces, because of the low budget production cost outlay and high profit margins. From a creative standpoint, those have often been the best horror films to begin with. The real challenge when you're doing a contained horror piece with a few characters is coming up with a strong central concept and conflict, and generating enough twists and complications within those limited parameters to keep the audience interested. You kind of make a deal with the audience at the beginning saying this whole story is going to take place right here, with just these people, and I'm going to keep you on the edge of your seat. Then you have to deliver, and many of those stories don't.