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Ah, a post where I get to talk about my two favorite things: craft and horror. Even if you’re not interested in horror, I think this post is worth a read, because it is about how the horror genre often gets two things right: inciting incidents and meta-awareness of its own tropes. Both of these are things that can immediately pull in a reader and capture their attention. I want to talk about three recent-ish examples (and I will avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to see these movies, and discussion of anything too scary).
The inciting incident to Barbarian (2022) is literally contained in the first four pages of its screenplay. Tess, young woman (Georgina Campbell) is driving her car in hard rain late at night on a dark street. She pulls up to a lone house and tries to get a set of keys out of a lockbox but the lockbox is empty (it’s clear that its an Airbnb). She tries calling the owner—no one’s there. She kicks the door in frustration, then looks around. From the text: “The reality of her situation sets in. She’s now shelterless. In a strange city. Late at night.” But then: a light comes on in the house. A sleepy man opens the door. They have a conversation: she rented this Airbnb—no, he did. There’s been some kind of mixup. The guy, Keith, says she should come in out of the rain to figure this out. This is literally all that is in the trailer, and trust me when I say it’s enough. We, particularly girls, can imagine ourselves in this scenario. It’s the middle of the night, it’s raining, and we find out later that the street she is on is scary and half abandoned. It’s not a bunch of giggling college girls who’ve rented the house, it’s… a guy. Quite pointedly, the perfectly cast Bill Skarsgard who can flip between an extremely handsome person with lovely bone structure to someone deeply scary. He’s larger than her. But he’s also being perfectly nice. (Too nice?)
The opening section with just these two actors in the Airbnb is about as perfect as it can get. Tess is being smart and cautious, but not so cautious that she gets in her car and drives away. (They check— all the other hotels in the area are booked because of a convention). Keith is being nice: he’s helping her out, he offers to make her a cup of tea, which she declines. He makes the tea anyway, out of her line of sight, then offers it to her. There’s a shot that’s just her perspective of the mug of tea: no way in hell is she drinking it. Smart girl. At one point he shows her a bottle of wine the host as left with a ribbon tied around it and says they can drink it. Later on—I think when she’s leaving the bathroom (where she’s closely examined his stuff to see what kind of person he is) and walking back into the kitchen, suddenly Keith sitting at the kitchen table comes into view. He has the unopened bottle of wine and two glasses. He says something like, I didn’t open it so you can see me open it if you want some. He knows that she is potentially thinking that this is a guy who could put something into her drink if she’s not looking.
We don’t know a ton about Tess, but we have no reason not to like her. Being out in the rain with nowhere to go makes her inherently sympathetic. And perhaps women watching the movie feel this more acutely than men, but there’s palpable fear to just being in this situation: alone, in the dark, female. She also exhibits cautiousness: she doesn’t barrel into the house with no reservations. She doesn’t drink the tea even if it looks a little rude. She does try to find somewhere else to stay. She views everything that Keith says with caution. And the script is masterful at playing with you about Keith: one moment he seems creepy, another moment sweet, but wait, is the sweet thing he said just a manipulation tactic? The inciting incident here is that a woman shows up at an Airbnb in the middle of a rainy night on a scary street and it is already occupied by a man whose intentions we can’t quite get a read on. The inciting incident here starts on page one of the screenplay. There is no five or ten or god help us ten minute segment before this where we see Tess doing young woman things with her friends, explaining in “As you know Bob” speech to her roommates about how she is going to Detroit for an important job interview. No discussion about how Tess has booked an Airbnb in a creepy neighborhood—no admonition that that isn’t the best place to stay. No idiotic, “you should make sure to call and confirm your reservation.” No heavy handed hinting of what is to come. Because it’s so much better to just see it on your own. Live. We don’t need the preamble. We don’t need five mouthfuls of bread till we get to the meat of the sandwich.
In Oddity (2024), we deal with another front door situation that gets straight to the point. We do get a brief scene of a woman talking to her husband: he works the night shift (at a psychiatric hospital…) and she is staying in their creepy old house in the Irish countryside, working on renovating it. She is literally living in a little tent inside the house, where cell phone service is sketchy. (The critique of modern horror getting rid of cell phone service because it’s inconvenient is totally fair—but I will say as someone who just got back from Scotland that there was surprisingly little cell phone service in more remote areas, a not-too-different region.) She putters around doing some house stuff, then comes a knock on her door. She doesn’t have a peephole, but this little metal sliding door 4x4” that she can open and close. She opens it and it is this man:
At the time, there’s no explanation for his eye (which if you can’t see is yellow, with a weird pupil.) He’s clearly panicked. He says, let me in. When you went outside to get something you left the door open, and I saw a man go into your house! Your inherent instinct is to not trust a strange man who is insisting you let him into your house. But… she did leave the door open when she went to get something. He keeps insisting that the man is in the house with her right now, let him in so he can help her! We also know that she has no cellphone service, though this man likely does not know this. It’s a situation that you’d be incredibly torn with: if you let him in, there’s a chance that it was all a ruse and now he wants to kill you. If you don’t trust him (and why was he outside her house anyway, in the remote Irish countryside??) you’d still be plagued with thoughts that there was someone else inside the house with you… or even if not, that this man was outside your house trying to get in. This opening section of the movie ends with her hesitating at the door, and you’re feeling 50-50 on what she will do, it could totally go either way. Again, we don’t know much about this woman, but the way it’s filmed immediately puts you into her shoes and make you ask, what would I do? What’s the smart thing to do?
Horror movies are incredibly good at quickly and firmly establishing mood and tone. We see enough of the old stone house to know just how dark and lonely it is at night. How isolating one little yellow tent with a light inside is. How fucking weird this guy looks. Because we can see ourselves there, we are immediately invested. Horror fans immediately recognize the familiar tropes: remote estate in the countryside, being a woman alone with no cell phone service. People who know the tropes want to see in what unique ways they will be combined to tell them a story they haven’t heard before.
In The Invitation (2015, not to be confused with the bad vampire movie from 2022), the emotion and awkwardness are apparent in the first three pages of the screenplay: a man and his girlfriend are going to the house of the man’s ex and her new partner for a dinner party. We have a sense that the man is haunted by something that has happened in the past, something terrible related to the marriage. We are not hit with this in the face like a chair at a pro-wrestling match: we get bits and pieces of it over the next hour. Here’s one of the first references to our protag: “A young man, WILL (30’s) drives in silence. We linger on his face as he concentrates on the road. Behind his placid expression, we can see something pulling at him. There is a haunted quality to his eyes.” He’s haunted—there’s a past, a mystery we will learn more about—and he’s walking into a situation that is both painful and awkward. You kind of wish he would turn around and just leave… This movie doesn’t get straight to the terrifying stuff: it eases you in in a way I found so clever that I keep trying to find other movies like it. Will and several of he and his ex’s old friends are there and it’s an uncomfortable mixture of “let’s talk about the good times” and “my ex has gotten kind of weird.” The ex and her new partner invite someone (Pruitt) none of the old friends know… and this guy comes in hot with making other people feel uncomfortable. We’ve all been to a small group setting where someone invites someone who doesn’t quite fit in and it’s awkward. It keeps getting more unsettling. You kind of wish the friends would all leave, because you have a sense that something awful will happen. In fact, The Invitation is one of the best horror movies to play with the “I feel uncomfortable with this social situation and want to leave without triggering suspicion” trope. Will notices that the ex’s partner keeps the front door locked (from the inside, with a key). They make the guests watch a video about dying and it becomes very apparent that they are now in a cult. They start to play an innocent party game and Pruitt discloses that he killed his wife and served time in prison for it. At one point, one of the friends insists on leaving. Will vacillates between thinking “there’s something weird and dangerous going on here” and “I’m probably overreacting because of my emotional state and don’t want to seem rude”
What all of these openings have in common:
They don’t dick around. What is this movie about?? A scary coincidence at an Airbnb. A scary man at the door. An invitation that seems strange. Horror movies are the unsung heroes at the box office: even bad ones can pull in a lot of money, and often they are cheaply made. In other words, they don’t have time to dilly dally: they get straight to the point on the inciting incident, on the mood, tone atmosphere. Some don’t start like the above three examples, but will have a prologue of sorts where we see whatever beastie—or maybe just hints of the beastie—killing someone, then we cut straight to good looking teens loading up their car for a road trip. This is not unlike many mystery novels that start with a dead body in the prologue. While this makes it very apparent what the conflict or inciting incident is, this often comes at the expense of focusing those opening pages on people we aren’t going to see again. So, use at your own risk. Columbo used to start that way, but Columbo was never about the story of a killer and how he got caught: it was always the story of how Columbo solved a mystery.
The stakes are very apparent. In the first two instances, we can quickly see the peril of being a woman alone at night. In The Invitation the stakes are a mix: Will dealing with his painful past, and his nagging sensation that something about this invitation is weird—these two things play opposite each other, with him talking himself down from thinking maybe it’s weird by reminding himself that he might not be thinking clearly.
I wanted to talk through these examples because you’ve probably heard that a lot of novels “start in the wrong place.” In other words, do you need to start with Tess explaining to her friends at brunch that she’s going to a job interview in Detroit and that she rented a cheap Airbnb? Do I care enough about her, in those five minutes talking at brunch, to really have my attention grabbed? Did I need the preamble? People in the business call this “throat clearing.” Go back to my previous post with the index cards and ask yourself “what actually happened in this scene that moved the plot forward?” It might be tricky: you might say, “Tess tells her friends her plans about the Detroit interview.” But you’ve got it wrong: the story of Barbarian is not about Tess and her career: it’s about the horrors of that particular house. Tess is a character in that story, but the story is fundamentally about what happens in that house. The inciting incident is that Tess shows up but the Airbnb is occupied by a hot-creepy guy.
For genre books, you don’t get a lot of space for throat clearing. Say you have a fantasy about a mage battling a new evil king. A lot of writers will start with an infodump about the mage: they want us to know that he is well respected mage who is good and pure and a savior to his community. We will get a bunch of stuff about people bringing him food to thank him for his good works, or him actually doing a good work that has nothing to do with the story of the evil new king. In almost all cases, the “story” in your book is not “biographical recounting of the life of the main character.” You can hint at the conflict with the evil king, or even just the first stirrings of it, right away. While you are doing that, you can show that the mage is a good person. Perhaps the nearly-dead king brings his son to the council meeting and you see that he is a shit and the mage kindly and respectfully trying to still drive the council to the right decisions. Or maybe all the other council members start shit talking about the son and the mage tries to defend him: all people should be given a fair chance. While setting and character are important, ask yourself how you can demonstrate them while moving the plot forward.
To find out if you are throat clearing or not, look at each individual scene in the beginning and ask yourself, “what is the bullet point of this scene?” A scene where Will is talking to his therapist about the tragedy that ended his marriage a day before he gets the invitation has the bullet point of “Will’s marriage ended tragically.” That’s a contextual point, not a plot point. The first chapter of Never Saw Me Coming: “Chloe arrives at school looking for Will, the boy she has been planning on killing for six years.” First two scenes of A Step Past Darkness: “Jia, a psychic, is contacted by an old hometown friend to locate a missing body, who when she finds her, turns out to be Maddy, someone Jia knew in high school. Jia drives by the local megachurch and is surprised to see that it has been revived since the 90s, and, more terrifyingly, that the current pastor looks exactly like the old one—the one she and her friends killed 20 years ago.”
These comments about inciting incidents are directed more at genre, rather than literary fiction, which I will probably have a different take on at a later time.
Great post! And if you (or other readers) haven't seen SPEAK NO EVIL with James McAvoy, it is so so good...and it starts out very quickly as well, with the same immediate thrust into awkward social situations that shout, "This isn't going to end well!"
I want to know what happens next just from reading your summary of the opening scenes!