Created: April 3rd
Personally, I think suspense movies are terrible (and I'm always right, so if you disagree you are wrong). Why would you be on the edge of your seat for people who don't even exist? Oh no, I hope this guy doesn't die, being that he's a real person, which he's not.
Suspense movies are inherently boring. The whole premise of the genre is to "build up" to one final showdown. Great. That means I get to watch a good 90 minutes of "build up". Sometimes they uncover clues as they go along, to give you the false impression that some progress is being made.
I haven't watched many suspense movies, but the ones I've seen were really bad. In one movie called "Double Jeopardy", some woman got convicted of killing her husband (she was framed and her husband was still alive).
So when she gets out and realized that the guy is still alive, she learned about some rule where she'd be allowed to kill him since she already served the time. So she decides to make him do something but then the guy tried to kill her, so she kills the guy, and that was the whole movie! What the hell?
Okay, I'll admit it, I could never think of a storyline like that. No matter how much alchohol I consume, I would never be able to take my brain power down to such a level as to think that such a plot would make a good premise for a movie.
Here, let me try (Keep in mind that I'm tired and just ran through this):
All right, some guy owns a big pharmecutical corporation. The corporation has recently discovered a medicine that cures a specific virus that only a handful of people have. So the guy plots to spread the virus to force people to buy the drug.
So the corporation needs to find someone who has the virus so they can use it for thier evil plan. Turns out some woman has it, so the corporation hunts her down. She runs away form them and into an abondoned farm. Then the evil guy from the beginning decides to come in alone (the other people from the corporation have left for no explicable reason).
The evil guy shoves her onto the ground. Then the woman sees a gun that was just lying on the floor for no apparant reason, and shoots the evil guy in the arm. Then she runs away.
Well, it turns out that when the evil guy came in contact with the woman, he caught the virus, and it had this reaction that makes him really powerful and irrational. So this guy hunts down the woman with his superstrong powers, he deals some blows, but then this cop who the woman was talking to earlier (yeah, I didn't mention that part) shoots the evil guy in the head. Then the woman hugs the cop and cries. Fade to Credits.
I smell an Oscar. Notice how men are always evil and women are always good. This is important becuause in real life your gender has big impact on your moral values.
You could use this script for a horror too. Just remove some of the backstory, replace the cop with boyfriend, make the evil guy a superevil mutant (preferably invisible or something), and show some sign that said mutant is still alive to open up for a sequel.
