Nowadays, the words "scary" and "gore" are synonymous in the movie industry. It seems all non-gore scary movies are all bombs, but is it because there's no gore, or because they just suck altogether?

Take a minute to think about what scares you. Now take that and incorporate it into a movie. Still scary? Of course not. That's the problem faced by moviemakers nowadays: Images placed onto a screen just aren't effective as a terror device anymore, but does this mean that it has become impossible to scare people with movies?

I think that the biggest blow to scary movies was when CGI took hold of all the movie effects. Without the "real" element in scary movies, people can not relate to it, therefore people are unable to react to it. What we need is some REAL crazy stuff going on. The problem with that is everything that can be done in the real world has been done before, and repeated things are often not entertaining.

With new effects not helping, we look towards the source: The screenplay. Believe it or not, it IS possible to write something scary. There's plenty of books out there that can scare the shit out of you, but screenplays for some reason lack fear-instilling action. How do novels scare us?

SUSPENSE is the key factor between scary novels and non-scary screenplays. Nothing sets you on edge like waiting to see what's around the next corner. For some reason, movies focus on the instant fear, rather than anticipated fear. Most movies make any anticipated fear they have painfully obvious, which ruins whatever fear-instilling event that may occur. Just go watch a movie based on a scary novel (Stephen King's novels, for example), and you'll see the difference.

So how do we remedy this dilema? A new generation of screenplay writers that understand my views, and take it to heart when they write. A good scary movie has plenty of suspense that will keep your adrenaline pumping in ancticipation. You do NOT need gore to sell scary movies. Sreenplay writers just need to wise-up on what is scary (besides gore), and go around that instead of writing these half-ast scripts that bomb because they couldn't spend an extra hour to make it good. It CAN be done.