How To Write A Horror Movie

Humor & Entertainment

Bell, Neal

Movies

Routledge

Product Description 
How to Write a Horror Movie is a close look at an always-popular (but often disrespected) genre. It focuses on the screenplay and acts as a guide to bringing scary ideas to cinematic life using examples from great (and some not-so-great) horror movies.Author Neal Bell examines how the basic tools of the scriptwriter’s trade - including structure, dialogue, humor, mood, characters, and pace – can work together to embody personal fears that will resonate strongly on screen. Screenplay examples include classic works such as 1943’s I Walked With A Zombie and recent terrifying films that have given the genre renewed attention like writer/director Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed and financially successful Get Out. Since fear is universal, the book considers films from around the world including the ‘found-footage’ [REC] from Spain (2007), the Swedish vampire movie, Let The Right One In (2008) and the Persian-language film Under The Shadow (2016). 
The book provides insights into the economics of horror-movie making, and the possible future of this versatile genre. It is the ideal text for screenwriting students exploring genre and horror, and aspiring scriptwriters who have an interest in horror screenplays. 
 Review 
"Here is a book that teaches how to think like a horror writer, that demonstrates how a deep knowledge of the literature can influence a modern script, and that thoughtfully conveys the craft necessary to write the artform." 
Terry Curtis Fox, Chair, Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, NYU Tisch School of the Arts 
 About the Author 
Neal Bell is a writer and professor of play and screenwriting at Duke University and has received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Winner of an Obie Award for sustained excellence in playwriting, he’s been a script consultant for HBO, and also received an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play for Spatter Pattern.

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Cold Sweat.

Neal Bell

Dramatist's Play Service

Operation Midnight Climax.

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

THE STORY: Estranged from her husband, and working as a cocktail waitress, Eileen has perhaps neglected her two small children--whose disappearance has brought about a visit by the tough-talking Lt. Brann. Obviously suspicious, the detective plays a

Two Small Bodies

Adapted from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, MONSTER takes a disturbing yet poignant look at one man's obsession with creating life and the destructive after effects of abandoning his creation. "MONSTER, a slick and streamlined new stage adaptation of the Frankenstein saga written by Neal Bell ... is faithful to Shelley, if not in all the exhaustive details, then at least insofar as it seizes on its thematic highlights. Mr Bell's adaptation pucks the major events from the narrative, and his language treads a colorful path: a mixture of fanciful poetics, glib wisecrackery and an occasional Anglo-Saxon obscenity that lends a contemporary tint to things." -Bruce Weber, The New York Times "... a lean literate version of Shelley's often much-embroidered classic. Exploring Shelley's psychosexual undertones, Bell's version is more creepy than shocking in effect. He also provides a viable new conclusion for the novel's open-ended narrative." -Michael Sommers, The Star-Ledger "Starting from Shelley's original, but with a sharp eye for cogency and a sharp ear for the turn of a phrase, [Neal Bell] has managed to locate the philosophic germ inside each of the horror myth's iconic scenes. The scare is still there, but it now has other functions than merely frightening your inner child with fantasies of impotence, rape and castration on a dark and stormy night. If you really want to frighten yourself, there's always today's paper; if you want a dramatic story that makes you think about the meaning and purpose of life, you should probably go and see MONSTER." -Michael Feingold, Village Voice

Monster

SHELLEY,MARY

Broadway Play Publishing, Incorporated

When a screenwriter becomes entangled in the life of a university professor under investigation for a grisly murder, what begins as self-interest soon gives way to empathy, and a bond between men from seemingly opposite worlds deepens. An eerie, grimly funny whodunit, SPATTER PATTERN is a brutally honest and touching elegy about survival and the guilt that accompanies it. "Leave it to Neal Bell. So many recent plays have made forays into the noir genre - conscious or unconscious, spoofing or surrealist - that I had assumed there was nothing new to be gotten from it. But Bell walks in, boldly and knowingly, where legions have trod before, and instantly finds new paths to explore, new matches of tone and subject, new sources of moral perturbation. His title, from forensic medicine, describes both the directions in which blood has spurted from a fatal wound and the aesthetic tactic his script employs. His topic, achingly visible under the sprayed droplets of his story, is responsibility ..." -Michael Feingold, The Village Voice "Bell's writing is so sharp, so focused and so consistently interesting - not a word is superfluous - that you come away with a surprisingly theatrical experience ... This is a tense, beautiful, speedy drama set in a right-now world of urban menace and fear. It's a theatrical discovery by a major talent. And it will stay with you long after the final, breathless blackout." -Jacques le Sourd, The Journal News "Neal Bell is one of those playwrights you keep expecting to hit big ... The immaculate stylist writes clean, crisp lines for characters quivering with urban angst. His humor is droll and laced with self-deprecating irony, and while his central theme might be summed up as 'spiritual alienation,' his topics are usually timely, reflecting a macabre interest in crimes of passion and a rather academic curiosity about what compels humans to violence ..." -Marilyn Stasio, Variety

Spatter Pattern

Therese Raquin

Zolá, Emile

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