Tag: horror

How does a MONSTER enter a scene?

“Death awaits you all- with nasty, big, pointy teeth! ~ Tim the Enchanter Monty Python and the Holy Grail

We want our monsters to be scary. But what makes a monster scary? Is it their size? How loud they can roar? Their number of teeth? How good of a jump scare they give us?

I think the answer lies in how a monster enters a scene. For this, let’s look at 1979’s Alien.

How does the Alien make its appearances in the movie?

  • An Alien egg opens onto Kane, and the face-hugger jumps out of the egg onto his face
  • They cut away Kane’s helmet revealing the face hugger wrapped around his face.
  • The face-hugger disappears from Kane’s face in the lab, and the crew looks for it. The dead face-hugger drops from the ceiling onto Ripley’s shoulder.
  • The Chestburster explodes through Kane’s sternum during dinner
  • The Alien drops from the top of the frame behind Brett
  • Dallas turns his flashlight onto the alien in the air ducts, and it grabs him
  • The Alien’s shadow sneaks behind Lambert, highlighted in a shadow. She turns around, and it stands up into the frame. Parker tries to fend the creature off, but it kills him, and then its tail slowly creeps between Lambert’s legs
  • The Alien turns the corner in the Nostromo, blocking Ripley from her escape pod
  • The Alien reaches out from the wall in the escape pod.
  • Ripley climbs into a space suit and turns on all the toxic gasses she can kill it. The creature writhes on the floor. But when she turns her head, it is no longer below her on the floor; it is right behind her rearing to strike.

So how does the Alien enter the scene? It doesn’t have to because the Alien is already there. We just can’t see it. Yet. We are going into its territory.

And the characters certainly do not know it is there. More often than not, the characters are entering the monster’s lair. A loud roar from a distance might be scary, but a whisper from right behind you chills to the bone.

Seeing something emerge from just below the surface or from the side of the frame is as surprising as it gets. Jump scares can emulate this temporarily, but without that ongoing physical proximity, the monster’s presence dissipates. Our physical sensation of being right next to something so dangerous adds a tense anxiety to our fear and horror.

More important than how scary a monster looks might be the question, “how did it get so close with no one noticing?”

Monsters are just under the surface.