Make Special Effects for a Horror Movie

Horror movies are fun and easy to create special effects for. As opposed to most genres, horror effects are expected and even encouraged to be bold and over-the-top. Read this guide for some great ideas on how to take your horror movie project to the next level of scary fun.

Steps

Lighting Tricks

  1. Film night scenes during daylight. Making this look authentic on screen might sound difficult, but for indoor shots, it's surprisingly easy. Simply turn the gain down on your camera so that it doesn't pick up very much light, and then use hard lighting as needed to control shadows in your “darkened” room. The camera will produce a very passable nighttime effect.
    • To create hard-edged and clearly defined shadows, you'll need powerful lights, which are easier to reconcile with daylight anyway. Using bright, powerful lights at night only makes it even harder to adjust the gain properly to produce a night effect.
  2. Play with light balance to tint your shots. A great way to add a sense of sickness or desolation to your horror scene is to tinge it with just a bit of color. Your video camera should have a white light balance setting that can be adjusted; this will cause it to pick up colors a bit differently. Combined with deliberate lighting, you can use balance to produce a great effect without using a gel or post-production filter.
    • Adjust the white balance setting to tungsten. The tungsten setting, called “indoor” on some cameras, adjusts the camera so that it treats bluish halogen lights as neutral white lights. In the absence of halogen lighting, this has the effect of tinting ordinary incandescent illumination a subtly eerie blue. This also allows you to use your halogen lights to make crisp shadows without being obvious, since the camera will treat their light as neutral.
    • Add fluorescent lighting. Leave the camera's white balance uncorrected, and the fluorescent lights will produce a subtle, sickly greenish effect. You may be able to slightly tweak the white balance to create a more pronounced effect. Fluorescent lighting is fairly harsh, making it useful for particularly horrifying sets such as blood-stained basements or old hospital rooms.
  3. Control light and darkness with flags. For a classic film noir horror effect, you'll want most of your room wrapped in shadow, with the ability to define specific subjects with harsh, unforgiving light. Cheap halogen shop lights are great for this effect, but they tend to flood too much light into a room, ruining the shadowy background. Compensate by making flags for your lights. Flags are simply panels that can be adjusted to direct the flow of the light.
    • Flags can be made of simple corrugated cardboard, or practically any other opaque material. You or an assistant will have to manually hold them in place midway between the shot and the light source to properly control where the light goes.
    • The farther away you hold the panels from the light source, the harsher and clearer the shadows it casts will be, so set up the light well away from the action to produce the sharpest contrast between areas of light and darkness on your subject.
    • Halogen lights are phenomenally hot when lit. Keep yourself and your flags well away from them while filming.
    • If you want to, you can attach barn doors to your lights by making them from metal or another flame-proof material. Barn doors act like flags, except that they're attached to the light, so they don't sit far enough away to sharpen its edges. Instead, they're used to control the overall amount of light escaping from the source. Use them in conjunction with flags for the best effect.
  4. Try moving flags for spooky effects. Slowly angling flags across a scene causes the shadows cast by the hard light source to slowly move, creating a sense of motion and unease. Flags can also be fully or partially flapped closed and then open again to create an unnerving blink or sputter effect. In close shots, turn your flags horizontally to light up one strip of a face or object, such as a grinning mouth, while leaving the rest in shadow.
  5. Use cookies to cast weird patterns. Cookies are shaped filters that go over your light source. By using squiggly or segmented cookies, you can add visual noise in the form of strange and unnatural-looking patterns of light and shadow in the background of a shot. Try placing them close to the light source for a subtle, static effect, or use them in conjunction with your flags to cast sharp shadows on a wall or ceiling.

Sound Effects

  1. Fill darkness with sounds. Being unable to see much of what's happening in the background is scary enough; adding a bump in the night can make it downright terrifying. Accentuate your shadow play and creepy lighting effects by punctuating the gloomiest shots with sound effects.
    • In most cases, a subtle ambient effect is appropriate. If nothing is actually going to jump out of the shadows, try adding the faint sound of wind blowing or a wooden board creaking. Even some soft radio static can work wonders. Try to pick something the audience won't consciously notice, but which will make them shift a little in their seats just the same.
    • From time to time, add a more definite sound. A shot that lingers on a darkened living room after its owner has left for the evening can be made scarier with a scraping, shuffling, or thumping sound. Your audience will know someone or something was inside the room with the character and went unnoticed, giving them big chills. Don't overuse these clearer effects, though, or they'll lose their power.
  2. Learn about sound attack. The attack of a sound is the time it take for that sound to reach its maximum volume, before decaying and returning to no sound at all. Sounds with a fast attack include doors slamming, balloons popping, and dogs barking; sounds with a slow attack include wind whistling, boxes sliding down a ramp, and wolves howling. Generally speaking, the faster a sound's attack is, the more frightening it can be; loud volume enhances the effect.
    • Some of the most effective horror sounds are the result of mixing fast attack effects into a longer series. Footsteps slowly coming up the basement stairs, for example, is a classic effect that combines fast attack sounds (footsteps) into a repeating sequence that makes each one more dreadful than the last.
    • Try combining a fast attack sound and a slow attack sound to create an uneven, twisted feeling. A thump on the staircase is bad enough; a thump followed by a wet dragging sound (with slower attack) is truly horrifying, because the audience can hear that whatever is climbing the steps is misshapen or broken in some way.
  3. Take advantage of free stock effects. For the budget-conscious horror film maker, there are many high-quality sound effects that are licensed for free use. Most of these are now available online at sites like SoundBible.com. Caskets opening, zombies groaning, and people screaming are just a few of the effects you can use without having to pay.
    • Be sure to check the license associated with each free sound effect. Many of them are only free to use if you properly credit their creators.
    • Don't just check horror sound effects. There are many other sounds that can be easily repurposed for a horror film, with some creativity and forethought.
  4. Add original Foley effects. Foley Editors have what is arguably one of the most entertaining and creative jobs in the film industry: they create sound effects, usually with everyday items, that approximate just about any noise imaginable. Some Foley effects are closely guarded secrets, but there are plenty you can do yourself to add a fresh, unique sound to an action or event. Get a good quality microphone and set it up near a nook with all the Foley prop items you need, and have at it.
    • Break bones or splinter limbs with wood or celery. To make a bone-snapping sound, wrap a thin dowel rod in soft paper (paper towels work) and snap it near the microphone. For a more sickening crunch, twist and snap a bunch of celery instead.
    • Add a gory effect to axe and club strikes. Use a length of garden hose slapped hard against a baseball glove to produce a meaty impact noise. A mallet on a pumpkin can accentuate a particularly devastating head strike.
    • Make a sickening impact noise with rags. To simulate the sound of something wet and disgusting falling and/or bursting on the ground, load up a bucket with soaked rags. Set up a short ladder on a concrete surface, then dump the rags from the top of the ladder onto the floor.
    • Add a sizzling effect to burn scenes. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to stretch a piece of wax paper near the microphone and then steadily pour uncooked rice down it. For a more authentic (albeit less dramatic) effect, put a hot iron in a tray with just a tiny amount of water. For sizzling fat, add a bit of oil on top of the water.

Blood and Guts

  1. Mix up fake blood at home. Scientist Steve Spangler has a great recipe that's useful for bleeding wounds, and is completely nontoxic, making it ideal for bite bags and other effects that might contact actual body fluids. It's as easy as mixing a cup of corn syrup, two tablespoons of cornstarch, and some coloring and thinning ingredients: two tablespoons of red food coloring, a bit of powdered cocoa and chocolate syrup to darken the color, and some fruit punch to thin and brighten it to your liking.
    • This recipe is especially useful since its thickness and color can be adjusted easily.
  2. Make burst bags. The most basic method of doing this is to pour some of your fake blood into a cup, cover the top with cling wrap, pour the blood out into the cling wrap, and carefully pull up and cinch the cling wrap closed around the blood. It takes some practice to get right, and it's pretty messy in the meantime, so wear an apron and work somewhere that's easy to clean, like the kitchen counter.
    • To properly seal your burst bag, use a bit of gaffer tape. Gaffer tape is a lot like duct tape, but it doesn't leave the same gunky residue, so it's easier to clean up after.
    • Burst bags can be placed pretty much anywhere – palmed in a hand, held lightly in the mouth, or taped to the inside of a shirt or pant leg. As long as your actors don't ingest the cling wrap or the tape, burst bags are perfectly harmless and can add a great bloody effect to stabs and bullet wounds.
    • To burst the burst bag, simply apply pointed pressure until it pops. A burst bag in the mouth can be bitten to produce this effect.
  3. Shoot your victim through the chest. Start with a burst bag taped under the shirt where the shot will hit. Film the shot with a prop gun (use blanks, or edit the sound effect in later) and have the victim clutch at his or her torso, squeezing the bag to burst the blood out.
  4. Stab your victim in the heart. Even with a prop knife (never use a real knife!), stabbing someone is an unpleasant experience for that person. Minimize his or her discomfort by making a bit of hidden armor out of some thin sheet metal and hard foam or rubber. Layer the foam on top of the metal, and cut both to make a plate you can attach over your victim's chest. Attach it with gaffer tape or bind it with twine, and then tape a burst bag to the front of it. When the victim is stabbed, the force from the knife tip should be more than enough to burst the blood bag.
    • The metal helps prevent the victim from feeling any discomfort, while the hard foam gives the knife a bit of sticking power for a more realistic effect.
  5. Break a back over a monster's knee. This dramatic effect can be simply achieved with stuffing and a spare set of clothes. Use leaves, cotton batting, or whatever other fill you want to stuff some plastic bags, then dress the bags up in a shirt and pants, binding them together at the waist with safety pins or thread so that the bags don't show in the middle. Run a thin dowel rod down the back of the shirt, and film a close shot of the monster bringing the dummy down over one knee, cracking the dowel.
    • You can use two rolled-up bags with light stuffing to make legs, and vary the distribution of the stuffing in the hips, waist, and chest to make the physique as realistic as possible.
    • If you don't get the scream right on the first try, there's no need to set up another dummy. Just add the scream in later.
  6. Rip off your victim's hand. Mix water and cornstarch with red food coloring until you get a thick, viscous, blood-colored substance (remember, you can darken the blood with cocoa powder if needed). Use this extra-thick blood to fill a latex rubber glove. Have your victim hold the glove tightly at the end of a long-sleeved shirt arm, and film the hand being ripped away from the opposite side, so the fact that it's a glove is less obvious. Your thick fake blood should splatter everywhere when the victim releases the open glove.
    • Consider using a burst bag for extra “arm stump” bleeding as well.



Tips

  • The examples provided here are just that – examples. There are many other effects you can create simply and cheaply. Be bold and experiment!

Warnings

  • Be sure everyone around your project knows it's just a project. Nothing ruins a day of filming faster than a visit from the police based on the fears of a concerned citizen who walked by and had no idea what was going on.

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Sources and Citations

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