Tonight, let's talk about you. Why haven't you written that horror movie you've been thinking about writing? IT'S NOT HARD! Just do it. Here. I'll help.
ACT ONE
First step: introduce genre.
This is a horror movie, so we generally wanna start with something SCARY, like Casey getting gutted and hung on her swingset, or something. Yeah. Why don't we just do that? Only instead of Casey played by Drew Barrimore, ala Scream, we'll have her name be Julia and she'll be played by Emma Watson.
Second step: introduce protagonist.
Now, it's a horror movie, so the protagonist HAS to be female. It's the law. The movie cops will come to your house and arrest you, (or charge you a hefty fine,) if you have a male protagonist in a horror film. Yes. Of course it's been done, but nobody thinks you can pull it off. No offense. So let's have ours, sorry, YOURS be someone like Nicole Kidman in The Others, and she's wondering why her kids are acting weird. Except instead of whatever her character's name was, we'll call her Josephine, and she'll be played by Olivia Wilde.
Third step: throw the audience off the scent.
The audience is going to figure out what's going on, unless you give them a valid reason to suspect that's totally not what's going on. So, when the dude who's been dead the whole time only talks to the kid who can talk to dead people, we might want to throw in a scene where he seemingly speaks to his wife over dinner. Brilliant! Oh, except, in our female-driven plot, Josephine will be the ghost, and she'll be meeting with her husband, Owen Wilson.
ACT TWO
Fourth step: be boring for a while.
You know that part in The Ring where she's driving around investigating, and it's so dull? YOU NEED THAT! So, have Josephine investigate for, like, half an hour at least.
ACT THREE
Fifth step: get confusing.
This is the part where we try and make sense of complete randomness, and suddenly our heroine will discover who the bad guy is, but we'll totally not get it, like at the end of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Except, for us Josephine will suddenly realize her friend Chase, played by Tobey Maguire, is somehow, inexplicably, the bad guy? Okay.
Sixth step: kill the bad guy.
Call the cops first, say, "I just shot an intruder," then shoot the bad guy. This was the best part of Sleeping with the Enemy, except in ours Josephine will say this and shoot Chase... who, you know, we'll just take your word for it, is the bad guy.
Seventh step: JUST KIDDING!
TWIST! A twist can be anything from the bad guy not really being dead, "EEP!" BLAMO! Or it could be something MIND BLOWING, like everyone was actually in present day Connecticut. Let's do that. So, turns out, Josephine, who thought she was living in the 1800's, was, as luck would have it, actually in 2018 Connecticut, a 1/2 mile from a Target she could have been shopping in her whole life.
FIN!
So, there's your movie. Julia gets gutted, Josephine's kids are weird so she has dinner with Owen Wilson, but actually DOESN'T 'cause she's a ghost. We're bored for a while. Apparently Tobey Maguire is the villain. She tells the cops she just shot an intruder - WHAT!? Target has popcorn!? The End.
Honestly, that's not half bad.
