“If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or a pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better.” — Dr. Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner
I’ll be honest: when I first wrote the word “biographize” I thought it wasn’t a real word and had to make sure I wasn’t just trying to coin up some new mot to the lexicon. Turns out it is a real word. You learn something new every day.
When you biographize a character, you define a border around something that is otherwise nebulous. It’s a hazy border at times but it gives you insight into what they will and won’t do, what they will say and how they will say it.
In the context of a horror film you don’t see this very often. Who do you see most often in a slasher flick? Teenagers. Very few characters over the age of 18. Do we really remember all of their names? Not really. Do we remember their foibles or interesting personality quirks? Nope. We do remember the look of terror as they’re sliced and diced.
Who do we remember? I certainly remember Crazy Ralph from the first and second Friday the 13th films. He was a minor character, very eccentric, and had very few lines in either film.
So why do we remember Crazy Ralph and Mrs. Voorhees but not Jack Burrel? Because everyone else was a flat character that was interchangeable. You couldn’t tell one of the victims from the other. That’s because teenagers by definition haven’t lived for very long and don’t necessarily have a background to speak of. They are, however, ripe for doing bad things that their parents told them not to do like smoke pot or get drunk with their friends and engage in promiscuous sex.
That also makes them easy targets for your run-of-the-mill killer in a slasher. That’s not to say that they a teenager can’t have something of a background, as evidenced by the killers in Scream, but those are very few and far between all of the others.
I’m not going to pick on slashers for the rest of this article. There’s more to horror than just groups of teenagers getting hacked up in the woods. Some horror films engage, compel, entertain, and frighten you all at the same time, such as The Exorcist or Alien.
It’s not only horror films that suffer from this problem, it’s just the easiest genre to point out and see this kind of problem. It’s also the easiest to fix, if there is a fix to be had. Sure, you may be thinking that this isn’t necessarily a problem, that there is an audience for watching something mindless.
I would argue that the field has gotten quite crowded with mundane films of flat characters that do nothing and say nothing of substance to advance a story. Is there even a story there? If it were a dress on a woman, it might as well be a micro-mini. But I digress. The characters themselves are there to advance the story, and if they are flat or cliché, who’s going to believe what comes out of their mouths or what they do?
Your could counter that those have a place, and I would agree. On rainy weekends I like to sit back and watch something that doesn’t require a whole lot of thought. But is that what everyone wants to watch all of the time? Of course not.
If you’re sitting there with your favorite screenwriting software package open right now and are constantly having to ask yourself why you can’t figure out what your characters do or say, check their bios. If you haven’t written one, do so, even if it’s only 2 sentences for the janitor in the background. He may come in handy later and you’ll want to be prepared when he has his moment.
