Fifty Horror Clichés That Need to Die in a Fire

#48: Characters Totally Ignoring Logic

Notoriously, the horror genre has been given a particularly bad name due to the not very well thought out actions of the main cast, also known as the prime victims for a slasher killer.  Whenever placed into a dangerous situation, the characters end up making the least logical choices possible in order to escape.  Some characters will end up going to the chainsaw museum instead of the perfectly fine working car, and end up getting their heads chopped off.  Other cast members will try escaping through the definitely too small doggy door, running towards a clearly marked dead end, or wander in the woods alone at freaking night with a serial killer on the loose.  Heck, some of these brain dead characters will even run towards the danger itself, thinking they can somehow beat an adrenaline fueled maniac with no prior combat experience or any type of weapon on hand.  Whatever the case, these beyond dumb characters end up getting embarrassingly killed in moments that destroy any feeling of seriousness the horror narrative was going for.

  While it is perfectly reasonable for a character to mess up once in a while, it is not okay to have the same character mess up on things they should have learned from example.  If a bunch of your friends are getting killed due to stupid things such as going into the chainsaw museum, it would be logical for you to not make the same mistake seeing how things went for them.  Creating a flawed character does not mean the same thing as creating a dumb character.  Flawed characters are crafted in order to make them more relatable to the audience due to the occasional slip up they make to seem more human.  Dumb characters are truly the ones making idiotic mistakes no one would make in real life, like believing a simple doggy door is going to be large enough to help them escape the house.

  It really irritates me how prevalent making life ending idiotic mistakes is for a cast of characters trying to survive a horror story.  Just because the story needs to heighten the stakes for the main character in order to make their confrontation with the killer memorable does not mean the characterization and logic for the rest of the cast members should suffer for that reason.  There are much more realistic ways to heighten the stakes for the main character by killing other members of the cast other than having them die because of a sudden lapse of judgement.

  Instead of a character dying because they got trapped in a too small doggy door, they could go down instead buying time for the other cast members to escape the house without the killer detecting them.  Even though this act would clearly cost the character their life, this action would add the weight the narrative needed without sacrificing characterization and pure logic.  The character in this case would go down honorably, selflessly sacrificing their life in a way the audience would easily feel emotion over.  You could even up the stakes of the sacrifice by making the character someone extremely close to the main character, such as a best friend or a lover.  By doing this, the main character will have a very justifiable motive for fighting the killer to the death later on, crafting buildup for a much more satisfying climax.  It is the emotional, well thought out demises in the story that audiences want in a horror narrative, versus a random death that could have been easily preventable.

  For every death that needs to happen in the slasher killer storyline, each has to give a certain amount of meaning.  Deaths that are meaningless such as finding yourself at a labeled dead end will not impact the audience or the story all that much.  Deaths that are impactful for the cast members trying to escape like self sacrifice or being unable to escape successfully despite the amount of preparation involved changes the stakes of the story entirely.  A death in a horror story should not only be fodder for the climax later on.  Death in horror has to have a purpose to the narrative and the characters trying to survive the dangerous position they unfortunately got themselves into.  That is why characters making idiotic motions that lead to their demises are purposeless and are more fit to be a dark comedy parody film like Scary Movie.

  Sending characters to their doom in easily preventable matters is a cliché that only makes the horror genre look like a huge joke to those usually not interested in those types of stories.  It needs to be replaced with meaningful deaths that heighten the stakes of the plot in a way that everyone in the audience can find themselves getting behind.  Even if these meaningful deaths might hurt to write about, they are the ones that will be impactful to the story.  Doing so is a small price to pay for expelling the cliché about dumb choices in horror stories that leads to ultimately deaths.