Bye Bye Man & how to write a horror film
Stacy Title is the name of the director of this film. She is also responsible for “Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror”, a horror anthology series. This was before the movie “VHS” was a thing. So I guess we can say she was ahead of her time?
The problem is you can bend the truth so many ways until it just becomes completely detached from reality. “The Bye Bye Man” is nothing but a good marketing campaign. It shows you how little you need to care about the actual film as long as it has a low enough budget so you can get it back in the box office. The budget was $7.4m and it made $26m. That’s quite an alright investment.
All aspects of the film itself, fails. But perhaps the most interesting to talk about is the world building and backstory. Which I will talk about below as a review of the film and a lesson on screenwriting.
The following movies will be spoiled: “The Nightmare on Elm Street”, “It Follows”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, “The Others” and of course “The Bye Bye Man”.
Rules, rules, rules
When you are coming up with a world different than ours, the key to paving the way to the audience's suspension of disbelief is to make sure you establish the rules of this world and stick by them throughout the whole film.
Never ever break one of these rules.
If the creature comes at you only by walking (which is super creepy), never have it run for no reason (“It Follows”). If the poison kills you by making your eyes bleed, never have a death without the eyes bleeding (“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”).
“The Bye Bye Man” never clearly communicate the rules. “Don’t think it, don’t say it” is actually quite clear on it’s own but it’s not enough to have this line of dialogue in the film (over and over again). It needs to be demonstrated. I would never put “thinking” as a rule if I was the writer of this film. Because “thinking” is actually pretty difficult to demonstrate to the audience. “Don’t say his name out loud” is a better rule.
It’s simple:
- Explain the rules.
- Demonstrate the rules.
- Stick by the rules.
If you are unable to explain or demonstrate the rules effectively, you need to change them. Make them as simple as humanly possible.
Randomness is boring and not scary
Just because your horror film is supernatural, it doesn’t mean you can have random weird shit happen in the film and expect us not to question it.
Watch a film called “The Others” with Nicole Kidman and see how they turn “footsteps from upstairs” cliche on it’s head.
Think of your horror screenplay no different than sci-fi or fantasy. If these genres need to explain their world, how it works and stick by that explanation, so does horror. Your screenplay needs to be rooted in reality of it’s own world. In reality, rules don’t just change randomly.
Also it’s scarier if rules are followed by the creature or the ghost or whatever it is. Because getting scared comes from a good anticipation. You cannot anticipate anything if there are no rules. The randomness is not interesting, it’s boring and it’s not scary.
Weakness rule
I’ve been telling you to explain the rules of the world as soon as possible. But, there is one very specific rule that you explain as late as possible, and that is the weakness rule.
A very classical example is “Nightmare in Elm Street”, which “The Bye Bye Man” borrows from a little bit. In “Nightmare…”, the basic rules are immediately explained. But, the weakness of the villain, Freddy Kruger is found by the characters who make sacrifices to obtain the rule: If they don’t fear him, he is powerless.
In “It Follows”, they experiment based on the knowledge they have. The thing they are dealing with has physical limitations. It can’t go through walls like a ghost. So they decide to electrocute it to see if they can kill it. The ending is ambiguous on purpose and they use that to point to larger themes of the film.
In the thriller “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, they are dealing with a human who poisoned the main character’s family to teach him a lesson. After resisting for a long time and trying to find a weakness to the antagonist’s plan, the protagonist decides to surrender. So the writer turns this on it’s head to make it serve the central theme of the film. It might be worth it to note, in this film too, the rules are defined very clearly as “Kill one the members of your family or the poison I inflicted on them will kill all of them”.
In “Bye Bye Man”, a similar idea exists. The main hero has a revelation based on nothing: He decides he can defeat the villain by not showing fear. This is not really based on anything within the film’s own world. That is a major problem but regardless, this idea is forgotten in the next scene. It doesn’t come in handy for anything and it’s not revisited in any way. There is no scene where he uses this weakness rule to even try to eliminate “Bye Bye Man”.
Backstory is not the story
Backstory is a character’s or a place’s history.
Story is what happens to the people you focus on in your film.
Backstory, believe it or not, is unimportant. This is why prequel films are generally fall behind the originals.
What’s important is what happens to your characters. Having them grow up, learn something, make sacrifices are way more satisfactory than having a greatly detailed backstory in your film.
The reason why we see a lot of backstory-heavy horror films is because exposition is easy and to a writer who is inexperienced or doesn’t care, a detailed backstory seems like fleshing out the story and giving life to it. It does create that impression but don’t be deceived, this is just an illusion. The only function of a backstory should be to set things in motion in your story.
Another thing you can experiment on but is quite dangerous is to have the backstory contribute to how the villain is defeated or whatever your climax is. Don’t forget your main hero needs to make a sacrifice in the climax to get the information on how to defeat the villain. Or you will be undermining your hero and because they reflect themselves onto him/her, your audience.
I much prefer the experiment-defeat rather than knowledge-defeat, because your hero needs to use his head and come up with a weakness rule himself by making sacrifices rather than go to a library to have it told to him.
As a result of it’s shortcomings, “The Bye Bye Man” finds it’s place in our collective memories as a horrible embarrassment to it’s makers and everyone involved in it. For us the audience, a waste of time unless we are trying to learn how not to make a film.
