Also, avoid the hackneyed plot twists. See Taking Lives as an example of a bad plot twist. See Silence Of The Lambs as an example of how plot twists aren’t needed. Plot is good. Twist is bad.
Amen! Not just in horror but in all filmmaking! Real life is full of events that have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever storyline you think you’re living. Movies should be the same way.
Like the SUV crash at the opening of Punch Drunk Love.
And I’ll bet that was scary, wasn’t it? See? Genius.
No misleading tension filled music.
Nothing makes me turn a movie off faster is to have a scene where someone is walking up a stairwell slowly with suspenseful music playing only to have something normal happen, like adoor whips open and the neighbor walks in saying “Hey What’s Up?”.
That is just shitty writing and film making.
Suspenseful music is for suspense - not for misleading.
And it should be used sparingly.
Like:
Suspenseful, eerie music
Real startling, jump-out-of-your-chair moments
Tension out the ears
Creepy cinematography
Really bad, twisted, evil, fearsome monsters
Dislike:
Too much gore and violence
Too much obvious sensationalism
Too much noise
But IRL, horrible (not supernatural, but pretty horrible) things happen to smart people, too.
A horrible fiend is the pelican
His bill ravage deep in your belly can
As you helplessly shriek
He’ll stuff more in his beak
Flap his wings and fly straight off to Hell, he can!
Night of the Demon is an interesting example. You see the demon right at the start (it was imposed on the director by the studio) but then the rest of the movie plays like a gradually-unfolding oh-my-god-he-really-is-a-black-sorceror script. Except that, because you know the demon exists, when the hero is expressing scepticism, you’re thinking, “You fool. How can you be so dense?”
Makes for a really different vibe.
Oh, and I second the boobies. Never can have too many.
I know this isn’t the same, but in the new movie Madagascar you don’t want to trust the penguins. I saw a trailer, and at one point, one character said, in dismay, “the penguins are psychotic!” That’s a cool line.
Be careful . . . that itself could be a source of horror. I refer you to “Great Is Diana,” a classic short story by Avram Davidson (published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1958; collected in Or All the Seas With Oysters and The Other Nineteenth Century – see The AVRAM DAVIDSON Website - Title Index).
Evil penguins? It’s been done.
It has also been noted in beer comercials ( I can’t find a link to it 
, and in the last line of the OP of this thread. [sub]Doobie doobie doo…[/sub]What was that?
And who can forget the giant green-tentacled penguin in “Scott of the Antarctic”? http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Epi2.html#23
Can I use that in my screenplay for Night of the Living Pelicans? If you recite it five times into a mirror, then Candypelican appears!
Less music - much less music. Especially the loud jarring blare of sound when something unexpected happens. I find it ends up making things less scary or effective. Silence is a much better way to build up tension.
The great moments in horror I’ve seen, the director lets the audiences imagination fill in the details of what happens.
In Shadowbuilder a character backs towards an open door (always a bad idea) & gets yanked into the darkness behind them. After that all you hear is a wet cruncccchhhhhhh. Great stuff (plus any film that has a Catholic priest running around with a pair of laser-sighted Glocks whacking devil worshipers has to have something going for it) 
As for chartacters acting like real people, in The Forgotten One, a pretty much run-of-the-mill ghost story, the main character goes upstairs to investigate a noise, hears a voice, freaks out & spends the night sleeping in his car trying to figure out whether or not he was hearing things.
By all means! 
For an arcane highbrow touch, see if you can work in the symbolism of the pelican in alchemy and Rosicrucian mysticism: Loading... Birds in Alchemy 404 Page Not Found. - GMOインターネット. Throw even the most pathetic Nostradamus-quoting horror geeks for a loop!
ME!
I want to be in a horror movie!
(heavy sigh)
Sadly my story where a masked killer, bumps off many teen-age girls, who resemblance to the girls I went to highschool with me, by blowing them up as a mad bomber/band geek has not been optioned.
I’m sure that can be arranged, Zebra.
Don’t look behind you.