Career & Craft

Write for Fright

Jack Giroux • 10/31/2025

M3GAN, Alien: Earth, and Hannibal writers discuss their techniques for creating fear on the page.

Fear is personal. Whether it’s a stroll in the woods, a nail peeled off, or the possession of a beloved, what’s scary is subjective. The running and screaming or hiding and quieting of a story doesn’t need to consume page one, but a message needs to be sent.

“The burden of open scenes more than anything is to set the tone of the horror,” Maria Melnik (Alien: Earth) said. “Horror, maybe even more than any other genre, has so many subgenres. You may or may not be introducing the threat right away. Maybe you’re building tension, maybe you’re doing a cold open, but either way, I need to understand the tone of this movie.”

Alien: Earth and Escape Room writer Maria Melnik.

No matter the tone, take the actions as seriously as possible. That’s how M3GAN and Malignant writer Akela Cooper approaches even her most tongue-in-cheek material.

For Cooper, she’s writing scares more for the screen than the page. “There’s only so much you can do in script format to actually make it scary,” Cooper said. “Describing, ‘oh, they’re scared or terrified,’ I start thinking, what word haven’t I used yet for this emotion? I don’t think I’m writing things that are scary on the page; I am building something that will be scary on screen.”

She does however take satisfaction when her writing scares an executive.

Bryan Fuller, the mind behind Hannibal and the upcoming fairy tale horror picture Dust Bunny will turn in a 60-page outline for a 90-page script, half-joking that he’s “the wrong asshole to ask” about horror writing.

M3GAN and Malignant writer Akela Cooper. Photo by Erin Ross.

“But I do remember reading the script for Silence of the Lambs,” Fuller said, “and noting how well-crafted those sequences were, being a very clever, clear economic adaptation of that book. Many of the scares I found to be representative of what we saw on the film.”

Melnik, who co-wrote the Escape Room films, approaches prose with a sharp knife. “It requires more sterilization,” she said. “Your language has to be more clipped and breathy in the pacing. You have to communicate a sense of disorientation and misdirection at times. To do that requires a subjective point of view versus basic stage direction. You have a narrow, more myopic point of view of the character, so the reader feels the tension with the characters.”

Cooper honed crafting action on American Horror Story, where she learned, if a character is looking around a dark corner or up at a ceiling, her lines must answer for the performer, “Why am I doing this?”

With dialogue, less is more for actors as well. “I was guilty of parentheticals in dialogue,” Cooper said. “I’ve cut way back on that now. If I’m doing my job with dialogue, it’s clear if a line is a joke or not. But if there’s nuance to it, then I will write that they ‘say this sarcastically.’ A lot of times it’s just for action lines. If there is action, I make sure the actor knows why they’re doing that action.”

Sometimes those actions require spotlight.

“There’s a line in Hannibal about how words are dangerous, that they’re pack hunters,” Fuller said. “It’s not just their meaning, but their shape as well. My brain will be pleased by the graphic nature of an all-caps word or sentence that gives more impact. It’s taking the words and either bolding them or underlining them or all-capping them so they have their moment in the spotlight.”

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