There’s an art to the horror short. You don’t have much time to tell your story, so you really need to focus on one element and execute it well. And one of the most common and rewarding moves: the reversal.
In particular, let’s look at recent horror short Visible, clocking in at under 3 minutes:
The Reversal
We start off with a young woman, alone at night. Tagging a public basketball court, she sees a ball float off the ground and fly all over the place. They quickly establish a pattern and type of story – girl haunted at basketball court. We think we know what’s happening.
Then comes the twist- the girl we’ve been following isn’t being haunted. She’s the ghost, and the invisible movers of the basketball are actually the living. We flip perspectives and see how they experience this haunting. One by one they get frightened and driven off.
So far so good – ground already covered by a certain 2001 movie, perhaps, but still enough to surprise and subvert expectations. The story isn’t done though —
The Button
As the teens flee the ghostly. presence, one stays. The ghost scrawls words onto a bench – “STILL HERE” – and the teen reacts. “Naomi,” he asks – as it turns out, he knows this ghost. And with that, our understanding flips again.
It’s a small move, but sometimes that’s all you need to put a button on your short. As we discussed previously on the podcast, you need to go out on a high note, especially with a horror short.
Without that extra turn to the story, it would end with a dissipation – teens fleeing, our protagonist a ghost. A familiar story in an unfamiliar location. But with this small emotional gesture, everything gets recontextualized. We end with momentum and further possibilities of where the story could go.
Just one new piece of information that changes our understanding of what came before can help you leave the reader excited about your script.