An oft-cited guideline if you've ever come across the academia of writing and storytelling comes in three short words: show, don't tell.
This pithy mantra stands for the principle that a story is bound to be more engaging and interesting if actions, scenarios, and ideas are depicted in the now through action and (in visual media) onscreen visuals, rather than having those ideas be merely alluded to with secondhand dialogue after the fact. Who wants to read a story where, say, a badass special agent comes back from an undepicted job and gives the broad strokes of what happened to his partner when we could have instead been given a scene in the moment as we watch him on the job and witness what he went through more presently?
I generally agree with the spirit of show, don't tell. For one, I previously discussed the principle as it pertained to characterization in religious horror, discussing how a film has to establish the morals of a character through sufficient actions to sell the good/evil conflict properly. Just saying you bat for the angels or the demons isn't enough. Show us how. But here, I'm talking more about show, don't tell as pertains to narrative events more than character morals. In this frame, telling too much instead of showing can make it feel like we're being deprived of immersion and entertainment, and it can also come across as disrespecting the audience's intelligence by making the story or script feel like it's talking down and spelling things out to a degree that removes the reason for investing in the narrative. Weird example here, I know, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the music video for Taylor Swift's "Out of the Woods" (which was made with the pre-Taylor's Version recording of the song, just to be clear). The video is surreal and metaphorical as it sees Swift going through different environments and looping forward to meet a copy of herself from the beginning. Cool! But then the end of the video flashes big subtitles on the screen to complete a message started at the beginning of the video. "SHE LOST HIM. [/] BUT SHE FOUND HERSELF. AND SOMEHOW THAT WAS EVERYTHING." And boom, there goes any need to think about the imagery of the video whatsoever, or to engage with your own interpretation. A work is fine to have a specific defined message, metaphor, angle, or moral, and many of the greatest pieces do. But spelling out the message so bluntly takes the conversation out of the piece that should take place between the viewer and the artwork. Alternatively, too much telling in visual media can be a detrimental indication of a low budget or rushed production time, where dialogue and narration is used to sketch out narrative events the creators didn't have the money, means, or time to film or animate as their own scenes. It can be noticeable when telling is used as a crutch in this way, and it makes a production feel more inept or improperly-executed when you can sense that the use of telling was a choice driven by creative limitation, not creative intent and impact.
But for horror, that's really not always how it works. The line is blurred a lot within the genre.
In some cases, horror is most effective by going all the way there and showing. Some of the most famous scare scenes in horror media are the ones where the monster or hellish scenario is finally uncovered in a horrible, scary visual. Horror manga legend Junji Ito is famous for creating book-page jumpscares where turning the page will reveal a horrible, unforgiving illustration of whatever horror he's cooked up for a given story. Many cinematic jumpscares are in the form of the reveal of a scary face, and horror movie climaxes often thrive on spectacular disclosures of the antagonistic party's most horrible facets. Heck, even Internet screamer pranks from back in the day used the reveal of a monster as one half of their startle punchline.
There are also films that generate disgust and discomfort via explicit or graphic content. William Friedkin's controversial classic The Exorcist remains a film that feels unfilmable, or at least, impossibly mainstream, due to the disturbing nature and explicitness of some of its scenes. The horror of the demon possessing young Regan MacNeil is manifested in the specific, grotesque, and sickening. We see what it does to her, what it makes her do, and we're trapped in the room with the disgust and terror that still feels shocking to put on film. Even a non-supernatural scene in the film is horrific because of its explicitness--we see Regan receiving a carotid angiography, a really scary-looking thankfully obsolete oh my god medical procedure where her neck is tapped with a tube and blood spurts out, all on camera. Of all the nastiness in the film, I've seen it told that the simulated but unflinching depiction of a real medical procedure allegedly caused vomit in the theaters the most! Exploitation-style horror also rides on lurid explicit imagery, like the current Terrifier films of today which are famous for their shock aesthetic depicting horrendously brutal and nigh-cartoonish killings that strive for audience revulsion and perhaps even offense.
At the same time, fear is an emotion deprived from the unknown, from mystery. It's why haunted-house stories are eternally effective, because nothing works quite as reliably on the viewer as invoking the universal primal fear of noises in the dark which you can't identify. And that's why a lot of horror can be super effective through telling--it's an excellent vehicle for delivering information in a way that allows the imagination to still do much of the of the work and make the horror more personally scary as it fills in the gaps in the worst way for each particular viewer.
I talked about The Exorcist as horror that works by showing, but in significant contrast, The Exorcist III, directed by William Peter Blatty (who wrote the original books), is not only the only good sequel in the franchise, but it's a film that skillfully horrifies almost exclusively by telling.
The film features Lieutenant Kinderman fifteen years after the previous film investigating the resurgence of murders that evoke the M.O. of the deceased Gemini Killer, and he discovers demons have their hands in the crimes. And yet, most of the scariest content in the film comes from verbal descriptions and visual implication. None of the murders committed in the film are depicted in the act. None of the dead bodies are seen in any kind of detail. The only gore is in the climax, and the only time we see the full aftermath of a crime scene is also in that climax when the demon, working to torture Kinderman, summons an image of a scene he only told another character about earlier. And it's almost shocking how perfectly identical the image is to what we heard and how unnecessary it feels to see it. Kinderman's description early in the film is so perfectly stark and illustrative and horrible that we don't even need to see the thing later on to know exactly what it looks like. His description to his priest friend Father Dyer, serving as a heavy rebuttal to Dyer's religious optimism, is simple but it's weighty, magnetic, and disturbing.
"His name was Thomas. Thomas Kintry. Black boy, about twelve years old. The killer drove an ingot into each of his eyes...and cut off his head. In place of his head was the head from a statue of Christ. All done up in blackface, like a minstrel show, you know. The eyes and the mouth painted white....the boy had been crucified on a pair of rowing oars."
The scene cuts immediately after that last word, and it's enough to rattle you. Nothing is shown, everything is told, and it's all haunting. The brutality, the smug mockery, the racist hate--they're all palpable and hideous. The image is burned into your mind like some of the worst visual horror tableaux, and it's purely delivered in dialogue. William Peter Blatty is a master.
Here's what's seen later in the studio cut of the film, during the dramatic exorcism sequence.
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| Screenshot from The Exorcist III. |
It's creepy and repugnant, yeah, and kudos to the script, because that's exactly what we're made to envision earlier. If there's any incongruity, it's the combination of the statue head and the ingots in the eyes placed on one figure when the description indicated the ingots were in the real head, not the sculpture. But we probably never needed this visual. My first reaction upon hearing that monologue from Kinderman was to pause and just think "I don't know if they plan to show us this later, but wow, what a choice to leave that in dialogue only because it's so effective on its own." And given that the exorcism scene was an addition of reshoots, it hadn't been Blatty's intent to depict the human hate effigy on-camera in any form. He knew he didn't need to. (I do think the messy exorcism climax is overall beneficial to the dramatic arc despite its clumsy insertion and indulgent aspects.) Elsewhere in the film, we get more effective descriptions of chilling horror and even visual symbolism that convey the terror beautifully. Creepy shots of a decapitated statue in the hospital visually signify the decapitations of two select victims over the course of the film, and dialogue has a heavy presence in characters simply talking to convey horror with great skill. The Exorcist III may be one of the most writerly films I've ever watched because it approaches everything with a prose author's knowledge of how to use "tell" for immersion and restraint, and it's great.
One of the other great "tell" uses in horror is Pearl's confession in Pearl (2022). In the story of a deluded wannabe chorus dancer in 1918 who turns to serial murder to chase her dream, Pearl ends up with her dream crushed and her murder for naught. Her sister-in-law attempts to console her, not knowing the depths of Pearl's issues, and encourages a roleplay to act like she's her husband and spill the beans. Thus commences an unbroken six-minute single-shot single-take monologue from Pearl where she rambles and unpeels every neurosis, fear, darkness, and crime she's been tormented by for ages, and it's spellbinding. The scene is uncomfortable, vulnerable, and frightening, and it works even though (or perhaps because) Pearl reveals troubles even the audience hasn't been privy to throughout the film (or even in the chronological sequel X where these aren't alluded to either). Like Mitzy the sister-in-law, we're trapped watching a very unwell woman discuss the depths of an ever-more-disturbed psyche we likely couldn't begin to comprehend...and because the audience is learning things alongside Mitzy (who's admittedly learning more), we're sharing her feeling of discomfort as we hear somebody dangerous uncorking the bottle. It's a scene that's so effective because it's composed of telling. A montage of Pearl's past wouldn't feel quite as effective as the social horror and tension of being across the table from an unstable person talking about all this stuff post-breakdown. Being told like this gives us the sense of realizing Pearl is even worse off than we already thought after a whole runtime of darkness. It's not the type of scene you're supposed to write and film for a movie, and that's why it's so incredible.
And of course, there are cases where neither showing nor telling are the most effective and the lines are blurred. Some horror rides on more absolute mystery. The Blair Witch Project is a famous for being terrifying while never showing any supernatural entities or unambiguously paranormal activity. In the slasher Sleepaway Camp, the most visually-striking and horrifying murder for many is not visually explicit, but it's not just said offscreen either. Instead, it's a silhouette shot of a curling iron pushed toward the parted legs of a sleeping mean girl. It's shocking and horrific without being profane or left entirely offscreen. Would that be restrained enough to count as telling or is it too explicit to count? Who knows?
But that's what's so versatile about horror storytelling, because there's so many ways to express fear, and every horror has its own most effective storytelling delivery. We can be sickened to our bones by visceral displays of fraught trauma...or shaken deeply by secondhand dialogue accounts of event. Sometimes the story can deliver nothing and let us do all the work, effectively conjuring horrors through declining to conjure them! And sometimes, we get a little of both--visual suggestions that aren't as awful as they could be...and maybe they don't need to be. Show. Tell. Imply. Convey everything, or nothing. All of those can be the root delivery of some of the scariest, most lingering horror moments in the genre.
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