Hollywood director and producer Chuck Russell originally decided to make The Mask (1994) as a horror film. Following A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 (1987) and The Blob (1988), The Mask was set to be his next spine-chilling project. Instead, the 1994 global box office hit was an action-comedy.

Chuck says that a good horror film is a combination of psychology and fear. “I don’t think I’ve ever worried about scaring the audience too much. I’m concerned about going too graphic. I always think, ‘Is it graphic enough, or is it too graphic?’ As a director, I want to scare the audience as much as I can and give them a thrill. They’re going for a horror movie, so they know that it is going to be scary,” he says.

Chuck says that when he crafts horror films, he focuses on storytelling and characters because when the audience cares about the characters, it makes the scares impactful.

He says, “I want to make films where the audience thinks, ‘That’s how I might behave, even if it’s a spaceship,’ or ‘That’s how I might behave, even if it’s someone trapped in a cabin or whatever.’ Now once I have the audience’s heart in the character, I can scare the hell out of them. This is the horror you really remember. The scenes in my movies that people remember the most are often the most imaginative, but terrifying because they cared about the character. So it’s not just how graphic it can be, for me, it’s how it is staged.”

Talking about the way horror as a genre has grown over the years, the filmmaker says, “The evolution of horror films has been very interesting because it has become more and more graphic. I’m impressed when I see something surprisingly graphic that’s true to the story. What’s happened in contemporary horror is that certain horror films are trying to be depressing – they’re so choked with despair. Every character is miserable. The film itself can become depressing.”

In India, this year, horror-comedy genre was quite popular. Talking about the genre Chuck says, “Horror-comedy is really cool, but you have to be careful not to be silly. There’s a little bit more humour in most of my movies. In Elm Street 3, I did things that were unexpected for the character, and it worked. Horror comedy is about the combination of fear with humour. If you’re doing something a little funny when the audience expects a scare, and when the audience is not expecting a scare, you scare them, and you will get a scream.”

- Story and characters that the audience cares for

- Set pieces with a great shot design

- Originality – It’s a great rule to say you want to give the audience exactly what they wanted the way they least expected

- There has to be an organic sense to the magic in the story, but there has to be logic