If after the first kill in Jaws, the mayor agreed that there was clearly a shark problem and acted fast to get rid of it, then would there still be a movie? Maybe a short film, but not a particularly interesting one. No, the reason that Jaws is a masterpiece is because of the poor decisions that the mayor makes. Or, to put it another way, he had an invested interest, a stake, in a particular outcome and that blinded him to the danger at hand.
This is a common theme in horror, though it isn’t always done quite so well as it is in Jaws. In this article, we’ll look at how Jaws, Death Spa, and Blue Monkey each use similar stakes in order to keep the characters involved with the horror aspect of their narrative.
But first, let’s clear up a little confusion. Pretty much every horror movie has a basic stake at play: somebody or something is threatening lives. There is a physical stake involved, typically, as it plays on a life/death dichotomy. However, it could also be a mental or psychic thing, such as with a possession movie. Even in a movie that has additional stakes, like Jaws, also has a physical stake in the way our characters put their lives on the line to fight Bruce the Shark.
We’re not going to look at these particular stakes, as they are quite clear. Instead, we’re going to look at the stakes that allow for the horror elements to proliferate, or those which are used to trap our characters in a single location. These stakes exist in order to allow room for the horror to breathe.
Jaws
Let’s start with Jaws. We all know the basic plot: There’s a killer shark out in them thar waters and golly gee somebody should do something about it. The mayor is made aware of the risk the shark presents but instead decides to downplay it. In doing so, the mayor allows the shark more time to roam free and thereby consume more people. So it is this decision of the mayor’s that is to blame for the continuation of the horror element in the film, but why does he make such a bad decision?
In this case, the mayor is looking at things from an economic perspective (something we’ll see again in Death Spa). He is responsible not only for the safety and physical well-being of those in his town but also for their financial well-being. It is established that the primary source of income for his town comes from the tourist season. A maneater shark loose in the waters would deter tourists and financially damage the town.
This may seem like a minor stake, all things considered, but this is only when it’s considered as a crux for our hero. We want to say “Damn the money, do something.” But have you ever seen what happens to a small town when the main source of income fails to materialize? Poverty, decrease in available funds for repairs and programs, increase in drug use… it’s not a fun thing to see. The mayor, as an elected official, has to consider all of this when making his decision not to pursue the shark thing any further.
There is another side to this decision, too, which is an all too familiar horror trope and that is the desire to avoid causing panic. Panic is often as deadly as the threat itself is. One reason to keep the truth of the horror elements buried is to avoid causing undue panic before things are confirmed. Of course, many movies take this beyond a logical or realistic point by having the gatekeeper character refusing to view the evidence clearly until it is far and beyond too late. We don’t get the sense that the mayor in Jaws is quite that far gone, though many of his filmic brethren are. The desire to avoid panic is often done to a laughable degree, but our next example shows that economic concerns can be blown-up to a lark just as easily.
Death Spa
We won’t get into a full breakdown of the plot… really, who could? It’s a wild one when you try to examine it in any serious way. Put simply, a string of deaths are occurring at a health and fitness club. They could be the result of deadly accidents, but they are happening too often to be brushed off this way. Clearly, someone, or something, wants to turn the spa into a bloodbath.
If this was real life or a better-written movie, then the first step would be to close down the spa. If deaths keep happening in the building, maybe skip leg day and just spend some time in a friend’s hot tub instead. But the movie is called Death Spa, so we’re expecting kills at a spa and it knows it needs to deliver. But since it also wants to have an investigative plotline with the police looking into what’s happening, the film can’t get away with hidden bodies. That would be one way to write this film so that they stay at the spa; the bodies of murdered victims are hidden in the lockers or the basement or some such thing – they can even make a startling reappearance in the third act this way ala Halloween or Friday the 13th.
Instead, the writers decided the best way to keep people in the spa is to really up the stakes and make sure there was a reason why they wouldn’t close it down. That reason happens to be their big Mardi Gra party. But why would a party be so important that they couldn’t reschedule it? You know, maybe move the date to give people time to grieve the friends they lost or to give police time to investigate the crimes or to simply just show some respect for the dead. But they can’t cancel the party….
Membership goes up 20% following the Mardi Gra party, damnit.
This decision is as hair-brain stupid as it gets. What good does a 20% rise in memberships matter if your members keep ending up dead? There really is no good reason to care about this stake, the potential loss of life is just too great by this point for it to carry any weight. But why does this fail where Jaws doesn’t if both films are using an economic stake?
In Jaws, we’re not just worrying about one or two of the characters. The stake here is the financial well-being of the entire town. If it was just the mayor who stood to lose money, then we would consider him a selfish asshole (and we’d also cheer if he was eaten by Bruce the Shark then). But the stakes here are pretty damn high and spread out across the whole of the town.
In contrast, Death Spa’s stakes only affect the health club itself. It’s hard for us to care whether the club does well following the mardi gras party or not. Honestly, the stakes are actually about as low as can be. An increase in membership means more money, sure, but the reverse is not true. They won’t make less money if they move the party, they’ll still be making the same as they were beforehand. It doesn’t seem like the gym requires additional members to stay afloat, it’s always packed as far as we’ve seen.
So really, when it comes down to it, the stake in Death Spa is “We could stop, but we want more money.” It’s shallow, selfish, and it’s pretty hard to believe it would be enough of a stake to keep the party going.
Blue Monkey
What we have in Blue Monkey is a monster movie wherein the monster is stuck in one location. As such, there is an inherent stake to prevent the monster from getting out into the general public. Perhaps the film that best highlights this stake is The Thing, wherein it is theorized that if the alien monster were to escape then it would infect the entire human population in a short period of time. This is a great stake, as it makes sense for our characters to stick around and fight against evil if they’re all that stands in its way.
But Blue Monkey doesn’t really use this stake. Okay, they do, but not because of the monster.
It’s a weird bit of writing that gives us the primary stake for keeping characters in the hospital. It’s made even weirder by the fact that, until the very end of the film, pretty much nobody is bothered by the monster. This is an exaggeration, as it eats a few people that were unfortunate enough to wander into its hiding spots, but the general hospital goers have no idea that a crazy bug-monster is living downstairs.
Instead, the film uses the parasitic aspect of the bug as the main stake. The film begins with a man being bitten by a weird foreign bug (that we never see). He is rushed to the hospital where he dies. It is quickly discovered that people who came in contact with him are coming down with the same sickness. Samples are sent off to the proper authorities. Seeing such a contagious sickness, the proper authorities immediately speak to other authorities, and before you know it police, men in environmental suits, and men with guns are surrounding the hospital. Nobody is allowed in or out.
This approach isolates our main characters and keeps them stuck inside of the hospital. It also sets the stakes as high as they can go: If it gets out, the infection could kill the whole city or even the whole country. But these stakes also raise the risk of our main characters, as they are trapped inside.
The stakes get even higher when we learn that they’ve been ordered to blow up the building in two hours unless they get new orders. Now the walls are closing in: the threat of monster death on the inside, the threat of explosions on the out. While the film fails to follow through on this, setting a time limit in this manner is also a great way to add a ticking clock element into the story; you know, that whole “They’re running out of time… oh, I can’t wait to see how they get out of this one” energy that really breathes life into a third act.
Out of the three movies we’ve looked at today, Blue Monkey has the highest and the clearest stakes. You don’t need to think of things from the mayor’s perspective or scratch your head wondering why the Mardi Gra party was so important. We immediately get it and we understand that a few dead heroes are a small price to pay if it means saving the city. In this, we not only understand what the stakes are but we also understand the why of them. We might not want to see our heroes die for the sake of the city, but the decision never feels arbitrary or over the top.
Conclusion
When you write horror, your audience is going to be asking some simple questions that you need to answer:
- Why don’t the characters get help?
- Why don’t they just leave?
- What is so important about [blank] that it’s worth risking lives over?
If you set the stakes right, they’ll have their answers and you’ll have more room to explore the horror elements of your story.
Keep your stakes relevant and understandable, but don’t get too bogged down in them. Most of these are background elements of the story, they exist in order to allow the story enough space to unfold. If we really wanted to know more about why the mayor made such bad decisions, we’d read the original novel. But who, beyond Kelly, wants to do that?