Who's Telling Your Story? The Framing Question Horror Writers Keep Getting Wrong

When you are writing a story, there are a few unspoken rules that you agree to. Namely, that you as author are positioning yourself as an observer of some kind (omniscient, most likely) retroactively sharing the events that you've "seen," fictional or not. In screenwriting, you almost put yourself in the audience's shoes to relate what they will see.

Sometimes you use what's known as a framing device to help you in your storytelling. A framing device is how a script answers who is telling the story, when, and why. It's a device that positions your storyteller more clearly, sometimes as a character.

In Interview with the Vampire, the framing device is that a vampire is telling his story to an interviewer. In The Princess Bride, the grandfather reads the story from a book that we can visualize as the movie. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, there are a couple of layers—a girl in a cemetery reads a book, and then we enter the book's author's point of view, who speaks with Zero Moustafa, whose perspective we're in for most of the film. (Whew.)

The point is, you can get creative. And the horror genre is one area where filmmakers get very creative. Most films never draw attention to these devices. The ones that do, through voiceover, a confession, or a camera someone forgot to turn off, are making a promise about how the story reached us.

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