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To Learn to Write Effective Horror, Watch ‘The Office’
How ‘Dinner Party’ is a master class of rising tension
When horror, suspense and thriller writers talk about their inspirations, they often refer to the great, renowned authors and directors like Stephen King or Guillermo del Toro. They pick through the prose and story beats of their works in an attempt to figure out what makes the stories so effectively terrifying.
Although analyzing horror content sure is the most logical way of figuring out the keys to creating a good scary story, there’s also something to be said for analyzing comedy shows like The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, or even It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There’s a very thin line between horror and comedy, and writers will often use the same techniques to make a situation funny that they would use to make it scary. Sometimes, the only thing you need to turn a sitcom into a horror show is to remove the laugh track and darken the lighting.
If I had to pick one episode of a sitcom to serve as a template for writing suspense, it would have to be Dinner Party from The Office. This is the season 4 episode in which Michael invites Jim and Pam (and Andy and Angela) to a dinner party with his toxic girlfriend Jan.
It’s one of the funniest episodes of the entire show, but it’s also one of the most painful. It’s an episode that makes you squirm in your seat due to how deeply uncomfortable the situation is. It’ll make you laugh, sure, but so much of the laughter this episode provokes stems from discomfort. We laugh because the only other alternative is to grimace.
While actual horror media is still an invaluable source for aspiring horror writers to learn from, it can be helpful to study Dinner Party, and see how the writing techniques behind this episode can help people learn to write better horror.
Remove the characters from their comfort zone
The episode begins with Michael Scott successfully forcing Jim and Pam to agree to attend his dinner party with him and Jan. A running gag throughout the season so far has been Jim and Pam’s clever methods of avoiding Michael’s invitations, but here they have officially run out of options. They have no choice but to…
