How to Audition for a Horror Film

The sides come in on a Tuesday night. Three pages, one character, and halfway down the second page a stage direction in capital letters: SHE HEARS SOMETHING IN THE HALLWAY. SHE SCREAMS. The tape is due Thursday. You live in an apartment with thin walls, and your reader is a roommate who has never seen a horror movie all the way through.

You run the scene once and catch yourself doing the face. Eyes wide, mouth open, hands up. It looks like a poster. Then you try the scream and your neighbor knocks on the wall, and your throat feels scratchy for an hour.

The short version: a horror audition is a normal audition with an unusual obstacle. Find out what kind of horror the project is, play a person who wants something and is trying not to be afraid, and start your fear with the stillness real fear starts with. Give the thing that isn’t there an exact place and size. Decide what the scream needs to be before you tape it, warm up for it, and protect your voice. Above all, play it straight. Your character doesn’t know they’re in a horror film.

Find out what kind of scary the sides want

Horror covers a lot of ground. A slasher and a quiet psychological thriller ask for different acting. A casting-site guide to nailing a horror audition starts here: read the sides closely and work out whether it’s the bloody-gore kind of horror or the psychological, emotional kind.

The same guide makes a point worth holding on to: horror is like any other genre as far as your audition is concerned. You still break down the scene. You still find what your character wants, who they’re talking to, and what’s in the way. The monster is just a very large obstacle.

So read the whole breakdown, not just your pages. Is your character the skeptic who doesn’t believe until it’s too late, the one who knows something is wrong from page one, or the person the audience meets in the first five minutes for a reason? Each of those plays fear at a different point and a different size.

Play it straight: your character doesn’t know the genre

The poster face comes from playing the genre instead of the person. Real fear, at least at first, often looks like the opposite of a big reaction: the body goes still, the breath stops, and all the attention goes outward to the noise. Our guide on how to act scared covers what frightened bodies actually do. For an audition, the important part is the order things happen in.

That order gives you a shape to play instead of a face to make. The noise happens. You freeze. Your attention goes, hard, to where the noise came from. Then you make a decision: call out, move toward it, back away. On camera, that sequence reads as fear without your eyebrows doing anything at all, and it shows casting a person thinking.

Try not to be scared

Frightened people rarely want to be frightened. They explain the noise away, make a joke, talk themselves down, or get angry. The same idea is a common note for crying scenes: play the fight against the tears rather than the tears. Play the fight against fear. Let it break through only when the character can’t hold it back anymore.

This is also how you avoid camp. Camp happens when the actor knows it’s a horror film and the character seems to know it too: the knowing glance into the dark, the scream that arrives before the scare. A character who is busy trying to stay calm, reasonable, and in control is a real person. When that person finally loses it, the audience goes with them.

Playing it straight also means keeping the ordinary parts of the scene ordinary. If your character is making dinner, flirting, or arguing about rent on page one, play that scene fully, as if nothing bad is coming. The calmer and more specific the normal life is, the more there is for the horror to break.

Give the thing that isn’t there a place, a size, and a speed

On a self-tape there is no monster, no dark hallway, and usually no sound effect. You’re reacting to an empty corner of your living room. Nicolaas Hendrik Jacobs, in a University of Pretoria dissertation on green screen acting, argues that green screen limits or removes the outside stimuli that help actors believe in a scene. He proposes Stanislavsky’s magic if as a way around it: what would I do if this were really here?

The magic if works best when the answer is specific. “Something scary” gives your eyes nothing to do. A shape at the end of the hallway, about your height, standing still, that wasn’t there a second ago, gives you an exact place to look and an exact thing to see. Decide all of it before you press record.

• Pick a real spot off camera for the thing, close to the lens but not in it, and put a piece of tape there so your eyeline lands in the same place every take.
• Decide how big it is, how far away it is, and whether it moves, so your eyes travel the right distance when it does.
• Decide the moment you first notice it, and let that be a separate beat from the moment you understand what it is.
• Keep your reader on the other side of the lens from the thing’s spot, so the person you’re talking to and the thing you’re afraid of are two different places on the tape.

Our guide to acting to a tennis ball goes deeper on eyelines and keeping them steady from take to take.

A drill from Shakespeare: the ghost only you can see

Shakespeare wrote one of the best scenes ever for reacting to something nobody else can see. In Macbeth, at the banquet, the ghost of the murdered Banquo sits in Macbeth’s seat. Macbeth sees him. His guests see an empty chair.

MACBETH. The table’s full.

LENNOX. Here is a place reserv’d, sir.

MACBETH. Where?

LENNOX. Here, my good lord. What is’t that moves your Highness?

MACBETH. Which of you have done this?

LORDS. What, my good lord?

MACBETH. Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake
Thy gory locks at me.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4 (Project Gutenberg)

Look at what Shakespeare gives you. “The table’s full” is the first beat: Macbeth notices something before he understands it. “Where?” is the freeze, when his attention snaps toward the chair. “Which of you have done this?” is the first attempt to explain the horror away as a prank. Only on the last line does he talk to the ghost itself.

Set an empty chair in your room and play those few lines with a friend reading Lennox, or with the lines recorded. Put the ghost in the chair with the magic if: how he’s sitting, what the blood looks like, whether he turns his head. Then do it again and keep Macbeth’s effort to stay a calm host at a dinner party. The scene is far scarier when he’s trying to hold it together. The full play is on our Macbeth page if you want the rest of the banquet.

Decide what the scream needs before you tape it

Not every scream in a script needs to be a full-voiced shriek on tape. Read what the moment is for. Sometimes it’s a sharp breath and a cry that gets cut off. Sometimes it’s a shout of a name. Sometimes it really is the big one. Make the choice on purpose, and make it fit the character and the size of the frame.

What sets a scream apart isn’t just volume. Researchers led by Luc Arnal and David Poeppel found that screams carry an acoustic quality they call roughness: rapid flickers in loudness that can reach, as the Cell Press summary of the study puts it, 30 to 150 times per second, against 4 to 5 for normal speech. The rougher screams were rated the most frightening, and they drove more activity in the amygdala, part of the brain’s fear response.

Actors who scream for a living have learned something similar. When Actors Theatre of Louisville staged Dracula, its cast worked with vocal coach D’Arcy Smith. One of the actors told Louisville Public Media that a clear, round note was healthy but not believable, so they worked toward an open sound with a little grit. A believable scream is a shaped sound with some texture in it, not just a loud one.

Protect your voice

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders lists screaming among the vocal extremes to avoid in its guide to taking care of your voice. An actor can’t always avoid it, but you can treat it as stunt work. There’s even training built for it: Vocal Combat Technique describes itself as a system for teaching actors vocal stunts like screams, shouts, and choking sounds.

The Dracula cast’s routine is a good model for a home self-tape. They were cleared by an ear, nose, and throat doctor before training, built their screams on breath support, practiced simple exercises like lip trills and vocalizing through a straw, watched for tension in the face and body, and took 10-minute rests between rehearsal periods. Here is that routine adapted for home, with a couple of additions:

1. Warm up first with lip trills or by sounding through a straw, the way you would before singing.
2. Rehearse the whole scene marking the scream, at a fraction of full voice, so you only do the real thing on camera.
3. Build the sound on breath from low in your body and keep your jaw, neck, and shoulders loose.
4. Limit yourself to a few full screams in a session, with rests and water between takes.
5. Stop if it hurts. If you’re hoarse or your throat feels raw or achy, rest your voice, and if you think you have a voice problem, see a doctor, as the NIDCD advises.

Two notes for home. A full scream can distort your recording, so test the level first. And warn your neighbors.

Keep it at audition scale

A self-tape frame is usually tight, often chest up, and that frame magnifies everything. A reaction that would read from the back of a theater looks like a cartoon at that distance. Let your eyes, your breath, and your stillness do most of the work: a held breath during the freeze carries on a small microphone better than any face you can make. If the scene needs a flinch or a step back, make it small and keep it in frame.

Keep your reader flat and quiet. They aren’t trying to scare you; the scene is. The more ordinary their read, the more your reactions have to come from what you’ve built in the empty corner, which is the part of the tape that is really about you.

Rehearse the silences, not just the lines

Horror scenes live in the gaps: the pause after the noise, the beat before you open the door, the moment you realize the voice behind you isn’t your roommate. Those silences are where a lot of tapes go flat, because actors rush through them to get to the next line. They need rehearsing as much as the words do.

Offbook is useful here. Upload your sides, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character and wait for your line. You can add custom pauses in the scene editor and set how fast the voices speak, as the video below shows, so the reader leaves exactly the silence you need for the freeze and the realization before the next cue lands.

Run the scene enough times that the words are automatic and your attention is free for the thing in the corner. If you’re taping with no one to read, our guide to self-taping alone covers the setup. Then pick the take where the fear seems to happen to you rather than be performed by you.

Questions actors ask

Do I need horror experience to book a horror role?

No. Casting is looking at the same things it looks for in any genre: whether you understand the scene, make clear choices, and come across as a real person on camera. Strong dramatic work in a frightening situation is the whole job.

What if I can’t scream full out where I live?

Rehearse at marking volume and save the full sound for a few takes somewhere you can make noise, like a car parked somewhere quiet or a friend’s place. If that isn’t possible, choose a sharp, cut-off cry or a shout that fits the moment, and play everything around it fully.

Can I rehearse a horror scene without a scene partner?

Yes. In Offbook, voices read the other parts and listen for your line before cueing the next one, so you can run the scene alone as often as you like. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere.