How to Write an A24 Horror Script Without Selling Your Soul
Let’s cut the noise.
You’re not here to write a haunted house movie with cheap scares and a priest who shows up in Act Three. You’re here to write horror that sticks. The kind that keeps people thinking long after the lights come back on. The kind that crawls instead of jumps.
A24 figured that out.
They took horror, cracked it open, and bled out everything that wasn’t real, leaving only what is:
The grief.
The guilt.
The shame you don’t talk about.
So how do you write something like Hereditary, The Witch, Saint Maud, or The Killing of a Sacred Deer without copying them, or getting lost in the fog?
Here’s the structure underneath all that dread.
1. Opening Image / Prologue (Minutes 1-5)
Start quiet. Start weird. Start meaningful.
The best A24 openings are loaded with tone and metaphor. Not action. Not plot.
It’s usually:
A death
A ritual
A place that feels wrong
Hereditary opens with an obituary and a dollhouse.
The Witch starts with exile.
The Lighthouse starts with isolation.
You’re not setting the plot. You’re setting the spiritual weather of the whole story.
2. The World of the Film (Minutes 5-20)
This is where 90% of writers lose the thread. Because they think, “I have to hook the reader!”
No. You have to sink them. Slowly.
This section reveals:
Who’s grieving
Who’s faking it
What’s broken under the surface
And what’s never going to be spoken aloud
Let the stillness do the heavy lifting. Show us the pressure before the break.
3. The Disruption (Minutes 20-35)
This is your first taste of “what the hell was that?”
It’s not a jump scare. It’s something subtly wrong:
A missing baby
A voice that wasn’t there
A ritual that maybe… worked?
The character might try to explain it away. But you’ve cracked the atmosphere now. Nothing’s going back to normal.
4. The Descent (Minutes 35-65)
Here’s where your protagonist starts trying to fix, fix, fix and digs themselves deeper every time.
The world tilts.
Reality softens at the edges.
Time stretches.
Identity starts to split.
The horror isn’t outside them anymore. It’s coming from within.
Think Maud’s ecstasy.
Think Annie screaming into a pillow.
Think Dani watching everything burn.
5. The Revelation / Inversion (Midpoint-Minute 75 )
This is the “oh no” moment. But it’s not a twist, it’s a truth.
Either:
They realize what’s been happening all along
Or they become something they were afraid of becoming
This is a psychological break disguised as a supernatural shift.
The point isn’t to scare the audience. It’s to make them feel like this was always inevitable.
6. The Collapse (Minutes 75-90)
No more logic. No more denial.
Just loss. Madness. Transformation.
Relationships disintegrate.
The character might surrender or they might fight, knowing it’s already over.
Either way, this section burns it all down.
Hereditary: We’re flying through the attic.
Saint Maud: She becomes divine alone.
The Lighthouse: He sees the light. And then the fall.
7. The Climax (Minutes 90–99)
One of two things happens here:
They embrace the horror and become something else.
They succumb to it, quietly.
Either way, this is symbolic, loaded, and almost always silent.
The visuals do the talking. The body language. The stillness.
This isn’t catharsis. It’s revelation.
8. Final Image (Minute 100)
Circle back to the beginning but inverted.
If you opened on stillness, end in chaos.
If you opened on grief, end in transcendence or total void.
The final frame should haunt. Not explain.
The Witch: Floating into the woods.
Midsommar: A smile in the flames.
The Lighthouse: Pecked by seagulls, godlike and gone.
The A24 Horror Formula (If You Can Call It That)
Emotion first, horror second
Atmosphere > exposition
Structure is circular, not linear
The monster is often just… the truth
You won’t always win. You might become the thing you feared
Final Thought: You Don’t Need Permission to Go Quiet
The biggest mistake writers make is trying to outsmart the structure or load it up with too much “meaning.” A24 horror works because it’s honest, not clever.
Because it dares to let silence stretch.
Because it knows horror is what happens when we finally sit with the things we’re trying to outrun.
So write it. Burn slow. Go deep.
Make it beautiful. Make it brutal.
And if you want the downloadable Google Doc version of this click here!
