Low-Budget Movie = Few Locations, Small Cast

The secret to writing low-budget movies is to limit your locations and keep your cast size small. The fewer locations and characters, the better.

When I first came up with the idea for my screenplay, Red Wedding, I started with a sub-genre (slasher) and an theme (wedding).

I loved the idea. It had lots of story possibilities, and it implied a central location.

But I worried about the cast size.

Even a small wedding would require dozens of people in the supporting cast. You've got the bride's family, the groom's family, friends on both sides, the caterers, photographer, priest, etc.

How to manage all that on a limited budget?

I started thinking of film locations. I remembered back to various weddings I had been to: churches, hotels, backyards...

And a lakeside resort.

Bingo.

Setting the movie in remote location — cabins in the woods — put me in familiar genre territory, and solved lots of thorny problems.

I could trap the characters in one place with, say, a storm that knocks out the only bridge. Better yet, I could knock out the bridge before most of the wedding guests even arrived.

The screenplay starts with a small wedding rehearsal and a thunderstorm outside. We meet the priest, the bride, the groom, the maid of honor, the best man, two bridesmaids, and two groomsmen.

Nine characters.

The wedding rehearsal is interrupted when the bride's cell phone rings. She answers. It's her dad. He can't make it to the rehearsal. The bridge is out.

Later, I add the killer and one more character, a wedding guest driving through the rain, trying to get to the lodge. She becomes that familiar horror trope: "the first to die."

That's it.

Eleven characters.

Most of whom will not survive the film.

Of course, there's a drawback to my solution. Rain is a production expense. But writing a thunderstorm into the screenplay allowed me to reduce my wedding party from, say, 111 to 11.

I think it's worth it.

And another nice thing about cabins in the woods, from a production standpoint, is that the cast and crew can live out of some cabins while filming in the others.

So that's my recipe for writing a low-budget horror film.

Eleven characters. Limited locations.

Just add blood.