Walk a mile in your lead’s shoes. Or rather, make your audience walk in them. If your character is a serial rapist in jail, your audience may not have much empathy for him; engage the audience by showing things from his point of view, such as in flashbacks of a difficult life or in a current abusive situation while in prison.

Give the camera a human quality. In short, let it stand for the audience’s eyes. Instead of focusing on only the important elements in the room, let it naturally glance around as if the audience is actually in the scene, too. Make them feel as if they are uncovering the surprise elements on their own without your help.

Capitalize on what you can’t see. This can be particularly helpful in scary movies, where things the audience isn’t able to see can be just as scary, if not scarier, remaining unknown rather than in every scene. Focus on sound, character reaction, and other elements when using this technique to really draw the audience in and have them on the edge of their seats.

Use a simple storyline. Though complicated tales can be interesting, they often lose the viewer’s interest early on. The idea isn’t to make the audience work to understand the movie; it’s to make them enjoy the movie by providing an escape from reality.

Give your characters plenty of scene time. This might sound obvious, but instead of focusing on a dynamic film wrapped around a couple of characters, why not focus on the characters themselves? Give them dramatic, unique personalities with layered backgrounds and lives, and let them play out these extraordinary lives in lots of clever dialog and interaction.

Interact with your audience. While you certainly can’t create a quiz for them to fill out while they watch your movie (or can you? People voted for Shrek Idol, after all…), you can put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. What would cause your audience to scream, cry, get angry? It’s just as if you were writing a novel–if you cry, your audience will cry. Keep that in mind when you create your movie as an entire experience.

Keep them begging for more. Hold back key details as long as you can. Now, this can go both ways: don’t make your audience angry by not letting them know what the heck is going on. Instead, keep teasing them so they won’t figure the whole thing out until the end, a technique used in films like Mystic River and The Sixth Sense.

Provide variations in proximity. Alfred Hitchcock liked to use close-ups as well as pan out far away from his actors to create different feelings during a movie. Use these every time you want to either create a very emotional scene or a feeling of detachment.

As we’ve seen in so many horror movies, camera quality is usually not a big issue, so you don’t need to spend your budget there. In fact, if your footage is grainy or even not shot so well, it can sometimes add to a feature in this genre.

You should also skip paying for expensive venues. Horror and sci-fi movies can take place basically anywhere. You could probably get permission to shoot your film at certain places at school, or even your workplace. Try the houses of friends and family as well. Houses with barns, ponds or other bodies of water, or fields or other large running, forest areas are all good choices.

As we’ve discussed before, don’t spend your money on casting, either. A token payment is fine for struggling actors who agree to help out, but try to get friends and family to star in the film for free first. You could even make it a fun family project–or simply make it a favor you’re willing to pay back soon.

Speaking of actors, make your alien, killer, or other bad guy a human. This will save you a ton of money on costumes and special effects. Aliens can look like humans, and human killers can be just as terrifying as monsters. If nothing else, you could even have half of a face rip off (think Terminator) in a scene and replace it with some cheap but effective 3-D effects gel and paint. You could even obscure your villain’s entire face with a creepy costume (as in I Know What You Did Last Summer or The Watcher).

With all of these tips, you should have plenty of money left over to create some really scary effects such as blood, wounds, and general gory glory.