How To Make The Audience Sad When A Character Dies

You might want to edit this post with some spoiler tags.

haha ok

Any time you invest effort in a character to make the audience identify with them and like them, and then you kill them off, you're most likely going to evoke a strong emotion (sadness, anger, fear). If not, then you've got a major problem with your script.

The trick is to underplay it, not overplay your hand. If you overplay it, you get "Love Story" bathos (Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw). Today's audiences, I think, are savvy to being manipulated. Trust the story and the depth of your characterizations to evoke the emotion you're seeking.

As for "techniques," music is always a good way to heighten emotion, but again, be careful of being maudlin and don't rely on a background score to do what you should have done with your writing.

There's a fantastic scene at the end of "The Deer Hunter." Michael, good to his word, brings Nic home to America and, after Nic's funeral, the cast gathers at a local bar for breakfast and sings "God Bless America." It's simple and enormously powerful. And it never fails to bring a tear to my eye. The lesson is: just have the characters be real and true to themselves and do what real people do in the face of death, and you will succeed.

Cheers!

-Charles

Sometimes sad just happens via the circumstances, but mostly it’s endearing the character so that we care, and also (Depending on the story) stacking the deck against the character with small victories and a few minor maybe unfair losses, yet a glimmer of hope for the underdog remains. The thing not to do is try sad, sader, sadest, because that emotion in us will be worn out. If the glimmer of hope we became emotionally invested in is stolen from the underdog, then it’s usually sad.

EDIT: I didn't see Adeimantus reply. I pretty much echo his response.

-Thanks-

I don't have any writing tips or suggestions, but you might get some thoughts or ideas from Big Fish.

Also what Adei said.

I think it was Capra who said drama isn't when the character cries, it's when the *audience* cries. So it's sometimes better to have the character straining *not* to be emotional, so that the audience jumps in and cries for them. I think if a character shows too much emotion, the audience won't feel any.

But it's identification with the character (which takes time) and situation (designed by you to be emotional). Also, look to the details, and visual triggers (this is a cliche, but if you have a child killed in a car accident and afterwards the mother sees the child's toy on the street, that will trigger the audience's emotions). Other things you can use are the same situation repeated - once when all is happy, once after the tragedy.

Because it's Indie Day, I'm rerunning my Friday's with Hitchcock on SABOTUER on my blog (which has the Statue Of Liberty, etc) and there's a great bit in the film where the hero's best friend is killed when there is a fire at their work, and a nerw employee (the villain) hands the hero a fire extinguisher. The hero gives the fire extinguisher to his best friend... and the fire extinguisher is filled with gasoline and his best friend is burned alive (on camera). Okay, our hero is blamed, goes on the run, and gets picked up by a long haul trucker... and next to the passenger seat is a fire extinguisher. Hero sees it, pulls away from it. But when the hero sees it *we* remember his best friend being burned to death, so when the hero backs away we know why - and we feel the same thing the hero feels.

The most important thing is bringing us *inside* the story - making us identify with the character so that these things are happening to *us* when we watch then movie. The more we care about the character, the more we feel when bad things happen to them.

- Bill

I can catch what you are telling . I read one book written by Daniella steel. The character is dying of cancer and she wants to live. Tears flowed into my eyes . That is what in her books . She is really emotional.
padma

Great advice.

I gotta say the most emotional death scene for me was on one of the last episodes of LOST.

Final Lost (to me) was exhausting even with the carefully doled out emotional on top of emotional ensemble layers,
-Thanks-