I have a Shudder subscription by way of my Amazon Account and through it I experiment with horror films I would be unlikely to rent individually. This weekend one of my video experimentation was an Italian exploitation film with the English title Night Train Murders. The film had been compared to The Last House on the Left, but set on a train as two young women travel from Germany to Italy but face a night of assaults, murder, and depravity.

Night Train Murders, like most films of its genre, is short scarcely more than an hour and a half in length and yet at the 35-minute mark I found myself bored and stopping the playback. Why?

Than a third of the way through the story nothing of consequence had yet happened.

The young ladies had made their train, smoked when they shouldn’t have, flirted with the wrong boys and then due to a border issue I didn’t quite understand (my attention by this point had wandered) had not switched trains to a nearly empty one. The two thugs who were to be the cause of so much horror and grief had mugged a street Santa Claus, evaded capture, jumped aboard the train, and one had experienced a cliched sexual encounter with a bad woman. (We know she’s bad because she has sexually graphic photographs of herself.)

Mind that paragraph of plot is essential to setting up the following events but it should have never have taken more than a third of the movie’s limited running time. The problem is that most of the scenes leading up to this point, while establishing the players and their positions, did nothing in terms of conflict, nor did they do more then sketch out the most basic aspects of anyone’s character. Because they lacked conflict and character the scenes themselves were boring ultimately killing any tension in the story until I stopped the movie and switched to 1983’s Scarface.

This is a critical element of the craft of storytelling; every scene needs to do more than a single function. The author, either of a screenplay or a novel, has to advance plots, display character, dramatize conflict, and establish critical elements for future use. Given any story’s limited resources, time and or pages, the best scenes serve multiple masters simultaneously. There may be time when your hand is forced and scene is only about a single aspect but those need to be the exception and not the rule.

When creating a story an essential question in your mind needs to be ‘Why is this scene here?’