Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: Trapped on a remote North Dakota farm in the middle of a bone-chilling winter storm, a deaf 12-year old girl must try to survive her murderous foster parents, who’ve been influenced to kill by a mysterious radio signal from deep space.
Why You Should Read: Deep came about from my desire to write a story putting the most vulnerable type of person in the most terrifying situation I could imagine. A very early draft of Deep made this year’s Page Quarterfinals. After feedback, it’s since gone through a strenuous rewrite. At 87 pages, and tightly structured, it’s a lean, electrifying read. Looking forward to any critiques from the Scriptshadow Community.
Writer: Dean Brooks
Details: 86 pages
I’m still looking for a good professional horror script to review in the Halloween Newsletter. You guys don’t want me stressed out looking for a script until the last second or I’m going to eat all five bags of Halloween candy that are in front of me. This candy is for the kids! Yet you would have them starve?! You would have them knock on my door only for me to say, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any? Go blame the Scriptshadow readers for not sending me a horror screenplay. Off the top of my head I’m looking for M3GAN and the Jamie Foxx vampire script Slamdance Contest winner, Day Shift. Or if there’s anything else, e-mail it to carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
On to last week’s WINNER! Congrats to Dean Brooks. He not only won Horror Shodown, beating out a couple hundred submissions, but he survived a glitch whereby it was difficult to download his script! I heard some people were never able to download it. So good job to Dean. Now let’s see if his script is all that.
Makayla Brenna is 12 years old and deaf. But her lack of hearing is the least of her problems. Her parents are hardcore meth addicts and extremely abusive. In the opening scene, Makayla sees a cop car outside who’s stopped someone for speeding. Feeling like this might be her only chance to escape her parents, she makes a run for it, just barely evading her shotgun-wielding father.
A few months later, she’s introduced into a new home with foster parents Joe and Adele. Of the two, Adele is more skeptical that they can pull this off. Whereas Joe is excited to finally have a kid to raise. He’s so excited that on their first full day together, he introduces Makayla to his backyard amateur observatory shack where he can watch and listen to the stars. Makayla thinks it’s pretty cool and likes Joe immediately.
The next day, Makayla is enrolled in school and makes a couple of friends right away. However, that night, Joe goes into the observatory and never comes out. The next morning, he’s acting distant and weird. He then has a seizure. Adele takes Joe to the hospital and drops Makayla off at school.
Joe comes home happy and healthy but after going into the observatory again, he comes back acting weird. That night, Makayla hears Joe violently going after Adele in the other room then taking her outside, presumably to the observatory. Sure enough, the next morning, Adele is acting weird and distant as well. It appears that some evil alien entity has found its way into their consciousness and is now controlling them.
Makayla isn’t quite sure what to do. At school the next day, she decides to make a run for it. But Adele, doing her best Robert Patrick impression from Terminator 2, tracks her down, kills the person who helped her escape, and brings her back to the house. It is here where both Joe and Adele will attempt to “make her listen” to the space sounds in the observatory. But Makayla can’t listen. She’s deaf. So what lengths will the parents go to to overcome this problem?
I went on a complicated journey with this one. At times I loved it. At times I doubted it. I’m still not sure where I land on it but it’s definitely worthy of being reviewed so I think you guys made the right choice.
The first scene is a cut above. And that’s saying a lot since I’ve read a TON of first scene Contest entries lately. I think a couple of factors helped it out. Opening scenes with characters in danger is par for the course with horror screenplays. But what “Deep” does is it sets up an EMOTIONAL dilemma as opposed to just a VISCERAL dilemma. This isn’t some random girl being held by a random psycho. This is two parents who have imprisoned their daughter. So, right away, there’s an extra emotional kick to the scene.
Next, the heroine is deaf. Deafness can be cliche but here it was believable. And it made it so the evil parents weren’t just imprisoning a regular girl. Their daughter is disabled. So there’s some extra nasty added to these villains that made us want Makayla to escape even more.
I thought the integration into the new home was also well done. Whenever I’m reading a script, I’m looking for authenticity and specificity. If everything is too familiar, I get bored. I need those differences that make the story unique. So the wife being Native American, for example. It was a nice detail that told me the writer had put more effort into this than the average person.
But then we reach the observatory stuff and that didn’t sit well with me. For starters, it felt like a different movie. We’re going from a deaf foster child escaping abusive meth-head parents to a guy with his own space observatory? Who then, the DAY AFTER THEY ADOPT OUR HEROINE, gets infected with an alien virus?? What are the odds of that happening?
I get that it’s a movie and, to a certain extent, what happens in the first act is excused from being a coincidence. But you shouldn’t try to cram more than one huge event into your first act. And I felt that this deaf girl escaping her terrifying abusive parents was the hook. Getting introduced into a new family was the hook. To then add this secondary hook – I’m not going to lie – it took me out of the script for the next 30 pages.
Then I started to see what Dean was doing. With the mom and dad becoming possessed by the alien entity, Makayla is essentially right back in the same situation. The problem is, when you do that, you want to construct a scenario by which, with the previous situation, there was a choice to succeed and the hero took the easy way out. That way she can learn and when presented with the same choice again, this time she makes the heroic decision.
This is what The Invisible Man did. She always cowered to her abusive husband. But, then, later in the movie, she chooses to stand up to and kill her husband. In this script, because the main character is so young, you can’t really do that. And, to be honest, Makayla already was a hero by escaping her parents in that opening scene. So there wasn’t anything else to do with her character except repeat what you did in that opening. If a character is repeating stuff they’ve already done, they’re not evolving. They’re not arcing.
But then you’d get these great scenes like when Makayla was at school and her mom is now possessed and she’s picking Makayla up afterwards and Makayla knows if she goes with her, she’s dead meat. So she tries to run away after school and her mom chases her down. It’s a really intense well-done scene.
I just don’t know if this weird deep-space alien virus possession thing can work. It never felt organic to the story. It’s almost as if Dean had two scripts. One about an abused deaf girl and another about an alien virus and then randomly decided one day to combine them into a single script. Cause that’s how much these two concepts were fighting each other.
Early on in the script, when Makayla first sleeps in her new room, there’s a moment where she thinks she sees the spirits of her parents in the corner. I wonder if there’s a version of this where her birth parents die in a police shootout after Makayla is rescued and then their spirits follow her to her new home, and their goal is to try and take over the bodies of her new parents. Makayla tries to tell her new parents this is happening but they, of course, think she’s just traumatized. I’m not sure if that has the same sex-appeal as this concept or if Dean would even want to write a story like that. But the biggest reason this did not get a ‘worth the read’ from me is that I could never marry these two worlds – the alien possession and the abused deaf child. They never felt like the same movie to me.
Script Link: Deep
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m all for moving the story along quickly. But you have to be cognizant of the situation and construct your timeline accordingly. One of the problems with this script is that Dean tried to cram the entire story too closely together, with no time passing in between major plot beats at all. Makayla shows up on Day 1. And on Day 2, she’s already enrolled in school and her new father is possessed by an alien! lol. These plot beats need time to breathe. It’s okay to throw a montage in there of the first week where Makayla is getting used to her new parents and home. It’s okay, after she’s enrolled in school, if we give a montage of her getting used to that environment as well. As much as screenwriting is about moving the story forward quickly, it still needs to feel natural. And if you’re cramming major plot beats too close together, it will feel anything but natural.
