Genre: Horror/Action
Premise: After her family is murdered by the mob, a religious woman lets herself become possessed by a demon in order to get revenge.
About: The Blood & Ink Horror Screenplay Contest is a unique screenwriting contest whereby, six months ago, you had to pitch your way into the contest. Scripts either got in with a “yes” by me or they got at least 15 upvotes when pitched in the comments section. The 90+ writers that were chosen then had six months to write their script. I will occasionally review one of the scripts here. If you want to see the previous Blood & Ink reviews, you can do so here, here, here, and here. For those who missed Blood & Ink, I am doing a brand new pitch contest starting Friday July 10th. Get those high concept script pitches ready!
Writer: Nicholas Cocco
Details: 96 pages
I LOVE this idea.
Love it love it love it. I think I picked this as one of the top 5 loglines, right?
Yeah. So I was really looking forward to this one.
Let’s check it out!
It follows Grace Rache, a deeply religious woman in her 30s. She’s married to Max, a war veteran who has no interest in religion, and together they have a teenage son, Wolfgang, who doesn’t believe in God either. So when it comes to faith, Grace is pretty much on an island by herself.
Max and Wolfgang run a breakfast shop in the city. Right next door is a Wiccan shop run by an elderly woman. One day, two mobsters, Cesare (20s) and Nico (40s), show up and inform the old woman that she’ll be paying them for protection. She tells them to fuck off. Wolfgang happens to be nearby, steps in, and knocks Cesare to the ground. That quickly escalates into a standoff between Cesare and Nico on one side and Max and Wolfgang on the other. The gathering crowd eventually convinces the mobsters to back down and leave.
Unfortunately, they come back later to send a message. But things get out of hand, and Max and Wolfgang end up dead. A few days later, we see Grace mourning. She struggles to move forward until the old witch pays her a visit. She presents Grace with an ancient jar containing a demon and explains that if she allows it inside her, it will help her get revenge. Grace doesn’t need much convincing. She’s in.
Next we meet a terrifying wraith, which we eventually learn is Grace in demon form. The wraith begins hunting down members of the mob one by one. One is taken down in a butcher shop freezer. Others are attacked inside a moving car. The creature is fast, powerful, and seemingly able to appear and disappear at will. After Grace kills Nico, his brother Frank, the head of the family, gathers everyone together to figure out how to stop this thing.
Meanwhile, Grace, or more accurately the demon living inside Grace, catches the attention of Father Vincent, who becomes determined to destroy it. So while Grace continues her bloody war against the Family, Father Vincent launches one of his own against her. Eventually, only Frank and his son Cesare remain. Grace tracks them to an abandoned live munitions island, where the story builds to a long, brutal fight to the death.
Okay, so I’m learning a valuable lesson from this experiment.
It would’ve helped if I’d given guidance on the outlines for these scripts before they were written. Because this doesn’t represent the idea that I imagined. And, if I would’ve seen this in outline form, I could’ve helped Nick nip some of these choices in the bud, and set him on a path to a more powerful screenplay.
So, I think what I’m going to do for the upcoming high-concept pitch contest is offer the top 10 finishers just that – An outline evaluation. Cause I would’ve strongly encouraged Theresa to go with one main character instead of two in Worst Time of the Year. I would’ve encouraged Jake to build a more all-encompassing mythology in Black House. And I could’ve helped avoid the structural issues with Eric Levin’s The Mold.
That’s why I always encourage writers to get consultations BEFORE they write the script. An outline consultation can eliminate problems that might otherwise take three or four drafts to discover. It’s one of the most efficient investments you can make. If you’d like an outline consultation or a screenplay consultation, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
Okay, so what are the issues in Devil?
I’d start with the wraith. The whole point of this movie was to see this woman take down these bad guys. But, instead, we start her off as this shadow-like wraith who’s basically Venom.
To me, that defeats the purpose of the screenplay. I don’t want to see a 1000 year old monster get revenge on people who never did anything to him. I want to see the woman whose situation I’m devastated by, someone I empathize with, I want to see HER get that revenge.
So, as soon as that wraith showed up, a big part of me gave up on the script.
To Nick’s credit, he seems to catch a second wind in the second half of the screenplay and give me something closer to the movie he originally pitched. The showdown at the church, the family going for outside help from other crime families, the climax on the island, Grace in human form — that was more what I was originally envisioning. But a lot of it came after I’d mentally given up on the movie.
That’s the thing with screenplays. You can be one of the screenwriters whose script doesn’t hit its stride until the middle of Act 2. But if the reader mentally decommitted on page 17, it’s pretty much impossible to get them back.
And there are other problems here as well – things that, had they not happened, maybe I would’ve stayed with the script longer. For example, we never see Grace react to her husband and kid being killed!!!!!!
The first time we see her reaction is at the funeral standing in front of the caskets. And she doesn’t even seem that upset. She’s just numb. This whole movie is about revenge. It’s about making this extremely difficult choice to bring a demon into your body so you can achieve something that you are diametrically opposed to — revenge and killing. If a character like Grace is going to make that choice, we have to see her devastation. That’s the only way that the choice makes sense to the audience. And for some strange reason, we never see that.
There were other basic mistakes early on. A key scene occurs when Nico and Cesare are trying to choose which shops on the block are good for hitting up. We’re not told what they want from these shops. That information is kept secret for some reason. Then, out of nowhere, we cut to inside the Wiccan shop, and Cesare is standing in front of a “crone” (note: I don’t know what a crone is), and we hear this line from the crone – “Don’t need protection, boychik.”
That’s the first line we hear after being thrown into this context-less situation. My best guess, at the moment, was that “boychick” implied some sort of sexual connotation. Like a ladyboy maybe? And so the word “protection” following indicated ‘sexual protection’ to me. Condoms maybe. I have no idea why that’s being talked about here but that’s the best I can do with what little information has been handed to me.
This then leads to Wolfgang coming out of nowhere, knocking Cesare down. Then running away, which leads to Cesare and Nico confronting Wolfgang and Max. Which leads to Cesare and Nico later killing them.
Only in retrospect do I realize that the Italians were going down this block, forcing shops to accept “protection” for money. And that’s what the scene was about. With this scene being so incredibly important to set up the story, why are we coming into it so late? Why open the scene mid-conversation with a line that can be so easily misinterpreted??
This scene sets up your whole movie!!!
Make it clear as hell!
And make it an actual scene!!! With a beginning, middle, and an end.
That shop scene is half-a-page long. It should’ve been 4 pages long. You build it up. You give us all the information we need so we understand what’s going on. Then, and only then, do you introduce a disruption.
I knew after that scene that the script was in trouble. Because those scenes should be easy to write. It’s the later scenes where you try and get deeper into the characters and create interesting plot developments — that’s the hard stuff. This setup stuff should be a piece of cake.
Maybe Nick thought, “I know I’m not supposed to be on the nose. So I’m not going to have the mobsters explain exactly what they’re doing.” And “Screenwriting books tell me I need to move the story along quickly, so I’ll jump into this scene really late.”
I mean, we come into the scene so late and with so little information that I didn’t even know why Wolfgang was there. I know Max told him to go in there for some reason. But I was not told why.
Sometimes I think screenwriters tie themselves in knots trying to do things the “right” way. This scene needed to convey important information. So convey the information. Don’t convince yourself that making the scene cryptic somehow makes it better.
Just to reiterate why I fell in love with this concept. I imagine this woman who couldn’t physically beat up a teenager, much less mobsters with guns. Her husband and son have been killed by the most powerful crime family in the city. The police won’t help her because they’re in with the family. No one else can help her because the family is so powerful.
Then she gets this opportunity to be possessed by a demon that will give her the strength to be able to take the family down all by herself. But it’s a demon. So, there will be problems containing it.
But she’s instructed on how to bring it forth when she needs to and put it away when she doesn’t. Of course, it doesn’t go that smoothly. When she doesn’t need it, it still wants to come out. And so even in her normal life, she’s struggling to keep it contained until the revenge is over. Then, at the end, she has to get it exorcised. Which is no given. And that’s your movie.
And just to be clear, I know writing scripts is a lot harder than criticizing the final effort. I sense that Nick struggled with how much horror he could stuff into this premise and made some creative choices that I didn’t agree with because of that. But I would tell Nick to always follow the path that gives you the best movie, not the path that fits you the most squarely into the correct genre.
Script Link: Let the Devil Loose
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your bad guys have to be formidable. At least the ones at the top of the food chain. Because if there’s no doubt at all that Grace can eliminate these guys, then there’s no suspense. There’s no uncertainty about what’s coming on the next page. Make Frank and one more guy super formidable. Maybe they even get their hands on some anti-demon weapons. I want to feel like Grace is overmatched in this final battle.
It is now 1am Pacific Time. You should have the newsletter by 3am Pacific Time.
Oh man. In the annals of newsletters, this one is up near the top. We’ve got celebrations in this newsletter with writers who are breaking into the business through Scriptshadow. We’ve got a giant new announcement for a screenwriting contest that I know you’re going to love. I review one of the single biggest spec sales of the year. This one had 40 producers chasing it. And I try to figure out how a nobody screenwriter nabbed one of the hottest screenwriting jobs in Hollywood, as well as dissect her movie, Supergirl. Is it as bad as everyone’s saying? James Gunn is Mr. “I Don’t Put Movies Into Production Until The Script is Great.” So… is the script great? If you don’t read the newsletter, you’ll never know. And if you don’t read this particular newsletter, your life in July will literally be 87% worse.
If you don’t get my newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send it to you.
I’m currently busy putting together a newsletter so posting will be erratic. But I couldn’t help but notice the Supergirl reviews and box office projections since the review embargo lifted this morning. By all accounts, the movie is pretty bad and it looks like it will make something in the 45 million dollar range opening weekend, which is an incredibly low number for A DC movie.
What hit me about this was that you now have three of the top 5 franchises in Hollywood — Marvel, Star Wars, and DC — all with their most recent movies being, if not the lowest grossing ever in the franchise, very close to it.
Star Wars – Mandalorian and Grogu
Marvel – Captain America: Brave New World
DC – Supergirl
To me, there couldn’t be more concrete proof that the 2005 – 2020 model of moviemaking is over. Studios clearly no longer understand what the audience wants anymore. They’re using outdated models. Their live-action franchise behemoths are lost.
And I know this is not an all-encompassing take. The full conversation is messier. Toy Story 5 just did better than any Toy Story movie ever. Marvel will come out with Spider-Man soon and that’s projected to make a ton of money.
But Spider-Man’s success is more about Tom Holland being perfect for the role. That screenplay actually looks like a mess yet it won’t matter. And quality made family-friendly animation is always going to do well because it’s one of the only options out there where adults will gladly take their children to the movies.
But as far as the “cool kids” franchises that I mentioned above, Hollywood has no idea what’s cool anymore. That’s why Obsession shocked them. They didn’t know that was cool!
It was so interesting. I recently stumbled upon this old clip of The Emperor’s first appearance in the Star Wars franchise.
Then, after watching that clip, I noticed Youtube suggesting another Star Wars clip, this one from Dave Filoni’s brainchild, the Ashoka Disney Plus show. Dave Filoni, for those who don’t know, was recently promoted to be the top dog at Lucasfilm. He’s in charge of all Star Wars going forward and really wanted to bring Grand Admiral Thrawn into the franchise.
Thrawn was introduced into the Star Wars universe as the next great villain, the replacement for Darth Vader, after Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi. He first appeared in the Timothy Zahn book trilogy. This was before Lucas had plans of doing any more Star Wars movies. He was going to end it with Jedi. So, as far as the Star Wars fans knew, this was the only Star Wars left.
And Thrawn (pictured to the left on this cover) was a badass. He wasn’t Vader. But he was original. And he was cool. Filoni then decided to bring him into live action and his unofficial plan was to move Thrawn into a larger role, eventually becoming the big baddie of the Star Wars movie universe, like Vader was.
So, here’s that Thrawn introductory scene…
For starters, there’s a clunky mythological element to the proceedings. The stormtroopers are kind of beat up and have their individual signatures in a way that feels cheesy and dumb. The way Thrawn’s entrance is shot is incredibly plain. The actor playing the role looks out of shape and unimposing. You have this embarrassingly on-the-nose score where you actually have the singers belting “Thrawn Thrawn Thrawn” over and over again. I mean, is this Star Wars or the Jennifer Hudson Spirit Tunnel?
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But, worst of all, the second Thrawn speaks and we hear his squeaky high-pitched voice, THAT’S IT. Nothing you do after that matters. We’re not scared of this man. He’s not imposing in any way. My mind was actually wandering 10 seconds after he started speaking. That’s how little he commanded the screen.
Why does this matter? Because Dave Filoni cast this man. And Dave Filoni is now in charge of all of Star Wars. If he’s THAT WRONG about one of the most important characters in the Star Wars universe, how wrong is he going to be about all the other less-important stuff?
I say it from a place of anger but the truth is that I’m sad. I’m sad that my beloved favorite franchise is on life support. It’s gotten bad enough that I’ll watch these AI Star Wars movies on Youtube sometimes.
But regardless, I’m sad that there’s no good Star Wars anymore. I’m sad that there aren’t cool superhero movies anymore. I know some people hated them but my feeling about going to the movies is not that I want to have some big important intense experience that makes me think for days. I JUST WANT TO BE ENTERTAINED. I WANT TO HAVE FUN. And these movies have lost the thread on how to have fun. They’ve been replaced with “HOW TO BE BORING.”
Sometimes they say that you need adults in the room to fix the problem. But I’m starting to think, with the success of these Youtube movies, that we actually need kids in the room. People with fresh ideas. Because while I know that the old guard understands how to tell a story better. They don’t know how to surprise audiences. We need something different and fresh and unexpected. Cause I want to go to the movies and be entertained again.
What about you?
Genre: Family/Animation
Premise: When Bonnie has trouble making friends because kids today only have online friends, her favorite toy, Jessie, attempts to locate the last real-world friend on earth for her.
About: Moviegoing is dead? Pft. Toy Story 5 just had the biggest opening of the entire franchise, taking in 160 million dollars.
Writers: Andrew Stanton & McKenna Harris
Details: 100 minutes
A lot of people are making a fuss over whether there needed to be another Toy Story movie. OF COURSE THERE NEEDED TO BE ANOTHER TOY STORY MOVIE! IT’S THE CROWN JEWEL OF PIXAR!
People. It’s Hollywood. No matter how much we bitch, they’re going to keep making movies in every franchise until people stop showing up to see them. What does it look like when a franchise ends? It looks like The Mandalorian and Grogu.
But Toy Story?? Toy Story does not have Star Wars problems. Toy Story has money printing problems. What are they going to do when the ink at the money printing warehouse dries up? That’s Toy Story’s problem.
The question behind the question here is the only one worth exploring. Because it’s a question you should all be asking yourselves every time you sit down to write a screenplay: “Do you actually have something to say with your movie?”
That’s why I think Toy Story 5 is a relevant entry in the franchise. Because it’s clearly trying to say something. That our children are becoming increasingly dependent on their electronic surroundings and not socializing and building in-life relationships.
Now, an argument can be made that Toy Story was a little late to the party with this take. But give them a break! It takes a long freaking time to make these films!
The plot takes a minute to untangle due to the fact that Toy Story 4’s ending split the toys up. Woody is off with most of the new toys somewhere far away. So the story begins with Jessie and a lot of the original crew losing their shit when they see that Bonnie, their kid, just got a new “lily pad” (an iPad made up to look like a frog).
Her parents got the Lily pad because Bonnie is struggling to make friends and, in the online world, all you have to do to make friends is “add a friend.” And that’s exactly what happens. Lily adds three new friends from Bonnie’s dance class. This is one of the better comedy bits in the screenplay. Lilly adds the friends within seconds. “Problem solved. Three friends added,” she tells Jessie. A confused Jessie starts darting her head around. “Where? Where are they?? There’s nobody here!!”
This friend-adding seems like a good thing at first but then her new online friends start making fun of the fact that she still plays with toys and now all Bonnie wants to do is play on her lily pad. All of a sudden, the toys are feeling the pressure.
Through a confluence of events, Jessie ends up at the old farm house of her original kid where she finds out that there’s an off-the-grid girl living there, Susie, who still plays with toys. This, Jessie decides, is the girl that Bonnie should be friends with. Unfortunately, the only way to connect with Bonnie nowadays is through devices, so she has to recruit several cast-off tech devices (including a tech potty trainer) to get Bonnie over to Susie’s.
The plan is to alert Bonnie’s mom that her daughter’s toys somehow ended up at this old farmhouse so the two will come to get them. Once Bonnie arrives, Jessie’s Operation Join Friends Together initiates. But when Bonnie’s new online friends start bullying her for her continued commitment to real toys, Bonnie decides she doesn’t want the toys anymore, placing the toys in the tragic predicament that this may be the end of the line for them.
There was something huge that stuck out right away about this script. Which is that this is a girl boss story. It’s all about Jessie and Bonnie’s adventure. Woody is barely in it. The other big male character, Buzz, is relegated to comedy sidekick status.
Do you know how dangerous it is to do that in 2026? The way that online campaigns can turn against a choice like this can smother a movie before it can take its first breath. Heck, that very thing happened TO THIS FRANCHISE in 2022, with “Lightyear.”
So, why isn’t anybody talking about this?
I’ll tell you why.
Because it’s clear with Toy Story 5 that they prioritized the story first. How do I know this? There are a lot of tells. But one of the easiest ways to decipher how extensively someone worked on a screenplay is how many setups and payoffs there are. And there are a ton in Toy Story 5. It’s very difficult to write a lot of setups and payoffs in a quickly cobbled together screenplay.
The problem with the diversity craze that took over Hollywood for nearly a decade is that they prioritized the diversity over everything. Every trailer, every article, every press tour was built around, “Look at how diverse this movie is!” And you saw the result of that in the movies themselves. They were never good. And why would they be? They prioritized something else before the actual story.
As I’ve always said, it is soooooooo so so so so so so so so so hard to write a good screenplay. Anything you do handicap that process is only going to put you further behind the 8 ball. Why make an impossible goal even harder? I never understood that.
I’m sure the Toy Story family pitched all sorts of movie ideas for Toy Story 5 with Woody being the priority in a lot of them. But this idea won out because it was the best idea. And that’s the way we should all be conceiving of our screenplays. What idea results in the best story? Whatever the answer is to that question, go with that movie!
Moving on, one of the things that’s always amazed me about this franchise is how many freaking characters it has. As a screenwriter, one of the toughest challenges you’ll have is managing your character count. Every single character you bring into the story is taking time away from bigger more important characters. Which is why, if you are going to bring in other characters, you better have a great reason for doing so. You should literally believe that your movie cannot work without those characters. Cause if it can, then you don’t need them.
There are more characters in the Toy Story franchise than probably any other franchise you can think of. Even Avengers. How many are we talking? I estimate between 50-60.
The lesson here, and it’s one Michael Arndt famously learned from the Toy Story team when he was laboring over Toy Story 2, is that when you have this many characters, you want to start dividing them into groups and treat the groups as one character.
So, with Jessie, her friends are dinosaur, Forky, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and several others. If you try to individualize all those characters, you’re going to explode your page count. You have to pick and choose which characters you actually want to develop a storyline for and then, for everyone else, they will move with the group as one. They can make a funny one-liner every once in a while. But otherwise, they are limited only to whatever goal their group has.
The last thing I’ll say about the Toy Story franchise – and really, this applies to all Pixar films – is that they’re the kings at making you cry. So how do they do it?? Well, there’s no exact formula, but I can tell you how they did it in this movie.
It is embedded in human nature for us to feel bad for people who really want to be a part of something but aren’t able to be, particularly if they’re being excluded by others.
One of the first things the writers establish here is that Bonnie really wants friends. But the neighbor kids she wants to be friends with think she’s too weird. Now, for the rest of the movie, we’re rooting for Bonnie to make friends. And every time she gets let down again, our heart breaks a little more for her. That constant breaking is what brings us to our emotional floor. And that way, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our heart goes from that bottom floor all the way to the top. That very quick rush of emotion is what triggers the waterworks.
If, however, Bonnie only kinda wanted to make friends. If she had some people in her life who already kinda liked her. Then our heart isn’t on the bottom floor. It’s somewhere on the middle floors. Which means, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our hearts aren’t that broken and they aren’t rising very far, which means the emotional build isn’t extensive enough to make us cry.
Anyway, I found Toy Story 5 to be pretty good. Would I recommend you go out and see it now? If you have younger kids, definitely. I think this movie would be quite eye opening to them. If you don’t have kids, wait until it comes out on Disney Plus. It’s a solid entry into the franchise.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A lot of people think that the Toy Story franchise is so popular because they’re toys and it’s cute to see toys play. But there’s actually a secret ingredient to its success. The main characters – the toys – are the most selfless characters in all of film. All they care about is making somebody else happy (their kids). Caring about others above yourself is one of the single most likable traits you can give a character. Give it to one of yours and see what happens.
There was a brief exchange yesterday in the comments section where Brian took a shot at one of my all-time favorite scripts, Meat. Not long after, Branko came to the script’s defense and said that script was the ultimate “vibe” read. And I agree. That script was not the poster child for GSU but it did an amazing job at BIU (burrowing into you).
But what stuck out to me about that was that I didn’t know Branko liked the script so much. Which made me realize, I don’t know many of the scripts that you guys like. So, I wanted to dedicate a post where you guys get to share the scripts that you’ve loved over the years.
And I admit I have a secondary purpose for this post. I’m hoping that some long since forgotten script gets thrust back into the spotlight and maybe we bring some deserving screenplay back to life. Re-examine it. Ask questions such as, “Could this be made today?” You never know. There are definitely managers and agents and producers reading this site and if you bring a great script to their attention that they’re not aware of, anything could happen.
Now, you are allowed to hype up any script that isn’t your own. But I would advise against hyping a friend’s decent screenplay. Let’s have a genuine discussion here about great script reading experiences. These can be amateur scripts. They can be professional scripts.
One script that I still remember to this day that I can’t, for the life of me, understand why it was never made was Brian K. Vaughn’s Roundtable, about four celebrity knights who are asked to protect England from a modern day evil. That’s a ‘game over’ moneymaker.
I did have an A-list director once e-mail me asking me about the rights to that script, which was pretty funny (how the hell would I know??). But he really wanted to make it. And he looked into it but he came back and told me that the “chain of rights” or something was exceptionally complicated. So, I guess we’ll never see it.
Osculum Infame (real-time witch gets hanged and must figure out how to escape) îs a script read I’ll never forget. The Disciple Program (man must figure out who killed his wife), obviously. There were others (Source Code) but they’ve been made since.
So, I ask you, what are some of your favorite scripts you’ve read over the years here that still stay with you today? Let me know and hype them up in the comments section! Leave a logline if possible (for those who haven’t heard of the script before). It’s a script celebration post!
