Genre: Folk Horror
Premise: After suffering from a miscarriage, an engaged couple putting off the marriage for 4 years travel to a rehab centre to help them recover – only for it to be controlled by the Irish Púca; bent on driving the couple apart and extracting the foetus.
About: This script finished number 8 in my screenwriting contest, which had over 2000 entries! This is not Robert’s first lap around the Scriptshadow track. In a Nostradamus like post, he entered a different script into a 2018 Amateur Showdown – “A reclusive detective with a haunting past returns to his rebuilding hometown, following a flu pandemic that crushed society, to solve the first murder in three years with the begrudging help of a younger, wannabe policeman.” That script had one of the best titles I’d read all year – “Neptune Beach.”
Writer: Robert O’Sullivan
Details: 94 pages
One of the more often debated topics in screenwriting is the slow burn. Despite every screenwriting book telling you to keep the story moving quickly, there is value in telling a slower more deliberate story when it suits the concept.
But writers often misunderstand what “slow burn” means, assuming it’s a catch-all phrase that allows for a slower overall storytelling style. The problem with this approach is that it’s too easy to justify long slow sections throughout the screenplay. “It’s a slow burn,” you contend. “So it’s okay if this section is slow.”
While there is no instruction manual for how to write slow-burn screenplays, there are several devices you can use that help a slow burn screenplay remain compelling. I’m going to show you how Sacrifice For a Pregnancy uses three of them.
“Sacrifice For A Pregnancy” starts off with one of the best “First 10 Pages” of the contest. The setting is Ireland, 1871. While farming, a farmer falls into a deep hole that he can’t pull himself out of. After 24 long hours, a mysterious man (known as a “spailpin”) emerges from above and helps the farmer out of the hole.
When the farmer gets back to his house, he explains to his pregnant wife that the man outside saved his life and that he would like for him to stay for dinner. The wife looks outside and sees that the man does not have normal feet, but rather hooves. She proceeds to freak out. This isn’t a man. It is a demon here to steal her baby. So the woman stabs her own husband and drags him outside, begging the spailpin to take him as a sacrifice instead of the baby. The spailpin does so.
Cut to present day, where Teddy and his pregnant wife, Jessica, are having a tough go of it. They’ve just learned that the fetus inside of her is dead. The news sends Jessica into a deep depression, leaving Teddy wondering what to do. He finds a remote center, The Buiochas Rehabilitation Facility, that specializes in helping couples who have lost an unborn child.
The two head to the spot, which resides on a small island, for a long weekend of therapy. But when they get there, things immediately seem off. None of the staff have names. Instead, they refer to themselves as “The Cogent,” “The Hermit,” “The Gracious.” The two aren’t even allowed to stay in the same room. They are separated.
Concurrently, we are cutting back in time to learn more about Teddy’s friendship with his best friend, Sam. And the more we see Sam hanging around Teddy, the more we notice he spends an awful lot of time looking at Jessica. This results in us realizing that Jessica’s dead baby was not Teddy’s, but in fact Sam’s, information that will become irrelevant over the course of the weekend, when we learn that the same beast which killed the poor farmer in the opening scene lives here on this island. And he wants… Jessica’s… baby.
Okay, so let’s get into why this script, with its patient deliberate pace, still works. There are three tricks Robert uses to keep this screenplay from devolving into a “too slow burn.”
The first is the opening scene. Not only is this a fun spooky scene in its own right. But if you’re paying attention, it’s performing double-duty. What this is establishing is that there’s a demonic entity that comes to take your unborn baby. When you establish something like that, the audience knows it’s coming back later.
This creates suspense. We know, at some point, this evil being will come back into our story. What that does is it makes time feel shorter. Our anticipation of the entity returning kills off the wandering mind that so often leads to that feeling of boredom. To understand how this works, imagine the exact same script, but without this opening scene. We meet a couple. They have a stillborn baby. Lots of sadness in the house. We have no idea what’s coming next, which more readily puts us into that “bored” state.
Next up, we have the island. In our average day-to-day existence, geography isn’t an issue. So if two people are having a problem, like Jessica and Teddy, they feel sad in their homes all day and never think about where they are or how their location affects things. By sending them to an island – a location where there’s no escape should things go wrong – you are adding tension to the read merely due to the fact that we’re more worried for the characters’ safety.
That’s one of the aspects of good writing. You’re trying to create this constant sense of worry in your reader that things aren’t going to go well for your characters. So while a choice like this will work for most stories, it’s especially important in a slow burn story where you don’t have the same plot density that a faster script would have.
Finally, we have the time frame. It’s one weekend. That might seem like a minor choice – to give the story 72 hours. But think about it. What’s the worst thing you can do for a slow burn story? Not give it any time frame at all. If we’re under the impression that we’re about to read a movie about a stillbirth that could last 3 weeks, 2 months, 6 months, a year? Kill me now. Kill me, effing, now. The tight time frame works to offset the slow burn.
Okay, Carson. You told us why you loved the script. So then why didn’t it make your Top 5?
Here’s the thing with slow burns. I’m fine with a slow burn as long as you set up a series of devices, like the writer did today, that make the slow parts feel faster. However, the one thing you have to get right with these slow burns is that when you finally get to your big moments, they need to be BIG MOMENTS. You need to pay off all that time we put in for you.
And I’ll give you the perfect example. The opening scene in this script was a BIG MOMENT. We need more moments that are EQUAL TO THAT or BIGGER THAN THAT. You can’t get away with a bunch of dilly-dallying scares in a movie like this for too long. Eventually, we want to be rewarded. And I didn’t get that until the end.
Which is ironic because it’s not unlike my issue with yesterday’s script, which was an Action-Thriller. That needed big set pieces. But when the set-pieces arrived, we got run-of-mill action movie moments. So this isn’t just a ‘today’ issue. This is for all scripts. When you get to those big moments in your screenplay, you have to deliver. Merely decent set-pieces aren’t going to work whether they’re slow-burn or fast-burn. Never forget that.
Despite this, there’s still a lot of good here. I’m always looking for stories that deal with things I’m unfamiliar with. The setting here – rural Ireland – along with the script’s unique mythology, made what would normally feel familiar, unfamiliar. And us readers rarely read stuff that’s different. So when it comes along, it stands out. Definitely worth a read.
Robert is not comfortable posting his script online so if you want to read the script, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I will connect you with him.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “SAM (24, droll Irishman with bedraggled hair and a rushed sense of fashion).” This was one of my favorite character descriptions in the contest. It may not seem like much at first glance. But often times, a great character description is not achieved by blasting the reader with as much information as possible (“he’s tall and he’s tough and he’s got a square jaw and he walks like a boss…”). Rather, it’s about finding the right phrase to convey who that character is. “Rushed sense of fashion” gave me that immediate image of both what this guy looked like and how he approached the world. Very clever!
