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Genre: Horror-Thriller
Premise (from writer): A career con-man with a terminal illness gets a last chance at survival and redemption when the CIA tap him to help locate an old associate thought to be the source of a zombie pandemic.
Why You Should Read (from writer): As for me, I’m a Chicago-based amateur screenwriter focused on features and pilots and like everybody, looking for representation. I’m also looking to learn and improve as much as I can with each script. “Born to Die,” is a horror crime-thriller in the vein of “28 Days Later” meets “Zero Dark Thirty.” (i.e. Zero Dark Zombie) The zombie genre is well-trodden territory but what my story aims to do is focus on character, spine-tingling thrills, and thoughtful twists to create a unique take on why audiences find these films terrifying and compelling. It blends the horror and crime-thriller genre with the goal of creating an intelligent, thrilling, and terrifying script with a unique voice.
Writer: Kyle Piereth
Details: 98 pages
On a day when we find out we have Dyson Sphere building galactic neighbors, it’s hard to concentrate on screenwriting.
And no, I’m not being cheeky. People are more distracted than ever these days. They’re one Twitter link away from reading the next hot story, the next “liked” selfie. So what are you bringing to the table to make sure they stay focused on your script?
Surely, if you’ve chosen to answer that question with “A zombie flick,” you’ve come up with a mind-blowing twist on the genre, right? Or a premise so clever and ironic that people can’t ignore it?
You remember a few years back when that amazing Dead Island trailer went viral? Do you know why it went viral? Sure, the backwards gimmick was cool. But a big part of its success was the irony in the premise. The story took place in paradise. That the most disgusting vile creatures imaginable would invade the safest most beautiful place on earth is deliciously ironic. That trailer doesn’t play the same if it takes place in an industrial shipping yard.
Or World War Z. It offered us an angle into the zombie quandary that we hadn’t seen before. They turned the zombie genre into a globe-trotting action film, almost like if James Bond did a zombie movie.
I think that Born to Die WANTS to be different. And that was Kyle’s intention. But I’m not sure his take is as different as he thinks it is. What did you think?
Frank Nyland is weeks, maybe even days, away from dying of cancer. And what sucks is it’s going to happen in a prison cell. Poor Frank is a thief, a con-man, and they finally caught him with his hands in the cookie jar.
What’s interesting is what turned up in that cookie jar. I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t cookies. Apparently, Frank was brokering a hundred million dollar deal with the biggest doctor on the planet, an underground legend named Henrik Salonen, who is the only man capable of performing the surgery that can save Frank’s life.
But Frank had to get some blood on his hands to make this happen, and that’s how the CIA caught him. Speaking of the CIA, a spunky young CIA case officer named Taylor Pike comes to Frank’s cell to get the 4-1-1 on his failed operation, in part because the CIA is after Salonen as well, albeit for different reasons entirely.
Salonen has just released a contagion into a bunch of cities and it’s turning everyone into freaking zombies! And, oh yeah, as fate would have it, the contagion has reached Frank’s prison, turning guards and inmates alike into arm-waving zombified psychopaths. As if normal zombies weren’t bad enough. Now we have to deal with the psychopath version!
Taylor and Frank are able to escape, only for Taylor to realize she’s been bitten. It now becomes a race to find the elusive Salonen so he can save both of them before time runs out. But when they do reach Salonen, they realize he works for a man who’s much worse than he is, a man that has terrifying plans for the world.
First off, I want to give props to Kyle for some of the most enjoyable character names I’ve read all year. Henrik Salonen. Corsan Pious. Emil Gorya. If screenplays had budgets, 75% of Kyle’s budget would’ve gone to his character names.
I wish I could say I was as excited about the story. There’s clearly SOMETHING here. However, it’s one of those scripts that reads like it’s driving through a haze. I sort of knew what was going on. But I also had a bunch of questions while I was reading. And I couldn’t tell if these questions were by design, or if they existed due to sloppy writing.
For example, I watched inmates get bitten and turn into zombies within three seconds. Yet a key storyline is Taylor getting bitten and us spending the next 48 hours trying to get to Salonen so he could save her. How is it other people turn in three seconds but she turns in two days?
I hate when writers fudge the rules, especially in the zombie genre, where the rules have been clearly established over time. It’s fine if you want to change things up, like they do in, say, 28 Days Later, but you have to make those changes CLEAR. If you try to slip one by us and hope we don’t notice, we’re going to get pissed. And the issue with this violation is that it didn’t just affect one scene. It affected the ENTIRE MOVIE. It didn’t matter if it was page 30 or page 80, I was still asking, “Wait, why hasn’t she turned into a zombie yet?”
Then there was Frank’s criminal background. Not only was I reluctant to accept that a con-man was the best choice for a zombie film protagonist (where’s the irony? The cleverness? It seemed so random, like the profession was picked out of a hat), but I also had trouble understanding what led to Frank being arrested.
In my best estimation, he’d stolen from/conned some people out of 100 million dollars and was in the process of brokering a deal (through intermediaries?) to use that 100 million to have this amazing doctor, Henrik Salonen, save his life. That deal went south after he decided to kill one of his own (a character confusingly named “Wednesday”), possibly because that contact was screwing him over.
But how or why this led Henrik to release a zombie virus onto the world is beyond me. Was that a coincidence? Was it bad timing that Frank was trying to get his terminal cancer fixed on the day his doctor decided to release the very first zombie virus onto the planet? Or were these things connected somehow? The fact that I could never determine that was frustrating.
I’m going to go back to something I talked about in my review of The Martian. You want to use CLEAN LINES when you’re plotting your story. Matt Damon needed to survive until he could be rescued. I understood that. It was CLEAN. Here, Frank is trying to reach Henrik Salonen so he’ll save him, which was a clean line. But then the questions came. How is this man, a reclusive weirdo, the only one who can cure his cancer? And why is he trying to destroy the world? And who’s Wednesday? And who are these mercenaries? And whose boat are we trying to steal? It seemed like with every scene, the answers to these questions became less clear, not more.
I can’t enjoy a story if I’m only clear on what’s going on 60-70% of the time. That other 30% is the haze I was referring to earlier. I SORT OF understood what was happening, but not enough to appreciate the nuanced mystery Kyle had promised in his WYSR.
All of these things are why the script didn’t work for me. We weren’t approaching the zombie genre from a fresh enough angle. We were placed in zombie locations that were far too familiar (a prison). The main character’s profession felt too random. And the plot lines got murkier as the script went on.
If Kyle wants to write a zombie film, especially in this ultra-competitive, everyone-and-their-sister-has-a-zombie-script market, he needs to come up with something truly different and then go from there. And be clearer about plot points. I understand that there are some mystery components to the story, but the irony is, the mysteries need to be clear. If I don’t know why we need to kill Wednesday, then I can’t participate in the suspense and excitement involved when Frank tries to kill him. Ditto the mercenaries. Ditto half-a-dozen things that had to do with Salonen.
Screenplay link: Born to Die
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Plot point clarity. Your plot points are the “clarity checkpoints” of your screenplay – they are the plot developments that scream out at your audience: “THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING!” Remember when Luke, Obi-Wan, and Han showed up to Alderran only to find it blown to pieces and a giant space station in its place? The three of them speak very clearly on what they believe has happened. It’s a “CLEAN LINE” plot point. If the writer isn’t able to convey his plot points in a clear manner, the reader will start to enter a haze. And while one mistake still allows us to see through the haze, two or three could turn that haze into a fog. And that’s when the reader stops caring about your story. The stuff with Wednesday (give him another name!) and the mercenaries and the reasons behind the terrorist attacks weren’t laid out clearly enough for me, which is ultimately why I tuned out.
