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Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise (from writer): A struggling journalist has the chance to reignite her career when she receives a mysterious letter from a girl claiming to be possessed and seemingly trapped at “The Willow Groves” plantation; an estate with a sinister history.
Why you should read: This is the first screenplay I’ve written. I spent months, planning, writing, re-writing it. Awake until the early hours while laying in my bed, thinking over certain lines and sequences, making sure that it was really the best that it could be. — I’ve spent time trying to create a world and an atmosphere that, hopefully, the reader will enjoy.
Writer: Nabil Chowdhary
Details: 95 pages
I really wanted to review “Let Us Touch The Sun” but the votes for that script seemed to be coming from a place of “Reward one of the best commenters” and not from a place of “I loved this screenplay.” I do think the people who contribute the best feedback should get rewarded somehow, so maybe we can give them their own week at some point. But for today, I wanted to review the script that got the best reaction, and that was Willow Groves.
Edward Tyler is a world renown psychic, one of those guys on TV who can work a crowd, stopping at random people, tell them all about their dead terrier, Kiki, or their chirpy dead chain-smoking uncle, Ronald. That is until he meets Kate Allen. During a live TV telecast, a prematurely graying 20-something Allen asks Edward to rid her of the spirit following her around, only to have Edward make some horrifying connection with this spirit and break down in front of the world in the process.
As if that wasn’t bad enough for his career, he was also interviewed on live TV by journalist Megan Walsh, who exposed him as the fraud he was (or so she thought). That double-whammy sent Edward into hiding and no one has seen him since.
These days, Megan is struggling through her own life issues, as her shock-and-awe interviewing style has made too many potential interviews avoid her. With her career crumbling, she needs a second chance. She gets that in the form of a letter from Kate Walsh. Yes, the Kate Walsh who freaked Edward out on TV. Kate needs help, and invites Megan to come to her home.
This is all rather low-rent as far as Megan is concerned, but her producer, Ryan, sees it as an opportunity to get some new eyeballs on her. In fact, he postulates, if they grabbed Edward to come along too, it could be an event.
Edward isn’t thrilled about teaming up with the woman who helped destroy his career, but he genuinely wants to help Kate, so he comes along. They grab a camera crew and head to this spooky plantation home where Kate sent the letter from, only to find out it’s totally deserted when they get there.
Once they start peeking around, they realize that Kate’s entire family grew up here, and that all of them may have been possessed by some spirit. The deeper our team looks, the more they realize that this isn’t some career-changing primetime special they have on their hands. This is a real-life house of horrors, one in which very few who enter leave. To that end, Kate, Edward, and the rest won’t be winning any awards. They’ll be fighting for survival.
Wow, if Nabil is being honest and this is really his first script, color me impressed. The idea of a television crew heading to a haunted house is far from a new one. So he’s playing in occupied territory here. But this well-structured horror romp definitely FEELS like a movie. From the setup of two characters who hate each other having to team up together, to the arrival at this spooky mansion, I was shocked to find myself at the edge of my seat early on.
I was so rooting for Willow Groves to continue to kick my ass, in fact, that I was devastated by the reason it stopped doing so. It wasn’t necessarily that the script fell apart. It was just a key choice that I didn’t agree with. About half-way through the story, this became a zombie flick. Well, a “version of zombies” flick, as I’d say the “zombies” were more “walking demons.”
From a dramatic standpoint, it made sense. The script needs to elevate – the threat needs to get worse. And it certainly added more intensity to the story. But to me, this script was at its best when it was creeping along at more of a “Conjuring” pace. Characters were sneaking into creepy rooms where the biggest scare might be a rouge shadow.
To have demons running around all of a sudden felt like we were cheapening those well-composed scares. And I guess the lesson here is a tricky one. There are going to be 3 or 4 big plot choices we have to make during the writing of our script, and we have to kind of take chances with these choices. If we’re too safe, the script starts to feel monotone and boring. But if we go TOO FAR AWAY from the story we set up, we can also lose the audience through false advertising. Creepy haunted house flick all of a sudden turns into Zombie-demon attack 9000.
I don’t really know how to help writers calibrate these decisions other than to say, try them and see what people say. Maybe I’m wrong here and others will like this choice, but if I was guiding Nabil, I’d say to drop the demon stuff and to continue to build the scares and the mythology of this house quietly. That’s how you brought us in. That’s how you should take us out.
As for the rest of the script, I think more could be done on the character front. Edward is probably the most interesting character here, but at times he’s completely absent from the story. One of your jobs as a writer is to identify where the most exciting/interesting characters are and then feature them. In this case, Edward has been “exposed” as a fraud, been screwed over by this bitch journalist, and now has a chance to redeem himself. That’s more interesting to me than this woman who’s trying to get better ratings for her next special. More Edward.
On the flip side, the rest of the characters are kind of plain. Whenever you place a group of characters into a psychologically intense situation, you want to explore each of their individual psyches on as deep of a level as possible. Each person who comes into this house needs to have their own specific issue that’s fucked them up in life. And this house needs to challenge each of those issues.
In the recent horror flick, The Babadook, this creepy bedtime story repeatedly jabbed at our main character’s deep-seated desire to be free – free of this troubled child she was cursed with raising. This allowed the idea to enter her mind that it was possible to be free of her son by killing him. Finally, she would have her life back. Use your idea to explore the character’s psyche.
All in all, I’d give the first half of this script a “worth the read,” but the second half a “wasn’t for me.” With that said, if this is truly Nabil’s first script, then we’re for sure going to be seeing more of him. This is a strong first effort, but still a messy screenplay that loses itself along the way.
Screenplay link: The Willow Groves
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: False advertising – Any time where you promise your script is going to be one thing and then turn it into something else, you’re going to lose some people. It’s a little like an artist starting to sing a country song then, at the 90 second mark, busting into a rap. It MIGHT work, but it’s probably just going to confuse people. So take chances like these with caution.
