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Genre: Western
Premise: As a zombie plague spreads throughout the Old West, a reformed outlaw must escort a sick girl to sanctuary while being pursued by his old gang and the undead.
Why You Should Read: The first scene won the Opening Scene Contest right here on Scriptshadow. Thanks to some helpful feedback, both the scene and the script have come a long way since then. The concept is both simple and marketable: cowboys versus zombies. And Hollywood has yet to produce a feature film to mainstream audiences. With additional help from the Scriptshadow community, this could be that film. Thank you, and hope you enjoy.
Writer: Scott Eames
Details: 114 pages
Today’s writer enters into one of the most competitive genres in Hollywood – zombie horror. Everyone’s writing zombie movies so if you want to get your zombie script read, you have to do something unique. Is mixing zombies and the Old West unique? Not entirely. I’ve reviewed – I think – three Zombie Westerns on the site? But in Eames’s defense, it’s been awhile since the last one. So maybe there’s an opportunity to grab a hold of some market share here.
Let’s check it out…
Harlan Ellsworth is a wanted man. Of course, wanted men were as common as Facebook pages back in 1872. Still, our guy Harlan ran with one of the nastiest gangs in Arkansas, the Four Horseman. During one of their raids, he killed a Marshall. And now the whole of Arkansas wants him to pay.
But Harlan’s after something himself – the Marshall’s daughter, Wendy. Having since abandoned the Four Horseman, he now believes that they’re after Wendy, and wants to save her before they find her. If he can do a little good, it might make up for all the atrocities from his past.
Off he goes looking for her in a little town called Stillwater, but finds that the entire town’s been slaughtered, likely by Apache. Except when he gets a closer look, he realizes this isn’t the signature of the Apache. And that’s when the zombie humans come. AND the zombie animals.
During the commotion, Wendy flees out of one of the buildings, he scoops her up, and they make a run for it. They’re able to escape the zombies (as well as a pursuing sheriff), and later Harlan lies to Wendy, pretending to be someone else, saying he knew her father and promised he would save her.
Wendy says they should head to her Uncle at Fort Shepherd. If there’s any place that will be fortified from zombies, it will be there. Along the way, they run into Harlan’s old gang, the Four Horseman, and their fearless leader, Percival Douglass.
Percival kidnaps Wendy and brings her to his fancy riverboat, where he appears to have all sorts of plans for her. Meanwhile, Harlan’s been bitten, and could turn within hours. He needs to get to the riverboat in time, kill Percival, save Wendy, and ultimately tell her the truth, that he’s the one who killed her father.
I can’t remember the last time an amateur script got so much right. From a pure craft point of view, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single error here. We start out with a great teaser. After our two main characters are introduced, a clear goal is established (get to Fort Shepherd). Eames builds the entire central relationship around some shocking dramatic irony (Wendy doesn’t know that Harlan killed her father).
There are a series of fun and creative set pieces. The circus of the dead. The waterfall with the falling bodies. The riverboat. Later in the script, our protagonist gets bitten, adding a ticking time bomb to the mix. The arrival of the Four Horseman add an important goal that must be met (Harlan must save Wendy). This script feels like it was vetted by 10 of the best readers in Hollywood. Virtually EVERY choice makes sense.
And yet that’s probably the reason I wasn’t fully engaged. While I admired the plotting, something about the format felt too perfect. Like when the Horseman kidnapped Wendy. That triggered the thought: “Of course the bad guys kidnap the girl so that the hero has to save her.” It confirmed to me that I was too ahead of the script. There was nothing in the story that was surprising me.
Don’t get me wrong. This is one of the HARDEST things about screenwriting. A screenplay has a beginning (the setup), a middle (the conflict), and an end (the resolution). You only have so much room to play around with. And what most writers have found is that when they go outside of that room, it’s a fail. Which pushes them back to the safety of the formula. And this script is definitely textbook formula.
One thing I tell writers when they’re writing something formulaic is to put in 1 or 2 surprise turns in the middle of the screenplay. Do something we’re not expecting. A recent example would be the movie, Good Time., where at the halfway point, our hero goes to the hospital to jailbreak his face-casted brother, only to realize after he’s gotten him to safety, he jailbroke the wrong guy.
But there may be a bigger problem at play.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I was indifferent to our hero, Harlan. It’s not that his plight was uninteresting. He has a really intense backstory. But I didn’t FEEL anything towards him. Something we talked about a couple of weeks ago is that when you feel negatively (or apathetic) towards a character, it almost always goes back to their introduction. And Harlan’s introduction is strange.
We meet him borderline threatening a priest. So already, I’m not liking this guy. Furthermore, the longer he speaks, the less I’m buying the scene. I guess I understand wanting to repent for your sins. But let’s be real. The scene was created for the sole purpose of Harlan being able to drop a load of exposition on us. So you had an unlikable protag combined with Exposition Man. That didn’t sit well with me and likely colored the way I read the rest of the script.
Compare this to a recent Western I watched, High Plains Drifter, with Clint Eastwood. That movie starts with Eastwood riding into a new town, and everyone’s giving him the stink eye. Everyone’s being an asshole. Everyone’s giving him shit. So OF COURSE we’re going to sympathize with this character.! He’s the underdog to all these dickheads.
So perhaps Eames should try giving Harlan an introduction that creates more sympathy. I can’t promise that will work. But there was definitely something about his intro that didn’t click with me. It was one of the weaker scenes in the script.
I’m so torn about this one. I DEFINITELY recommend Scott as a writer. This guy knows what he’s doing. But if I gave the script a “worth the read,” it would be more for that reason than rewarding the script itself. I’ll finish with this. This is the kind of script that is a pebble’s toss away from pushing an amateur into professional territory. I mean, we’re so close, we can bite it.
Script link: Under The Vultures
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I love the use of COLOR in description. Color helps readers visualize better. That means they’re more likely to imagine the image up on the big screen. The opening scene here with its WHITE NIGHTGOWN and its YELLOW EYES and its RED BLOOD. I felt that scene more than any scene I’ve read in the past month. The use of color is a major reason for that.
