I have a feeling this review is going to go well :)
Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Winning Logline: A wanted criminal and a recovering addict are forced to smuggle a possessed fifteen year old girl across the Mexican border to a supernatural holding facility in the United States before her terrifying power is unleashed.
About: In one of the most controversial (yes, I am embracing hyperbole in all its glory) showdowns in the HISTORY of Scriptshadow, heretofore known as the “Beckys Debacle,” the winning logline for the April Showdown was disqualified when it was discovered by famed LA script detective, Norwood Remingbone, that a script never existed for the logline. After both Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter wrote scathing detailed breakdowns of the events, it is said that the writer was last seen at a gas station in Amarillo Texas, screaming at the attendant, who was, ironically, named “Becky,” to “Hurry up and give me my Skittles! I’ve got to get out of here, lady!” Hence, the greatest screenplay lesson in the universe was learned: Never EVER enter a Scripthsadow Showdown without a finished script. Amen. — Luckily, we’ve got Patrick McNulty taking the place of the phantom script with Devil In Transit, which scored 22 and a half votes.
Writer: Patrick McNulty
Details: 104 pages
She’s too young to play Luna but trust me they’ll be going after her when this gets made!
Whoa!
Things just got INTERESTING this year.
Have you seen the latest Quiet Place: Year One trailer? That movie looks AWESOME. And we get a new Mad Max movie this year. And we get Joker 2 this year. AND we get Deadpool and Wolverine??? Could 2024 low-key be the best movie year of the last decade?? I’m starting to think so.
Carson! Carson!
You’ve got to review a script, remember?
Oh yeah. Let’s get to our OFFICIAL April Showdown winning screenplay. I have high hopes for this script. It’s the logline that gave me the best sense that the screenplay would be well-written.
We’re in a place called Durango, Mexico. A young addict named Luna owes her life to the local priest, Father Ramirez. That’s because, years ago, she was high and wasn’t able to save her daughter in a fire. She later tried to kill herself but it was Father Ramirez who came to her and convinced her that her life still had purpose.
Meanwhile, in a town 4 hours away, a bad dude named Shaw betrayed a local gang so, in order to get him back, they burned an entire school bus full of people and made him watch. Now, both the cartels AND the authorities want him. So this dude has a rough life at the moment.
Ramirez brings Luna in and explains that there’s a priest who’s been possessed by a demon. That priest needs to be transferred to another town so the demon can be destroyed. If it isn’t destroyed within the next day, it will find another host, transfer to that host, and then it’s basically game over.
The demon has power over the weakest people. If you’re weak-minded, it starts to pull you in. I think you’re getting an idea here. Luna and Shaw are going to have to transfer this thing and they’re both addicts. So this demon is going to be playing all sorts of mind games on them.
But before they can get going, the mob of degenerates outside the church hoping to be the next host of this demon, charge in. One of those people, 15 year old Mya, gets there first and the demon is able to slide into her. So now they’re not taking this old decrepit priest on this journey. They’re taking a young crazy girl.
So they grab her, hurry to the car, tie her up, and they start their journey. But Mya is going to do everything in her power – including feeding visions to these two of their worst most tragic moments – to get away and wreak havoc on the world!
One of the harder things to teach in screenwriting is mythology (or world-building). Because, as many times as I’ve told writers that they have to put more effort into the mythology of their story, very few are able to execute the note in a satisfying way.
I think that’s because mythology is busy-work. I guess it’s kind of fun to come up with a whole new world and rules and powers and languages if you’re into that stuff. But, when it comes down to it, it’s a lot of work that happens OFF THE PAGE. And most writers don’t like to spend time on things that aren’t going to directly make it onto the page.
Why learn about the history of your killer demon if nobody is ever going to mention it in the story?
Well, the reason you do all that work is so that you can WRITE ABOUT YOUR STORY WITH CONFIDENCE. If you’ve created this giant mythology and you’ve written down every single corner of it, it comes across in your writing in the form of confidence. Because when writers KNOW their world, they write with certainty. When they don’t, they write in this unsure way where you can see them trying to figure out their world on the page.
That never works.
And look, I’m fine if you don’t want to do that work. But then don’t write scripts that require deep mythology. Cause if you write them and you try to figure out your mythology on the page, I promise you your script won’t work.
Today’s script, Devil in Transit, has a baller mythology. The moment it clicked for me was when I saw all these desolate weak people (homeless people, drug addicts) outside the church where the demon was being kept, desperate to become its next host. When a character explained that it was the weak-minded who were the most susceptible to this thing, and I remembered that both Luna and Shaw were addicts with dark pasts, I could see how intricately woven the mythology was into the character development and plot. And that’s when I knew I was reading a good script.
I don’t read stuff like this often, guys. Where you can tell that the writer has thought through every angle. So when it happens, I’m like a sneakerhead at the Nike store. It’s so fun for me because I know the writer put the work in.
That doesn’t mean it will end up good. There are still other things that can kill a screenplay. But it starts you in pole position, which gives you a major advantage in your storytelling race.
So, was the rest of the script good?
I’ll answer this way. Whenever I see a road trip script, I know that repetition and been-there-done-that scenes are coming. Cause there are only so many scenes you can write on a road trip (the car breaks down! Zoinks! What do they do!?).
And when they had to stop at a hospital because Shaw was still bleeding profusely from the violent church scene, I was like, “Here we go! We’re going to get that scene where they sneak into a room and Luna bandages him up and they tell each other their backstories and then we’re in the car again.”
But that’s not what happened. When they go in, someone finds Mya tied up in the car and lets her go. She gets into the hospital and when Luna and Shaw find her, she grabs a freaking baby from a woman and holds a knife to its throat goading Shaw into killing her (the demon possesses the new body of the person who kills the current host). It was a freaking INTENSE scene. That’s when I knew this script was playing on a different level. A level Beckys could never hope to play on!
My only beef with the script is that I wasn’t entirely clear who Shaw was and who he harmed and why both sides, good and bad, wanted him. I didn’t even know if he was Mexican or American. Or if he lived in Mexico or America. There’s this whole theme of crossing the border here that would’ve worked a lot better if Shaw’s storyline was clearer.
But this was a really fun script. It did something I never considered because, usually, when people write possession scripts, they keep them in one location because a one-location possession script is the single cheapest type of marketable movie to produce. So that’s where writers’ minds always go with possession – they keep the story in one place.
I never realized how adding movement opens up the creative options for telling this type of story. I loved, for example, the fact that, whenever someone weak-minded was around, they would sense Mya and try to get to her so they could be the next host. It added this chaotic energy wherever our characters went.
This is definitely going to have a shot at winning Scriptshadow Showdown script of the year. Great job from, Patrick. Now go read it yourself and tell me what you think!
Script link: Devil In Transit
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Place a common concept trope inside a different setting and you get a fresh movie idea. Taking possession out of its typical stillness and into this active kinetic environment of a road trip really gave the genre a boost.
