Here are some scene breakdowns to get you motivated!
Next weekend, aka Halloween Friday, we’re scheduled to have a showdown for the 97 participants in the Blood & Ink Horror Script Showdown contest. The showdown is titled “That Scene” Showdown and it involves submitting “that scene” from your script, aka, that amazing killer scene that will be remembered for decades once your movie comes out.
But I’m starting to get worried because only three people have submitted their scene so far. I suppose that since it’s just one scene, writers may be using every single second they have to perfect it before they submit. But if I get anything less than 20 scenes, I’m going to cancel the showdown. Which means you guys will have nothing to participate in while you stuff all your Halloween candy down your gullet.
After a little self-analysis, I realize that I might have set the bar too high. Telling writers to come up with the best scene ever is kinda intimidating. So, I’ve decided to dial things back. Just send me a good scene. If you have a good horror scene in your script and you are one of the 97 Blood & Ink participants, submit it to the showdown. Here are the details.
For Blood & Ink Contest Participants Only!
What: “That Scene” Showdown
When: Friday, October 31st
Deadline: Thursday, October 30th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me: title, genre, logline, up to 100 words of context for the scene, a PDF of the scene
Sent to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
In the meantime, I want to talk about some of the memorable scenes I’ve seen this year to give you guys an idea of what constitutes a good solid memorable scene.
Eddington: The Power of Tension
One of my favorite scenes in Eddington is when Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, goes into the supermarket during Covid to get a few things. A big theme in the movie is that Joe refuses to wear a mask or physically distance himself from others. So when he walks into this supermarket, everyone turns to him and starts staring. Some people take out their phones and start recording him. The grocery store manager comes up and tells him he has to leave unless he wears a mask. He refuses. And that’s pretty much it. That’s the scene.
Why does this scene work? The scene works because it leans so heavily into tension. Tension is a subcontractor of conflict. And conflict is the lifeblood of drama. If you have drama, you have entertainment.
So just seek out scenarios that have tension and you’ll naturally have an entertaining scene. It’s also important to note here that there isn’t any huge yelling or fighting going on. That can work in certain scenes. But if you’re not careful, it will feel on the nose.
With tension, you don’t have to worry about being on the nose. You just put your character in a scene where the variables surrounding that scene make one or more of the characters uncomfortable. The more you dial up those variables to raise the temperature of the tension, the more uncomfortable people will be, and the more entertaining the scene will be.
Weapons: Suspense Through the Unknown
Another good scene this year came in the movie Weapons. The scene occurs near the middle of the movie when a druggie, James, is looking for a quick score. He needs money so he can buy drugs. He comes across a house that looks empty for the moment. He sneaks off to the side, breaks a window, and slides inside to the dark living room.
Once inside, he starts looking around for valuables, only to turn around and see that, sitting perfectly upright on a couch three feet away from him, are a man and a woman. Their eyes are wide open. And yet they’re not moving. He gets closer to them to try and see what’s going on and he eventually concludes that they’re incapacitated. So he ignores them and goes looking around for things he can steal.
Meanwhile, the camera always has this couple in the background just sitting there, lingering. And at some point, unbeknownst to him, they stand up. The rest of the scene evolves from there.
This is a classic horror scene setup. You place an element of danger in the scene and you draw out the suspense of how that danger is going to develop for as long as you can. And then, usually, you let the danger loose.
These scenes are always better, however, if you can find a new spin on them that the audience isn’t used to. Which is why this Weapons scene stands out from the competition. We don’t understand the rules of this scenario yet. We don’t know why this couple is frozen. We just know it’s creepy as hell. Our lack of understanding is what supercharges the suspense here. We know something may happen while James is looking for dough. We just don’t know what. And it adds this extra tension to the suspense that really brings the scene alive.
The Ballad of Wallace Island: Conflict Within Desire
Let’s take a left turn and talk about a scene from another favorite 2025 movie of mine, The Ballad of Wallace Island. This is a small movie about a once successful married couple folk band, Herb and Nell, who have since broken up and gone in different directions with their lives. Years later, their number one fan, however, pays them to come play a concert together on his remote island.
The scene in question happens about halfway through the movie. After a lot of frustrating moments together, Herb and Nell realize that they have to practice to make sure the concert goes well. They haven’t played together in years.
The two sit down together out on the porch with their guitars and they just start practicing. Now, of course, the songs they became famous for were songs they wrote about each other when they were falling in love. So the songs have a lot of history to them that, just singing them out loud, forces them to revisit their relationship, whether they want to or not.
Things start out cordial and, because of the songs, become flirty. It’s clear that there are still feelings between these two. But the other personal and business shit that gets in the way of that is what eventually destroyed them. And that reality starts coming out, leading to them ultimately fighting again.
The reason the scene works is, again, due to conflict. This will be a theme you can consistently draw on when your scenes aren’t working. You want to find the conflict in the scene and build the scene around that. But what’s great about this scene is that the conflict isn’t clean cut. It’s not just, “I don’t like you and you don’t like me.” Or “I like you but you don’t like me.”
The reality is, they still like each other. But they know that they can’t overcome all the other shit to make it work. So there’s this tug of war going on within each character, for Herb a little more than Nell, that’s making his goal (to be with her tonight) impossible. That’s where character work tends to be the most interesting. When two people want something but there are other factors keeping them apart.
And this device has been used forever. Romeo & Juliet. They want to be together. But their families forbid it. There’s something so much more frustrating about that than “one person doesn’t like the other one” and that’s why they can’t be together. But I find the situation in Ballad even more frustrating because the thing that’s keeping them from being together is self-imposed.
I bring this specific scene up because it’s all character and backstory. It’s a reminder that you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to write a good scene. You can write a good scene with just two characters sitting down, as long as you’ve drawn those characters up in a way that creates a charged atmosphere every time you put them in front of each other.
Nobody 2: Using Your Unique Element
Finally, I want to highlight a scene from an underrated movie in 2025, Nobody 2. If you want to sit back and gobble up some snacks and enjoy something without having to think too much, this is the movie to rent.
The movie has Hutch, Bob Odenkirk, who’s a secret undercover assassin, take his family to a small town water park for a summer getaway. But what he doesn’t know is that the town is run by a powerful hillbilly drug ring.
On the first day there, the family, namely Hutch’s teenage son and daughter, go to play at the arcade. Once there, some kid picks a fight with Hutch’s son. It’s 100% the other kid’s fault. But when Hutch comes to take care of things, the big ugly muscled scary manager of the arcade starts yelling at Hutch to keep his son in check.
Hutch keeps apologizing but tries to make the point that the other kid was in the wrong. The manager gets angrier, puts more pressure on Hutch to leave. And then, at the last second, the manager gives a little shove to Hutch’s daughter as they exit. Hutch continues outside, pauses, tells his family he forgot something. He’ll meet them back at the room. He then proceeds to go inside and kick the living hell out of the manager along with all the other roided up coworkers.
So why does this scene work? A couple reasons. Let’s start with the big one. Whatever you have that is unique to your story, you want to use that to drive scenes when possible. That’s what’s going to make your scenes different from other movies.
Hutch is a secret hitman. That’s called (as I point out in my dialogue book) reverse dramatic irony. It’s the same principle that guides scenes with superheroes out of their costumes, like Spider-Man or Batman. When Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker is dealing with an asshole, the reverse dramatic irony of us knowing that they’re picking a fight with Spiderman creates an intense amount of energy within the reader where they cannot WAIT to see what happens when Peter becomes Spiderman and makes this jerk pay. It literally works EVERY SINGLE TIME.
And it works here as well. Hutch is a secret superhero. We know that. They don’t. He can beat up all these guys but he has to keep his “superhero” persona under wraps while he’s here. But we know it’s only a matter of time before he cracks and fights back. And the time between the manager confronting Hutch and Hutch cracking is the line of suspense that makes us obsessed with the scene. I am telling you, it would be literally impossible for anybody watching that movie to walk away during that scene. Because they HAVE TO SEE Hutch crack and beat the hell out of this guy. That’s when you know you’ve got a good scene.
But there’s more going on in this scene as well. Audiences react strongly to certain triggers/hot buttons. Injustice is one of them. Bullies is another. Corruption. All three of those things are going on here. So they help supercharge an already charged scenario.
But the big note here is to USE THE SPECIFIC SPECIAL THING that you have in your screenplay to drive scenes, just like Hutch’s secret superhero status drove this scene.
The Takeaway
Okay, that’s it, folks. I hope these scene breakdowns have inspired you. Now submit your own scenes so that Scriptshadow can have a Happy Halloween next weekend! I need a good reason to take down 26 Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. You know, besides, “It’s Friday.”
