Genre: Action/Horror
Premise: In a city locked under a brutal curfew, a desperate teen must brave the night to save her younger brother from a winged billionaire vigilante armed with high-tech gadgets and a sadistic obsession with exterminating lawbreakers.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me horror movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, sold! Today’s script was voted in by you, the readers of the site. It did not get the Carson seal of approval. But let’s see if Federico can prove me wrong!
Writer: Federico Frachhia
Details: 99 pages
Okay, you guys voted this one in.
The main reason I didn’t vote for it was because I’m out on anything “superhero” these days unless it’s literally the most clever superhero idea ever.
My feeling is that every superhero movie angle was explored during that 10 year Marvel period and there’s nothing left.
I will say that exploring Batman from the point of view of an innocent person being hunted by him is a solid idea. It’s still not enough to get me excited. But it’s definitely better than most of the superhero ideas I get pitched.
The Dark Slayer follows 19 year-old Maya, who lives in a city under a nightly curfew. Once the sun goes down, nobody is allowed outside, and an army of surveillance drones patrols the streets looking for anyone who breaks the rules. But there’s also a much scarier presence out there. A mysterious figure in a bat-like armored suit known as the Dark Slayer. If the drones catch you, you get arrested. But, according to rumor, if the Dark Slayer catches you, you disappear.
Maya’s 17-year-old brother Leo hates the curfew and everything it represents. He and his rebellious friends (who run around in clown masks) decide to sneak out one night and tear through the city, defacing anything deface-able. When Maya discovers what Leo has done, she’s terrified he’s going to get himself killed. So she does the one thing she’s never supposed to do: goes outside after dark to find him.
Almost immediately, Maya finds herself dodging drones as she makes her way across the deserted city. Along the way, she encounters Harvey, a night-dweller with half his face burned off, who reluctantly becomes her guide through this world. Harvey knows how the drones operate and, more importantly, how to avoid the Dark Slayer. But while hiding inside a department store, the Slayer finds them. During the confrontation, Harvey manages to remove the asshole’s helmet, revealing the shocking truth: the Dark Slayer isn’t a robot like everyone assumed. He’s Julian Ward, the billionaire tech mogul responsible for creating the city’s entire curfew system!
Maya escapes and falls in with a group of underground rebels, one of whom has a question mark sign on their sock (the Riddler???), where she discovers that Leo and his friends have an even bigger plan. They’re throwing an illegal rooftop party designed to lure the Dark Slayer into an ambush and destroy him. Maya gets word to Leo that the Slayer is actually Julian Ward (as opposed to an assumed robot), and the group calls off the ambush, not wanting to murder someone. But Julian is not so kind. He tracks Maya down, kidnaps her, then attacks the rooftop gathering, slaughtering the rebels and ultimately killing Leo.
Julian returns to his mansion with Maya, intending to kill the only person who knows who he is. But Maya escapes her restraints and begins a final battle with this psycho. What began as a frightened sister breaking curfew to bring her brother home becomes a fight for survival against the man who built an entire city around fear.
I’m actually pretty surprised by what Federico was able to get out of this story. I didn’t love the script, but a lot of that comes down to this simply not being my jam. Because there were definitely stretches where I found myself getting pulled in.
The arrival of Harvey, for example, was a cool moment because that’s when I started to realize what Federico was doing. He was taking these Batman staples and injecting them into the story in subversive ways. And then there’s the moment where the Dark Slayer first attacks Maya. He does so with such violence that I developed this visceral hatred for him. Once that happened, I noticed myself becoming a lot more invested in the story because I wanted to see this guy go down.
That’s probably the thing I respected most about the script. Federico commits to the darkness of the idea. He doesn’t sugarcoat the Dark Slayer or try to make him “fake scary.” This guy is fucking really scary. And once I realized Federico was willing to go all the way, I became more intrigued by what was coming.
Where the script ultimately fell short for me was Maya.
We don’t learn much about Maya before the story kicks into gear, and that’s always a dangerous choice. One of the easiest ways to pull a reader in is to introduce your protagonist doing something that makes us interested in them. It could make us like them, sympathize with them, become curious about them, or even hate them. It doesn’t really matter. You just want some kind of strong reaction that makes us think, “I want to follow this person.”
Think about Cassie’s introduction in Promising Young Woman. She pretends to be blackout drunk, allows a supposedly “nice guy” to take her home, lets him reveal exactly who he is, and then turns the tables on him. Within a few pages, you’re fascinated by this woman.
Or look at Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. We meet him stealing chain-link fencing and other metal from a construction site. A security guard confronts him, Louis tries to talk his way out of it, and the encounter ends with Louis attacking the guard and stealing his watch. Then he goes and sells the stolen material to a scrap yard. Before the story has even really begun, we understand that we’re dealing with a deeply unusual human being.
We don’t get an equivalent with Maya. And when you don’t make your protagonist interesting up front, you’re essentially deferring the task. You still have to make us interested in that character, you’ve just decided you’re going to do it later. Which means that over the next 30, 40, 50 pages, Maya has to make fascinating choices, reveal surprising things about herself, or interact with people in ways that gradually build our investment in her.
That’s possible. But it’s risky, particularly for an unknown writer, because the reader may check out before you even get there.
And to Federico’s credit, I did eventually care more about Maya. Ironically, a lot of that came through the Dark Slayer. Once I saw how brutal he was, I didn’t want him to beat her. So the stronger the villain became, the more invested I became in Maya’s survival. But it never quite crossed that tipping point where I was obsessed with what was going to happen next. And I think that’s ultimately what kept The Dark Slayer from reaching a “worth the read.”
Still, I think there’s a legitimate strategy behind writing a script like this. Mattson Tomlin, who worked on The Batman, is another writer who wrote a Batman-coded script and got that Batman job because of it. And Hollywood has repeatedly shown an appetite for writers who can demonstrate that they understand this kind of grounded, psychologically dark superhero storytelling.
So if you’re a writer who desperately wants to write Batman someday, writing your own “Batman without Batman” spec isn’t a crazy move. You’re essentially saying, “Look, I can’t legally write Batman for you yet, but here’s proof that I know how to handle this kind of stuff.”
Ultimately, though, this just wasn’t my bag. But I can see hardcore superhero fans responding to it more strongly than I did. So, superhero fans? Take a look for yourself and tell me what you think.
Script link: The Dark Slayer
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be very careful about who you choose to put through your story. Sometimes simply changing the protagonist can dramatically increase our investment in the exact same plot. In The Dark Slayer’s cold open, we follow a pregnant woman and her husband who are forced to break curfew because she’s going into labor and they need to get to the hospital. I kept thinking: Would I have been more invested if they were the protagonists? I think I would have. They HAVE to be outside. Their baby is coming. Compare that to Leo, who’s basically a punk who sneaks out because he hates the curfew, forcing Maya to go save him. Put that pregnant couple through the same nightmare and I’m immediately rooting for them: Get to the hospital. Keep the baby alive. Don’t let the Dark Slayer find you. Always ask: Is this the most compelling person I could be telling this story through?
