Genre: Supernatural Thriller/Horror
Premise: A hardened 9-1-1 dispatcher begins receiving emergency calls from the future, including one reporting her own death forcing her to confront whether she can change fate without becoming the very cause of the tragedies she’s trying to stop.
About: The Blood & Ink Horror Screenplay Contest is a unique screenwriting contest whereby, six months ago, you had to pitch your way into the contest. Scripts either got in with a “yes” by me or they got at least 15 upvotes when pitched in the comments section. The 90+ writers that were chosen then had six months to write their script. I will occasionally review one of the scripts here. If you want to see the previous Blood & Ink reviews, you can do so here, here, here, here, and here. For those who missed Blood & Ink, I am doing a brand new pitch contest starting Friday July 10th. Get those high concept script pitches ready!
Writer: David Lamberston
Details: 104 pages
This was one of the more popular voted-in screenplays in the Blood & Ink Contest. That may be because David Lamberston is one of the most respected commenters and writers on the site. The script may seem familiar because we did a first-scene review from the screenplay early in the year. Now, it’s time to take a look at the full thing!
We are in New Orleans. Zoey Martinez, 43, is an Emergency Dispatch Caller. And one day she gets a call from a little boy who says his parents may be dead. The little boy hangs up. She sends cops to the house but everyone is fine. On top of this, the call never gets logged into the system, making her boss believe she’s lost it. So they send her to a shrink, Dr. Ellis.
Dr. Ellis digs into her foster child past and thinks that Zoey may have some unresolved traumas that caused her to imagine this phone call. However, a few days later, the call ends up becoming a reality. An entire family is killed due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Now the cops get involved cause they want to know how the heck Zoey knew these deaths were coming.
When she goes to work, she receives another dropped glitch call, confirming that this issue may not be isolated. But now Dr. Ellis is starting to have suspicions about Zoey. Might Zoey be involved in these deaths somehow? So he starts looking into Zoey’s file on the down low.
Another call comes in, this one a marine bridge jumper and Zoey decides to leave the station and handle it personally. She gets a friend to call in the suicide before it happens but even with the warning, the cops get there too late and the bridge jumper dies.
In their next session, Dr. Ellis informs Zoey that her real father killed her mother and he’s in prison. So, they decide to meet with him to see if they can learn anything, and the dad shockingly tells them that the mom could see into the future, and a situation arose where if he didn’t kill the mom, then baby Zoey would have died. So he killed mom to save Zoey.
Zoey then gets a 9-1-1 call regarding a teen who took a fall and is dying. So she goes to the house herself and saves the girl. But the parents think that she tried to kill her and get mad. And the cops are very suspicious of Zoey now, since she seems to know these bad things are going to happen before they happen.
Meanwhile, Zoey and Dr. Ellis continue to work through her issues and even, at times, Dr. Ellis’ issues (his teenage daughter killed herself). In the end, Zoey gets pulled off her station. Shit has gotten too crazy to let her continue. But she does get one final 9-1-1 call and this one will be the most personal of all. Will Zoey survive????
This is one of the more challenging scripts I’ve had to review in a while because, on a character level, it’s better than most amateur scripts for sure. But as a horror script, it’s like a 737 with only one engine working. I would go so far as to say that there’s a bit of a bait and switch going on here. You think you’re opening a horror script but it’s really a character piece.
Now, it’s fair to ask, “Who cares what you do to get them to read it as long as the script is good?” However, one strategy that does not work well in this situation is promoting a sexy genre, like horror, and then giving the reader an unsexy genre, like drama. The horror lovers are going to be disappointed.
But it isn’t JUST that it’s not horror. It’s that the plotting doesn’t build the story aggressively enough. We get these calls and the calls are basically all the same. Someone is about to be in trouble. And Zoey has to figure out a way to save them. And while Zoey’s personal storyline is growing, these repetitive call plot beats keep the script running on a treadmill. We keep waiting for the story to escalate and it doesn’t.
That puts a lot of pressure on the script because, at that point, the primary engine driving the story is our investment in Zoey and her journey. For me, there was enough there to keep reading, but I found myself wanting more momentum from the plot itself. Some sections worked better for me than others in that regard, which is why I occasionally found myself wanting a stronger external narrative drive to complement her character arc.
One thing I didn’t like with Zoey was her backstory. I have an issue with double trauma in characters. Because the second trauma is where you feel the writer. You feel him trying to make the character as impactful as possible and, ironically, it achieves the opposite. A big part of Zoey’s past was that she was raped for a year by a foster dad. And then, also, her father murdered her mom. That second trauma is essential for the story. But the first one is not. And when you add that Dr. Ellis’s daughter killed herself, that tells me there’s an over-reliance on intense trauma which makes me aware of the writing and, in turn, chisels at my suspension of disbelief like an ice pick.
But the thing that sinks this script for me was that the hook of the movie, which is these phone calls, were not nearly interesting enough. Guy jumps off a bridge. Family dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Girl takes a bad fall. This is the heart of the premise and these emergencies just felt so small. I’m fine with the first one being small but I wanted them to increase in intensity.
The final call is good. But by that point I’d mentally given up on the script.
I’m going to finish up with a weird note for David. But it’s the biggest thing I felt after finishing the script. This script needs more swag. Right now, this script is the guy sitting at the bar in a plaid button-down, tan chinos, and neatly combed hair. He looks perfectly presentable. You’d trust him to house-sit for a week. But if I asked you to describe him an hour later, you’d struggle.
I need a little more of the guy who walks in and immediately catches your attention. Not because he’s louder. Not because he’s trying harder. But because there’s something unpredictable about him. Maybe it’s the Henley with the top three buttons undone. Maybe it’s the tattoos. Maybe it’s the look in his eye that says there’s a story there. You don’t know if he’s trouble or the most interesting person in the room, but you want to find out.
That’s what I felt was missing here. The script is competent. It’s readable. It does a lot of things well. But it rarely surprises us. It rarely takes that big swing. And those are the moments I was craving.
Script link: What’s Your Emergency?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s important that both the character storyline AND the plot build. Here, the character storyline builds. But the plot never does and that’s what holds the script back.
