Genre: Horror Thriller
Premise: A medical student testing a new memory drug experiences sudden transitions (‘shimmers’) to a past-life working in a Victorian hospital. He’s intrigued – until during one shimmer he learns the year is 1888, his past-self is Jack the Ripper…and that whenever he is in Jack’s body, Jack is back home in 2027 occupying his.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me 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, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of the upvoted scripts.
Writer: Frank Enscribe
Details: 107 pages
Okay. Yesterday got ugly.
So I’m a little nervous about reviewing another user-voted-in script.
But, with today’s script, we’re dealing with Jack the Ripper. Ripper is one of the most popular “free IP” characters out there. Writers love him. Hollywood loves him. So I’m hoping, today, I’m going to love him. Let’s find out together, shall we?
It’s 2027 and 26 year old Danny Foley is living in London, barely getting by. The dude is taking care of his mother, who has dementia, and he’s so poor that he’s been forced to participate in one of those “drug trials for $$” at one of the local hospitals.
The trial, unfortunately, is causing him to have hallucinations. He’ll briefly think he’s in 1888 London. And as time goes by, these hallucinations last longer, and, within them, he’s inhabiting a medical student named Fredrick Eltham.
In 2027, Danny befriends a local nurse who’s taking care of his mother. Her name is Ava. And he shares his hallucinations with her. They both find them interesting. But the longer they go on, the more Danny starts to think they may be real.
Also, the more that he inhabits Frederick, the more he realizes this is a bad dude. Frederick gets a fellow student pregnant and just ditches her, telling her to figure it out on her own. It’s only when Danny jumps into Frederick’s body seconds after Frederick just slit a woman’s stomach open that Danny figures out that Frederick is Jack the Ripper and all this is real.
Meanwhile, when Danny is jumping to the past in Frederick’s body, Frederick is taking over Danny’s body. And boy does Frederick, aka Jack the Ripper, think 2027 is wild. Just the porn alone blows him away. So, Frederick begins using Danny’s body to explore every hedonistic temptation on the spectrum. Strippers, hookers, chaotic nights of excess, you name it.
In a slightly hard plot development to follow, Frederick has found a drug back in 1888 that allows him to spend longer periods of time in Danny’s body. This keeps Danny back in 1888 longer, which puts him in more danger of being caught as The Ripper. So Danny has to figure out a way to stop these hallucinations, get back in his body, and somehow kill Freddy along the way.
First of all, a huge salute to Frank for his first three scenes.
All three scenes did something well.
The first scene is one of the better cold opens I’ve read in a while. Download the script below and read the scene then come back here. One of the big issues I see with cold opens is that they’re too short. The writer gives us the BEGINNING of something exciting. But then cuts to the main story without following through.
A good cold open has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a really good cold open will have a reversal, which this cold open did. We’re watching this butcher chase this woman through the streets. Things get interesting when two other dudes show up. We’re trying to put together the pieces of the Ripper and why he would have two other people with him.
Then this fourth well-dressed man shows up, puts a knife through the butcher’s throat, and just as we think he’s about to escort the woman to safety, he slits her throat. It was a really great scene. Constantly evolving. Keeping you on edge. Great writing overall.
We then meet our hero, Danny, in a coffee shop. I ramble on and on to you guys about how important a hero’s introductory scene is. It’s one of the top 3 most important scenes in a script. Because if you nail it, we’ll root for your hero the rest of the movie.
And one of the best ways to write a good protagonist introductory scene is to have your hero do something clever. We LOVE clever people. Love them. And that’s exactly what Frank has Danny do. Danny is at a coffee shop. He realizes he doesn’t have enough money for a coffee. But he’s desperate for one.
He then hears the barista call out the order for, “ENRICO!” Danny waits for Enrico to get his coffee and leave. He then walks up to the counter and says, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for my coffee forever. Where is it??” “What’s your name?” “Enrico.” The barista realizes that the other guy “stole” the coffee and makes Danny a new one.
Two for two on scenes!
We then have Danny spot the beautiful Ava, a nurse in the nearby hospital. In an attempt to shoot his shot, he tells her he’s a medical student over there. Ava says she’ll give him a ride to the hospital. The dialogue here needed work (and, actually, all the dialogue in this script needs work) but what Frank did well is he KEPT THE STORY MOVING.
We’re literally moving through space constantly. From the coffee shop to the car, form the car to the hospital. They’re walking through the hospital together when Ava gets called. There’s no time to split up so Danny is all of a sudden in an elevator with her to the top of the building.
This propulsion is pushing us through the story and it’s a great way to keep the reader turning the pages. What I mean by that is, if Frank would’ve, instead, had Danny sit down with Ava back at the coffee shop and talk about each other’s lives, that may have brought the script to a standstill. I’m not saying it would have for sure. But my point is that, by physically keeping our characters moving, we keep the beginning of the story moving.
However, after those three scenes, the script never quite found its footing. It had some nice moments. I thought that things got interesting with Jack the Ripper spending time in 2027 (inside Danny’s body). And there was a particularly well-written sequence where Jack keeps a diary of his experiences in 2027 that Danny later reads when he comes back to the present. And it’s a very thoughtful and descriptive account of what the future may have looked like to someone coming from 1888, whether you’re a serial killer or not.
But a lot of the script is all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be any structure. We kind of stumble into 1888 and then stumble back and then stumble into 1888 again. That’s how I would describe the personality of the story: stumbling.
The great thing about a traditional serial killer narrative is that the structure is always clear: STOP THE SERIAL KILLER. Figure out who he is. Capture him. Stop him before he kills his next victim. That goal gives the story a strong structure.
We don’t have that here. Danny spends at least half of the movie confused about what’s going on. He assumes it’s all a dream brought on by these meds. So that period of the story is, basically, a giant dream sequence.
It isn’t until later that he and Ava start taking things seriously and, even then, it’s not like they develop a coherent plan. The plan seems to be off-the-cuff. I’ll go back there and turn myself in as “The Ripper.” The best way to explain it is that it felt like a plan two high school freshmen would’ve come up with. Not two intelligent adults.
I’m trying to decide is this script can get to “sale-worthy” territory through rewrites. Cause I don’t want to send Frank off on a Odysseus-like journey where he’s working on this thing for 20 years trying to fix it. But I suspect that if he started by fixing the structure that a lot of other parts of the story would fall into place.
By structure I mean, let’s have our heroes identify the problem earlier, realize it needs to be fixed earlier, come up with a plan (earlier), and then execute it earlier. We have to get the story moving… earlier.
Now, even if we do that, I’d still be worried about the dialogue. And I’m worried about the Danny-Ava relationship in general. It doesn’t feel true to me. It feels sort of like it was lifted from an abandoned romantic comedy script. This is not that kind of movie. I would make the relationship here more professional. And it’s fine if romantic feelings develop over time. But I would keep the tone more in line with other serial killer movies, like Lambs and Seven.
Cause the rom-commish relationship is leading to some cheesy dialogue that doesn’t feel like it belongs in this movie.
But, overall, I want to commend Frank because I did not vote for this idea to get into the contest and, in retrospect, I probably should have. I underestimated that Frank was going to be able to make the “jack the ripper in modern day” stuff work. And yet, that ended up being some of the coolest stuff in the script.
The script is too clunky to get a ‘worth the read’ but if these changes were made, I could see it getting there.
Script link: The Shimmer
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is a small detail, but I think it’s a smart one. Scripts can become dated fast, so you want to look for little ways to extend their shelf life. If you’re writing a script that requires you to establish the current year, one trick is to push that year forward. So, if we’re living in 2026, set the story in 2027, which is what Frank does here. That way, if the draft sits around for a while before someone remembers it or requests it, it still feels current. Even if it gets passed to someone in 2028, it only feels a year old. This is also why I advise not putting the date of the draft on your title page. Hollywood is weird. If someone sees 2021 on the title page, their first thought might be, “Oh, this has been around for five years and nobody wanted it. There must be something wrong with it.”
