Genre: Thriller/Horror?
Synopsis: A woman gets lost in the Everglades.
About: A Nicholl’s quarterfinalist.
Writer: Leif Lindhjem
Give. Me. A. Break.
Look, I hate to bash a writer who’s just starting his career. But this wasn’t enjoyable. It wandered. It meandered. It had no idea what it was.
Can I just make a statement? Can I make a plea to all the young writers out there, especially the writers who write horror? Please…for the love of all that is holy…DO NOT. UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. WRITE THE MOVIE WHERE THE PERSON WAKES UP IN THE END IN A PSYCHE WARD AND FINDS OUT THAT THEY’RE CRAZY.
Not only is it the least original ending that you can possibly think of. But it allows the writer to write 10,000 “spooky” crazy nonsensical things into the story that go nowhere, all in the name of being “clever” cause in the end, the character we’ve been following is CRAZY! So you see! Remember when she saw that tree made out of human flesh?? Well that’s explained because she’s crazy! Remember when she ate a human baby? Well that makes sense now because she’s crazy! (sigh)
Claire, 30s, pretty, heads into the forest with her son, Levi, and sometimes-boyfriend David, and the three get split up. When Claire goes looking for them, she gets lost. As dusk turns to night, and she’s frantically searching, she slams into a branch, knocking herself out. She wakes up the next day with no idea where she is or how to get home.
We sense something is off. There’s a strange savage seminole woman who follows Claire around wherever she goes, always staying at a distance, always in the background. The first thing I thought (at this point I still held out hope) was “Please don’t let that be herself. Please don’t let that be herself.”
Claire almost gets eaten by an alligator. She gets stuck in a sinkhole (and watches the Seminole woman toss a baby into the sinkhole, killing it). She keeps falling and passing out every three minutes. At some point she’s picked up by Russel and J.R., two hicks who live out in the everglades. They take her to their house and they speak cryptically of knowing the Seminole woman. They tell her the woman has her son. When she asks if they can go get her, J.R. replies. “You don’t go to her. She comes to you.”
Everything is cryptic and weird. Nothing makes sense. Nobody talks in any sort of reality, which makes every conversation and moment extremely absurd(cause like, she’s MAKING THIS ALL UP IN HER HEAD, REMEMBER??).
She finally wakes up in the psyche ward. Her real world boyfriend turns out to be a doctor – proving that she just *believed* he was her boyfriend. They have no relationship. The real Russell and J.R. work there as assistants. She still thinks this is all real of course and tries to escape. She sneaks out through the window, climbs the fence, only to get caught up in the barbed wire. She’s too wrapped up in it for them to remove her. Blood gushes everywhere. She passes out….and wakes up in the forest again…to start the nightmare all over again! And oh yeah, if you haven’t figured it out already, she IS the seminole woman.
I wish she would’ve died. And I wish she would’ve taken me with her.
This is when I don’t like reading. When I hit a stretch of scripts so bad I start wondering if anything will surprise and excite me again.
What I learned from Everglade: You can only lead your audience on for so long before you have to start giving them answers. “Intriguing” can become “annoying” faster than you know.
