Genre: Horror
Premise: Three women attempt to climb a dangerous mountain only to learn that a giant of a man hunts anyone on the mountain down.
About: This rare script was written all the way back in 1975. John Carpenter was writing the script for Bob Clark, who directed, “Black Christmas.” Clark was skittish about doing another horror film so, as the legend goes, “Prey” became a spiritual prequel of ideas for what would later become Carpenter’s most famous work, Halloween.
Writer: John Carpenter and James Nichols
Details: 97 pages
Old horror movies are funny.
Recently, I re-watched Phantasm. That movie haunted my dreams when I was younger. So I was curious to see how it would affect me today. Haunt me it did not. Instead, I got caught up in how ridiculous the plotting was.
It was a reminder that tons of horror movies in the 80s didn’t care about an overarching narrative. All they cared about was piecing together scenes in such a way that they got the movie to the next big scare.
For example, there was this ridiculous subplot where the hero’s younger brother is obsessed with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” the hero says to a friend. “He just follows me around.” And then we literally cut to the little brother chasing his brother throughout the neighborhood. Like, his big brother is driving a car and the kid runs after him, for miles at a time, to wherever he goes, lol.
I realized this was the “writer’s” way of getting the younger brother around all the scares. Because if he wasn’t following his brother around, he couldn’t encounter all the horror. All I I could think was, “Why not just come up with a separate storyline and give him his own objectives?” I guess writers didn’t think like that back then.
Anyway, John Carpenter is a cut above whoever wrote Phantasm. So I’m not expecting the plotting to be that bad. But who knows? This is a 40+ year old script!
Newswoman Elaine Macavie, archer Rose Helm, and obsessive jogger Kathy Briggs, are going to attempt something that’s never been done before. They’re going to climb Mount Tobias in 72 hours. How badass is this girl crew? They’ll be the first women to climb the mountain PERIOD.
The locals don’t like it, though. They warn the girls that up there on that mountain, strange things happen. But our crew shrugs them off, thinking they’re climb-shaming them cause they’re women. After they get an okay from the local sheriff, off they go!
Meanwhile, we cross-cut to some giant man lugging a huge log through the forest. He uses the log as a bridge whenever he encounters big drops he has to cross over. This guy is ginormous, almost 7 feet tall. On the very first night, the girls see him deep in the forest. Or they see someone. A second later and he’s gone.
As they get higher up, Kathy stumbles upon an old civil war canteen. That’s never good. The three have fun with trying to figure out its origins but you can tell they’re starting to have second thoughts about climbing this mountain. And they should. Because late at night our 7 foot log-puller, Otis, and his father, a gray-bearded man named Swain, capture the girls while they’re sleeping by simply zipping up their sleeping bags all the way (so they’re stuck in there) and throwing them over their shoulders. Like logs!
That can only mean one thing. Especially since this was written in 1975. Yup. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre situation. Once the girls are safely tied up in Otis and Swain’s remote cabin, a grandma lady comes up and explains that the Civil War killed off all their women, see. So they don’t have any way to breed. Which means these three ladies will be doing the breeding!
They’re all like, “no thank you,” but Otis and Swain and Grandma don’t seem to be taking no for an answer. Still, an escape attempt is made that Rose doesn’t survive. Elaine and Kathy are thrust back onto a mountain they don’t understand and must outwit their pursuers, who have lived on this mountain their whole lives.
The best part of this script was originally thinking, “Wow, this is such a current script! We’re following three women who are trying to climb a mountain together. This is so timely, I could totally see someone buying this tomorrow!”
And thennnnnnnnn…. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Once you have Old Man Swain ripping womens’ clothes off to rape them, there goes your 2020 buying potential.
To me, this is a lesson in influences-of-the-time and how they can negatively impact your story choices. Texas Chainsaw Massacre had come out a year prior to this. Deliverance had come out a couple of years prior. What that did was majorly influence Carpenter and Nichols to make story choices similar to those films. As a result, something that had a lot of promise at the start turned into something cliche and not very interesting. It’s a good reminder to not use story choices from recent films. Find your own choices.
Another reason this lost 2020 street cred was that, while it had an all-female cast, the character work on that cast was weak. Not a single woman had anything going on outside of this mountain trek. Nobody talked about anything other than plot points (“How much further?” “There’s supposed to be a tree up this way.”).
When readers give you the criticism that your script has no character development, this is what they mean. If characters only have the plot to talk about, you’re going to have a really bored reader. We only connect with stories when we get inside the heads of the characters on some level. We have to know things about them, preferably things that they’re struggling with in life. We want to know what’s holding them back from overcoming those things. And we want the journey to test that part of them so that, by overcoming those obstacles, they can finally overcome the obstacles holding them back in their day-to-day real lives.
You may have heard me say, characters sitting in a room talking about their problems is boring. Which is true. However, when your characters are physically on the move, you can give them some of these same conversations and they’ll work. That’s because at least one of the two lines of progression is being met – the physical line. They’re physically moving forward towards the top of the mountain. So readers don’t mind character-based dialogue during that time.
But when you don’t do the research of your characters’ lives, you won’t know how to write those conversations because your characters’ backstories are invisible to you. How can a character explain the frustrations she’s having trying to get a promotion at work if you don’t even know what she does for work?
And it’s not like Carpenter doesn’t have the capacity to achieve these things. Check out how he describes two women in a cafe during breakfast. “At the counter sit CADY and PRICE, two locals. They are both middleaged with the peculiar kind of hostility that pervades the consciousness of mountain people.” I know EXACTLY who he’s talking about. I know I’m dealing with a good writer when they can describe someone perfectly. And the description of these two was downright perfect. But he didn’t put that same thought into our three leads for some reason.
Despite that, I loved how much SHOWING as opposed to TELLING was going on in the first 20 pages. In that first act, there’s a lot of meeting people while they’re doing things. Nobody’s standing around talking. If someone’s talking, it’s because they need something. That ‘show don’t tell’ skill probably comes from his directing. He knows that characters standing around talking is death. Still, he put SO MUCH focus on it early on, and it was so effective in creating a mood, that I’m reinvigorated for showing. It’s so much more powerful than telling.
It’s too bad this script went south so fast. I think if these women would’ve gotten picked off one by one and the final girl had to outwit and defeat the bad guys, I would’ve liked it a lot better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: John Carpenter once said, “To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.” In our eternal struggle to create memorable monsters and villains in our horror script, we try to come up with all these gadgets and overtly creepy things to shape them. When, sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes), the scariest thing is for the monster to be as human as possible.
