Well this script sure turned out to be bat#$@% bananas. Get ready for adult fetus mayhem!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A team of military personnel are sent to inspect an abandoned missile silo after a diseased old man emerges from it.
About: S. Craig Zahler! The man. The myth. Zahler’s magnus opus Brigands of Rattleborge is STILL in my top 5. They keep saying they’re going to make it yet it still hasn’t been made. One of these days. I’m not sure when Zahler wrote Silo but I’m surprised nobody’s jumped on it. It’s one of his most marketable ideas. AND it’s actually original. When does that ever happen with horror scripts? I have a feeling this review will renew interest in the script.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 112 pages
The other day I decided to celebrate Halloween Candy Week by buying one of those big square packs of single-dose Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I’m watching the Bears game and I eat one. And then I eat two. And that leads to me eating three and four. Once I get to four, I’m like, why would I stop? At this point I’m covered in a myriad of orange wrappers, brown chocolate holders, and those white cardboard pieces that give the wrapper structure. It was in that moment that I had an out of body experience whereby I looked down at myself covered in this shameful mess of corn syrup debauchery and thought… Why didn’t I buy two of these??
Reeses are the “Dale” of Halloween candy. All other candies can only hope for a few seconds of attention. Sorry if you didn’t get that reference. I promise you it was funny.
Robert Linderman is a 30-something psychiatrist working for the military. He gets a visit from a couple of higher-ups who take him to meet fellow military personnel, Kirstin, Bodell, and Tyler. These three specialize in decommissioning missile silos that the U.S. military doesn’t need anymore. They’re charged with going to silos, taking out the warheads, and closing the place up for good.
Well, this latest job is going to be different. A few days ago, an old man who appeared to be heavily diseased, attacked a woman at a truck stop. That man, it turns out, was thought dead 30 years ago. They’ve traced him back to working at an old missile silo. But here’s the spooky part. The military doesn’t have any records of this silo. Fearing that it might still have active warheads, the team’s mission is to go in there, make sure there’s no one else, and retrieve any warheads.
They’ll be accompanied by Captain Gonnersnson, a man they will later find out is an absolute psycho who shouldn’t be in charge of anything. They head to the silo, go inside, but are immediately met with a wall that’s been welded closed with all sorts of random junk. Whatever’s going on in this silo, it looks like someone (the military??) made sure it could never get out.
The team go down several staircases and hallways until they finally reach the main room. It’s there where they find the first bodies. Mostly military people who have committed suicide. Except for one room where a naked woman has been hanged and, below her, 5 men have been laid out, naked from the waist down, and shot dead. Above the woman’s head, someone’s written, “Traitor.”
The next room they check, there are three old men. Who are alive! They come at our group, trying to grab at them. Our team shoots them dead. Yay for guns. The guys begin to put together the puzzle. Some sort of radiation leak happened here 30 years ago. Instead of exposing the story, the military decided to lock everyone in here and wait for them to die. Except they didn’t die. All of this resulted in something unheard of. Twin fetuses… that grew into a psychotic adult fetus coupling. Try that on at your next Halloween party!
You know you’re reading an S. Craig Zahler script when you encounter the line, “We found the skull of a rat in his feces.”
First, I want to commend Zahler on a cool idea. How many zombie scripts have you read that felt, oh, I don’t know, just like all the other zombie scripts you read!? A lot, right? Silo goes to show that if you can come up with an interesting location (a missile silo), even if it’s in a familiar genre, you can give people something they’ve never seen before.
Zahler isn’t afraid to take chances in his execution either. Once we got deeper into the silo, we started hearing voices. Voices that only some of the characters were able to hear. I was thinking, “Aren’t we getting off track here? Let’s stick with the genre we’ve set up.” But then I remembered, this is EXACTLY what you need to do to stand out in a popular genre. You have to take chances. Do weird stuff. That’s why Hereditary was a hit with so many people.
But Zahler’s got Ari Aster beat on the weirdo front. He creates a fetus that has, assumingly, continued to grow even after it was out of the body, due to all the radiation madness in the silo. This created an adult fetus (that’s actually twins and still talks like a child) that was running the silo. I mean… not to say ‘mic drop,’ but Ari? You better bring the crazy in your next movie if you want to stay on Zahler’s level.
Another thing I like about Zahler is that he’s not afraid to build up to something. A lot of writers get impatient in this genre. They feel like they need to hit you with a big scare every few pages. If they don’t, you’ll stop reading. Zahler doesn’t have that worry. He’ll take his time getting to a set piece. He’s able to do this for a couple of reasons. One, there’s a sophistication to his writing that makes you trust him. I’ve read a lot of unsophisticated writing and if a writer can’t even make a sentence work, why would I assume that if I stick around fifteen more pages, he’s going to make something interesting happen?
And two, he knows how to build to a moment. Characters are active and moving towards the next goal at all times. We’re getting little clues (a bunch of large furless rats) that something is amiss. Each time we go down a new hallway, it gets a little darker. Every time we go down a new stairway, we hear another strange sound. There’s purpose to Zahler’s sequences that let you know, at the end of the sequence, you’ll be rewarded. If you can do it this way, do it this way. It’s much better than throwing an endless array of scares at the reader. It’s only a matter of time before that scare-a-minute approach stops having an effect.
But the truth is, this is just a cool idea. My feeling with cool ideas is that they do a lot of the work for you. Which means lots of writers could’ve made this work. Zahler’s just got that extra crazy gear he can go to. I’m still not sure what I think about grown twin fetus guys. That may have been a bridge too far for moi. But I’m not telling you it isn’t original. That’s for sure.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Let me tell you the one particularly genius angle Zahler came up with that got me: The military wasn’t aware of this missile silo. I thought that was so cool! 99 out of 100 writers would’ve had the military aware of it. By making it unknown to the military itself, it made the mystery of what this place was that much deeper, that much cooler. Always be looking for that one extra angle that elevates your idea. This was it for me.
