Scriptshadow turns to its own for today’s screenplay review, the runner-up in the November Logline Showdown! The Equalizer meets Nosferatu.
Genre: Horror/Action
Logline: An elderly shop owner in San Francisco’s Chinatown sacrifices himself to become a goeng-si–a Chinese hopping vampire–so that he can get revenge against the gangsters terrorizing his neighborhood.
About: Today’s script finished SECOND in the November Logline Showdown to The Mentor, losing to the therapy thriller by just a single vote!
Writer: Mark Steensland
Details: 95 pages
There were lots of fans of this logline. And since it was one of the more unique concepts I’ve seen on Logline Showdown, I had to review it.
72 year old Dai, a shop owner in Chinatown who sells special papers that you burn to connect with your ancestors, is running out of time. He’s got cancer of the lungs and it’s bad enough where he can’t hide it from his family anymore.
His granddaughter, 18 year old Susan, informs her father, Chen, and mother, Zhu, that grandad is ignoring his deteriorating health. Unfortunately, the family has other pressing issues to deal with. Three gangsters – Fang, Bin, and Ko – are demanding more money for “protection” of their shop. When Chen hems and haws, they slice his arm and say they’ll be back tomorrow.
The family tries to tell the cops but when Officer Poole comes by, he erases their security footage and encourages them to pay up. He’s obviously working with the gang. They’re all part of a bigger mafia outfit run by a dude named Han.
Dai realizes that, since he’s going to die anyway, he might as well go out with a bang. An old Chinese folk tale suggests that if you hold your breath while you’re dying, you turn into a goeng-si, a hopping vampire. So Dai confronts the gang and Officer Poole, forcing them to shoot him dead. He then holds his breath and turns into a hopping vampire.
Chen knows how the hopping vampire lore works. You can use something called a “fu” to place on their forehead to freeze them. This is what he does to his father. But Dai is still able to get away and kills the three gang members. This sets off a panic in Han’s operation except nobody inside the outfit can fathom that hopping vampires really exist.
When Susan recruits her boyfriend to take down the last member of the group – Officer Poole – she gets in over her head and Han kidnaps her. This forces Chen to make a trade with the mafia boss, a trade that will include an enraged Dai, who wreaks havoc on Han’s operation.
All us readers want is for you to give us a script that’s the same but different.
Is that too much to ask?
I, of course, ask this question tongue-in-cheek, because the age-old request is one of the most self-contradicting in existence. Nobody really knows what it means.
But if there was a concept that encapsulated this request, A Chinese Vampire Story would be it. We all know what vampires are. So that’s “the same” part. But we’ve never heard of a Chinese-hopping vampire. That’s the “different” part. Voila. You’ve now given Hollywood exactly what it wants.
The only catch is that “the different” part must be conceptually strong. I could make a romantic comedy with a fork and a spoon as the lead characters and call it “the same but different” but, conceptually, it’s too weird of a premise for anybody to care. So there is some nuance to this request. You have to find that “difference” that connects with the reader. A Chinese Vampire Story achieves that.
Kudos to Mark for doing something else I always say on this site: KEEP YOUR STORY SIMPLE. This script is as simple as it gets. Bad people are robbing struggling people of their hard-earned money and, therefore, we want to see them go down. That “going down” part comes in the form of a Chinese Hopping Vampire.
It’s not just the simplicity in the plot that I like. It’s the simplicity in how Mark gets the reader invested. One of the easiest ways to get readers invested is to stir up their emotions. You can do this in a positive way. You can do it in a negative way. However you do it, once we’re stirred up emotionally, WE CARE. If we care, we want to turn pages.
One of the easiest ways to stir up emotion is to create characters the reader likes then have bad characters take advantage of them. It’s such a simple formula yet so effective. When Fang, Bin, and Ko are stealing the hard-earned money of our struggling family, we are angry, and therefore committed, to seeing them go down.
Enter our Chinese Hopping Vampire. This is the script’s “strange attractor,” – the unique thing the reader is intrigued by and wants to learn more about. The Chinese Hopping Vampire attacks by hopping (obviously). All hopping vampires are blind. So they hunt by smelling peoples’ breath. Therefore, the only way to avoid an attack is to hold your breath.
The way to kill off a hopping vampire is to stuff sticky rice in their mouths. Which is how Chen kills Fang, Bin, and Ko when they become hopping vampires.
While I liked this script, I thought it could’ve done a few things better. For starters, we’ve got a main character problem. Who’s the main character here? It starts off being Dai. Then the implication is that it’s Susan. But then it’s Chen who commits to taking out the vampires. Then it’s Susan again, who wants to kill off the cop.
Yeah, you can call it an ensemble piece and jump from character to character if you want. But this feels like the kind of movie that needs an official lead. Go with Chen or Susan, whichever character you feel is more complex and interesting.
The biggest missed opportunity is not leaving one of the gang members (Fang, Bin, and Ko) alive as a hopping vampire. If you had a villain hopping vampire running around along with a ‘hero’ hopping vampire, there are more opportunities for things to get interesting, most notably having a vampire showdown at the end.
I also felt that Mark could’ve done more with the breath-holding stuff. I’m imagining a scene like the kids stuck in the kitchen with the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Put our characters in a similarly confined room with Fang the Hopping Vampire, and make them hold their breath for a full three minutes as he sniffs around. That scene writes itself.
Finally, the second half of the script isn’t as good as the first half and that can’t be the case. The script loses something when all the gang members are killed. I think the solution is to give Officer Poole a partner – so there are two bad guys we still want to kill after the gang members die. And, also, make the Chinese Mafia Boss a much bigger personality in the script. He’s our top dog and, supposedly, the guy we should want to kill the most. But we barely know him so we don’t care. He needs to be more present and more evil.
Having said all that, this is a movie. I have no doubt about it. The writer needs to put his foot on the gas more. But if he can do that, I see no reason why this script couldn’t sell.
Oh! One more thing. This script needs a cold open. Start 200 years ago and show a hopping vampire do something crazy in a shadowy sequence. Or show a murder scene and when they open the person’s mouth, it’s filled with sticky rice, which creates mystery going forward.
Script link: A Chinese Vampire Story
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful about killing the villains we hate the most too early in your script. Once we feel that satisfaction, we’re not as invested in the story. Either keep one of the thugs alive, make Poole a lot worse, or make the mafia boss the worst guy ever. That way we’re still highly engaged and want our heroes to take these guys down.
