The Blood & Ink Horror Script Contest is a unique screenplay contest where you had to earn your way into the contest with a good enough concept. I accepted just under 100 entries. Those writers had half a year to write their scripts. And now, the judging begins!
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: A killer space mold terrorizes a small town during their local cheese festival and threatens the lives of a food journalism intern and her cheesemonger-in-training ex-boyfriend.
About: You have until 11:59pm tonight (Tuesday) to get your Blood & Ink entry in. Now, let me remind you how this contest will work going forward. I’m going to read all the Blood & Ink scripts and then I’m going to review the Top 10, starting at 10 and working my way up, over the course of two weeks. When will this start? Optimistically, in 1 month. More realistically? 2 months. In the meantime, I may review a Blood & Ink script here and there on the site. I’m too excited not to! If these early reviews end up being Top 10 Worthy, the reviews will reappear during the Top 10 Review fortnight.
Writer: Eric Levin
Details: 85 pages
The Blood & Ink Contest is off and running!
Actually, some of these entries are running faster than I can keep up with. Which is a problem because they were never accepted in the first place!
Let me remind everyone that your concept needed to be accepted into the contest. It’s not an “anyone can enter” situation. That’s probably my fault for not being clearer about that but now it’s going to take some work to figure out and remember which concepts got accepted and which didn’t.
Because I know there were a good dozen or so concepts that I would not have accepted but they did get voted in via one of the other secret ways into the contest.
Okay, moving on to today’s script. This was one of the loglines that made me smile the brightest so I thought it would be a good one to start with.
20-something Bri and her ex-boyfriend, 20-something Mac, are headed to upstate New York because Bri is writing an article about the Finger Lakes Cheese Festival. She’s brought her ex along because he is a cheesemonger apprentice and can help her understand this world. If the article is good, she’ll be promoted to an official journalist at the paper.
What neither of them know yet is, not far from the festival, an alien meteorite has crashed into a farm and has started spreading killer mold. The only thing we know about this mold, early on, is that light kills it.
Bri and Mac immediately visit one of the many cheese farms in the area. That’s where they meet 20-something Lyla, who is excited that two big New Yorkers have come up to write about their little cheese festival. Later, they will run into Jason, Bri’s bad boy ex-boyfriend.
They get to the festival just as a lunar eclipse occurs and that gives the alien mold exactly three minutes to wreak its havoc. And boy does it take advantage. It eats up a good dozen people at the festival. Bri and Mac are able to escape to her farm. But the night is fast approaching. So, even though the eclipse is over, it’s only a matter of time before the mold strikes again.
Eventually, the mold is able to take form into an alien creature. The only way to stop this creature, apparently, is by singing to it. So Mac is able to save himself repeatedly by singing to mold monster just before he attacks. Meanwhile, Bri gets beamed up to an alien spaceship and learns from the piloting alien that he loves coming to planets and destroying them with his pet mold.
Somehow, Bri is going to have to escape this ship if she’s to save Mac, who’s been placed in a mold web by the mold monster. Apparently, Mac’s singing is only going to save him for so long. And it’s a long ways away from sunrise…
So??
How was our first Blood & Ink entry???
Here’s what I liked about The Mold. It’s an old school premise that delivers in an old school way. And it’s something you could see becoming a movie. These types of horror-comedy setups are perfect. They never die. And this is an original enough take on the sub-genre to stand out.
I loved the cheese stuff.
There’s something in screenwriting I like to call “doggy bag” moments. They are things you can teach the audience about your subject matter for them to “take home in a doggy bag.” There’s a lot of that here with the cheese. We go really in depth with how to make cheese early on and I felt like I learned a bunch.
I loved how Eric SHOWED instead of TOLD when it came to his mold rules. For example, when we see the mold first spread through the shade and see it hit a patch of sunlight, it instantly dies. Now we know that rule: the mold dies by sunlight.
A lot of times writers will get lazy and try to fit those rules in via dialogue. It’s always better if you show as opposed to tell. The reader understands the rules 100x better that way.
I also thought the setup was strong. I was gearing up for this cheese festival. I was curious what was going to happen. The script almost had this “Sideways” vibe to it, except that, instead of wine, we were dealing with cheese.
However, once the mold became a focus for the screenplay, the script lost something. All the specificity (about cheeses) was gone. A lot of what made the story feel original was gone. It essentially became “People run away from mold.”
And I know that’s the point. But that’s the challenge with writing a screenplay. You don’t just give us the obvious execution of the idea. You gotta figure out ways to make it exciting and dramatic and scary and entertaining. And not enough effort was put into making that happen.
There isn’t a single great mold kill in this movie. And there needs to be about five of them. They’re all pretty bland. Mold approaches. Person tries to get away from it. They fail. Mold overcomes them. That can’t be every single kill. There’s got to be more variety. There’s got to be more imagination.
But the real problem with the script is the main core of characters. No character had a flaw that was explored well. Brie kind of had this flaw where she leaves when things get tough. But, unlike the mold rules, this is told to us rather than shown to us, and therefore, it doesn’t stick.
The miss here was the Brie, Mac, and Lyla triangle. The way the dynamic should’ve been written is that Brie left Mac. She broke up with him for whatever reason you want to use. And the two are friends now but Mac is clearly still in love with her. And, originally, he’s hoping this trip will allow him to get her back.
But then they meet Lyla and Brie watches in dismay as Mac and Lyla have amazing chemistry together and, all of a sudden, she realizes she lost the prize. Now she’s trying to get him back but maybe Mac has finally moved on. What’s going to happen here?? That’s a much stronger character dynamic to play with.
The Jason stuff was weak and barely explained. A lot of it didn’t even make sense (Brie broke up with Mac because Jason destroyed her confidence several years earlier???). I don’t even know why you’d want Jason in this movie unless he’s a complete asshole who we’re rooting for to die.
The second half of the script shows a pretty steep dive in quality and, unfortunately, I’m expecting a lot of that from these entries. I talked about this in an article recently. We over-focus on our first acts and don’t put the same amount of time into the later parts of the script.
The stuff with the mold turning into a monster isn’t bad but needed a more natural build-up. The alien character felt like he was from a totally different movie. He was too wacky. He didn’t feel calibrated or tonally consistent with everything else.
Another big missing opportunity was the cheese! We spend the entire first 30 pages hyping up cheese. But then cheese never appears in the script again. It’s odd. I think that cheese should somehow be the only weapon to defeat the mold. Certain cheeses do better than others at holding it back. That way, all that setup can actually be paid off.
And I would’ve loved more time at the festival. More time meeting some of the wacky people who inhabit this cheese universe. I felt like we rushed past that.
But hey! That’s the great thing about screenwriting. You can rewrite and make the script better. Hopefully, Eric sees some value in the problems I’ve identified. If you want to prioritize, start with the characters. Nothing matters until that’s squared away. Better flaws for Brie and Mac and work that new love triangle. It’s going to make this so much better!
Script Link: The Mold
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to kill a bad person, get the most out of it by setting up that they’re a bad person! That’s half the fun! There’s a scene in the grocery store where the customers don’t know about the mold yet. And this woman comes rushing in and slams the door shut. When a customer wants to leave, she won’t let him go out there. He says, “I have places to be you crazy bitch,” pushes past her, goes outside, and is dead ten seconds later. You could’ve spent a page building this character up as an asshole. He’s being a dick to one of the workers. He’s calling the checker stupid for a mistake she made. NOW when that guy gets killed, we’re going to FEEL SOMETHING. That’s what you’re trying to do in scripts. Is make people feel something. If you rush past the setup of any character, even small ones, we won’t feel anything when they engage with your story.
For the first person who e-mails me the answer to this trivia question, I will give them super-discounted $199 script notes. What is the most famous spec script ever sold that had a strong focus on cheese?? E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you know the answer. Put “TRIVIA” in the subject line. NOBODY WRITE THE ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS UNTIL 2PM PACIFIC WEDNESDAY!
