Carson has never seen The Evil Dead. Until today!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends head out to a remote cabin where they inadvertently unleash a series of demons from the woods.
About: This was Sam Raimi’s first film! You know Raimi as the director of the original Spider-Man films, the director of Dr. Strange and the Lame Sidekick, and the guy who insists on wearing a tuxedo while he directs. The Evil Dead was one of the few horror movies before 2000 that actually got good reviews. The film was made for about 300,000 dollars and when it debuted, the master of horror, Stephen King, fell in love with it, becoming a huge advocate for the film.  Look down below.  They even quoted him in the poster!
Writer: Sam Raimi
Details: about 90 minutes long

I am about to blow your mind.

I’ve never seen The Evil Dead.

I can’t say why. It’s just one of those odd holes in my movie-watching history.

Let me tell you why I chose to watch it today, though. I looked it up online and saw that it wasn’t streaming anywhere. Which is impossible in 2022 – that a popular movie isn’t available for streaming.

I was annoyed but what was I going to do? Make the movie appear out of thin air? So I decided to watch John Carpenter’s “They Live” instead.

Holy moly in a hand-basket full of guacamole is that movie terrible. I’m talking late stage 4 send it to the hospice terrible. It does *not* hold up.

Which brought me back to The Evil Dead. The more I internalized the idea that I couldn’t have it, the more I wanted it. I’m not allowed to watch you?? Oh, we’ll see about that, Mr. Movie! Without going into too much detail, I took a trip into the bowels of the internet, got stuck in a Mongolian server, before shooting back up through the center of the earth holding a copy of Evil Dead autographed by the entire cast.

Which brings me to this moment.

I’ve seen The Evil Dead. Finally. A movie that, for long stretches of time, I believed was the same film as Army of Darkness. It’s time for my ignorance to end!

If you haven’t seen the film, five friends head up to a remote cabin. Ash, Cheryl, Linda, Joke-maker Scott, and Shelly. Ash and Linda are together. Scott and Shelly are together. Poor Cheryl is the fifth wheel. Ironically, she’s the most attractive of the bunch. Go figure!

On the way to the house, they cross a rickety old bridge, and arrive at their destination a few minutes later. They obviously didn’t plan this trip very well because they don’t seem to have anything to do. There’s no lake to swim in. Everyone forgot their cell phones. I don’t even think they brought beer. All they can do is sit in a tiny cabin and talk.

As night sets in, Cheryl thinks she hears something outside. So she goes outside to check on it because that’s what any rational person would do. While she’s out there, she’s attacked by the trees, which wrap her up and, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), try to impregnate her with tree sap. Maybe in the hopes of creating a little half-human half-tree baby. Luckily, she escapes before this tree malfeasance can happen.

Back at the cabin, she screams at Ash to drive her into town. She’s not staying here. But when the two get to the bridge, it’s collapsed. Cheryl knows why. The demon people want to keep them here all night.

Once back at the cabin, Cheryl turns into a full-on demon and, after an intense scuffle, they’re able to throw her down into the cellar and lock the floor hatch. Unfortunately, Shelly turns next. Then Ash’s girlfriend, Linda. And now it’s on like John and his fawn. Ash grabs an axe and does his best to fend everyone off. Stupid Scott, who ain’t cracking jokes anymore, is too injured to help.

From there, it’s blood city. There is a LOT of blood in this movie, which I guess is one of the reasons it’s famous? No entity dies without gobs and gobs of liquid shooting out of them in every which way. Gobs of blood our man Ash will have to endure if he’s to make it to sunrise!

I just have to say that for a good 20 minutes there, I was ready to unleash my rage upon horror fans everywhere. This movie is so beloved by so many people but if you watched just those first 20 minutes, you would think you were watching a movie directed by your pal, Gerry, who works nights down at the Gas and Pass.

I mean it was baaaaaaaad.

I’ll tell you the moment that changed for me, though.

It was when Cheryl went into the forest and was met with an unrequited romantic pursuit by the trees. I thought to myself, oh, okay, we may have something here.

And, really, the entire movie changed after that. It was like two different films. I don’t know what happened but everything about the production became more confident.

Unfortunately, like a lot of low-budget horror, the screenplay was clearly not a priority. Raimi put more effort into it than those guys over on the Friday the 13th production, but not much. I’m not even sure there was a single plot development, lol. It was just, demon lurks, demon possesses, possessed friend attacks, rinse and repeat.

And you know what? It works!

I can’t imagine trying to keep a narrative like that going for 90 minutes in just four rooms, though. And SMALL rooms, too. That living room was miniature. If you killed someone, their body was basically right next to you on the ground.

The biggest tell about the lack of a screenplay were the characters. It wasn’t clear who the hero was until the final third of the film, when Ash becomes the only un-possessed character left. But, before that, the guy was background noise. He was the least vocal character of the bunch.

It reminded me of “Alien,” in the way that Ripley was non-existent for the majority of the movie until she, essentially, became the last person left and then we had no choice but to anoint her as our main character. Ash was very much cut from the same cloth.

This movie sent me off on an intense journey to find that mythical answer to the question, what makes this movie work and 99% of its imitators fail? Because we’ve all seen the bad versions of Evil Dead. Heck, we saw the bad version OF Evil Dead, in the 2013 remake.

Why does this work and all those other movies not work?

Here’s my unscientific answer. The Evil Dead is infused with a rarefied energy – and that’s the energy of a group of people desperate to break in. They know that this was it for them. Very few people raise 300,000 dollars (over a million in today’s money), make a bad movie, and get another shot at it. You have to get it right.

And this movie feels like that to me. The energy throughout its second act is just as intense as any 300 million dollar Marvel movie you’ll see today. There’s something about desperation that supercharges an artist’s creativity.

I’ve watched so much content lately that has no heartbeat to it. Andor is a good example. It’s lifeless. It’s hard to make something come alive when you don’t have that 180 beats per minute energy pumping away like The Evil Dead did in its veins.

Is this a perfect movie? Definitely not. There were times when the production value was so poor that I was pulled out of the film. But, by and large, the movie works. And for that reason, I think it’s a great entry into the approved Scriptshadow Spooktacular Club!

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream (if you can find it!)
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You have a superpower that everyone working in the business right now does not have. And that’s your desire to succeed and make it in this business. If you can take that energy and place it in the DNA of your script, you can write something that feels way more alive than anything these dead-inside work-for-hire Hollywood writers are churning out right now!  I promise you that!

As someone who reads a lot of scripts – scripts of every level – I’m lucky enough to be one of the few people who will read a top level professional screenplay and then, just a few hours later, a script from a brand-new writer.

This allows me to study screenwriting from a unique perspective, as it allows me to see, almost in real time, the differences between pro level work and beginner level work.

I was doing a lot of that this week. Reading beginner scripts then professional scripts then beginner scripts again. And I kept encountering the same mistake over and over by the beginners. Which is that they don’t exhibit any quality control over their ideas.

They instead have something I call “I Can Do It Too” Syndrome.

“I Can Do It Too” Syndrome is an evil infectious virus that most beginners don’t realize they’re sick with. It’s the act of liking something from other movies so much that they want to show that they can do it too.

As I’ve stated before, almost every screenwriter’s motivation, whether they’re aware of it or not, is to rewrite the movies they fell in love with as kids and young adults. If they liked Star Wars, they want to write their big space opera epic. If they liked Die Hard, they want to write that big action thriller with a fun one-liner spitting protagonist. If they liked Step-Brothers, they’re determined to write a fun goofy two-hander comedy.

While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I can assure you that this syndrome is KILLING YOUR SCREENWRITING GAINS.

Because whether you realize it or not, every person who reads your script is comparing it to the movie you’re inspired by. And guess what? Your script is losing. You’re never going to write a similar movie to a classic movie and beat it. You’re never going to write a space epic better than Star Wars. You’re never going to write a movie about a guy trapped in a military base taken over by bad guys where he has to save his wife that’s better than Die Hard.

You are only going to fall short in the eyes of the readers. They’re going to read your script and whether they say it to your face or not, they’re thinking, “This is just a not-as-good ripoff of [whatever your favorite movie is].”

But for some strange reason – and I put myself in this category when I was starting out too – beginner writers are unable to see the similarities between their script and the movie they’re copying. To them, that movie was an *inspiration* for their script. It doesn’t matter that the main character is basically the same. It doesn’t matter that 75% of the set pieces are similar. It doesn’t matter that a lot of similar dialogue lines are used or that a lot of supporting characters seem eerily similar to that favorite movie of theirs. In their minds, it’s different *BECAUSE THEY WROTE IT*.

And that’s the big mistake. Assuming that because the story is coming from their fingertips as opposed to someone else’s, it can’t be mistaken for any other movie. The mere fact that they wrote it is what makes it unique.

But that’s not reality.

Readers have a very broad filter for what they consider “familiar.” They think way more scripts are familiar than different. That’s because there have been a lot of great movies over the years. So they’re always thinking, “This feels too much like The Exorcist.” “This feels too much like The 40 Year Old Virgin.” “This feels too much like The Hunger Games.”

I can assure you, one of the most common feelings a reader has is, “This script is just like [so and so].” And beginners are the most susceptible to this because they don’t yet know it’s a common problem and therefore don’t know to look out for it. Again, they think that the mere fact that they’re writing the movie means it will automatically be unique no matter what.

So, if you want to gradate into the intermediate level of screenwriting, one of the easiest ways to do so is to squash this mistake and never make it again. Cause if you’re writing original ideas with original execution, you’re ahead of 90% of the people out there.

How do you achieve this?

With an Idea Bouncer.

Your screenwriting brain is a club. Just like any other club, you need to be careful about who you let inside. That’s the bouncer’s job. He’s there to only let original ideas into your club. He has to screen every single idea that arrives and ask, “Is this original enough to come inside?”

You’re going to do this on two fronts. The first is the more important front – the concept itself. The good news is, if this is a strong highly original movie idea, it wards off a ton of potential problems down the line. An original movie idea can withstand a solid chunk of cliched choices. On the downside, if you let a bad movie idea into your club, there’s virtually no way to save the night.

The other front is all the individual creative choices within your script that need to populate the club (aka, your screenplay). This includes the main character. The supplemental characters. The plot developments. The setting. The tone. The scene choices. The set pieces. Every one of these choices must line up in front of the club and your bouncer needs to determine if they’re original enough to come inside.

The more unoriginal (or “familiar) ideas that get past your bouncer, the lower the probability that your script will feel unique, even if you have a unique concept. Because if you’re writing a bunch of scenes that I read all the time, that will neutralize your strong concept.

I can’t emphasize enough how big of a problem this is in screenwriting. I suppose I understand why new screenwriters make this mistake. You can’t prevent a mistake that you haven’t yet learned is a mistake. However, I cannot, under any circumstances, accept non-beginner screenwriters making this mistake. If you’ve written more than five scripts and you haven’t even hired an idea bouncer for your club yet, that’s unacceptable.

I’m bringing this up because I read tons of screenplays and most of them are boring due to the fact that the writer isn’t even trying to be original. They’re just repurposing their favorite movies and their favorite scenes under a new title and a slightly different story and thinking that’s going to do it. But these scripts are the easiest ones to dismiss because they’re uninspiring and forgettable.

Now, I realize this is an imperfect argument. Cause you can bring up The Equalizer and John Wick and say, “Those movies sure seemed familiar, Carson.” Yes, it’s true. They do.

But those movies are outliers. First off, The Equalizer doesn’t count cause that movie was being made in-house and hired a writer to do what they wanted. It wasn’t a spec. And John Wick was destined to be a straight-to-VOD-cemetery crap-fest until the directors repurposed it into a slick action flick with game-changing fight choreography.

Let’s not forget that everyone in town not only passed on the John Wick script, they laughed at it. And while that may sound like they were the ones who made the mistake, it’s pretty hard to look at that script before the film and think, “Yup, this is going to be a billion dollar franchise.”

Point being, you can’t use the most successful outliers in history as an excuse for why your script gets to be cliched. You’re operating as a one-man or one-woman business and that business is your screenplay. It’s got to speak for itself. Which means your idea bouncer has to be the most discerning in the business. He’s got to be the bouncer who’s looking at that 9 out of 10 but not letting her in because her outfit looks like it was cobbled together at the Salvation Army.

I want you guys to take this seriously. I want your bouncer to have an extremely high bar. I want you to give him a name. I want you to share that name in the comments. I want you to give him a backstory. You can share that too if you want. Heck, I want you to give him an accent and tell me which actor is going to play him in his biopic. I want him to feel as real as yourself. Because he’s got one of the most important jobs in the world – he’s quality control over your ideas. He needs to be hard on those ideas because I can guarantee you, we, the reader, are going to be a thousand times harder on them than him.

Now go write something original and great.

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: After an introverted college kid gets together with a pessimistic strange young woman, the two visit her father’s old home, where many secrets lie below the surface.
About: One of the most prolific writers in the screenwriting business, Zahler, wrote this one in 2005. He would eventually turn it into an audio-story, in the hopes of improving his chances of getting a film adaptation. The audio story got some pretty big-time actors in Vincent D’Onofrio, Will Patton, and Kurt Russell’s son, Wyatt, playing the lead. But, as of today, it still hasn’t been turned into a film.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 95 pages

Lili Simmons played the role of Ruby in the Narrow Caves audio book

The man still has one of my favorite scripts of all time in my Top 25 list (Brigands!). So I’m always excited to read one of his screenplays.

Plus, this is probably the shortest script he’s ever written! So how could I resist?

It’s 1981. 21 year old Walter finds himself at a party he doesn’t want to be at. That’s where he meets Ruby, a girl who doesn’t want to be there either. But in her case, she lives at the house. So she parks herself in the backyard, away from everyone, and reads a book all night.

Walter sees her and makes a move but she stiff-arms him. Determined to try again, Walter shows up the next day, pretending he left something there and gets rejected a second time! But later Ruby has second thoughts and calls him to go on a date.

Cut to six months later and they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. Ruby finally wants Walter to meet her father, who lives in the middle of nowhere. So off they go, and right away, Walter’s kind of put off by this guy. He seems a little weird.

During their stay, Ruby tells Walter about some strange experiences she had growing up in the area, including occasionally seeing mysterious naked men running around. After Walter finds an old diary of Ruby’s dad’s, he becomes really creeped out by this place and wants to leave.

However, that night, both of them are knocked out and kidnapped by a group of albinos. When they wake up, they’re in some cave. The albinos bring a strange disgusting fruit and make Ruby eat it. Over the course of the next two weeks, Ruby loses all of her teeth and hair, likely because of this death cave fruit.

On the brink of death himself, Walter gets a final reprieve when Ruby’s dad shows up and cuts him loose. He’s too late to save his daughter, though, who killed herself. The dad then inexplicably abandons Walter, forcing him to find a way out of this hellhole himself.

You’ve never read anything like this before.

I mean, you sort of have.

You’ve read about people going to a remote location and encountering danger. But the danger introduced into this story isn’t quite like any you’ve seen before. That ends up being the script’s biggest strength and biggest weakness.

One of the things I take for granted these days is how well I understand structure. Cause I just assume everyone else understands it as well as I do.

To me, structure is obvious.

The first 25% of a script is your beginning, aka your setup. The next 50% of your script is your middle, aka where all the conflict happens, and the last 25% is your ending, aka your resolution.

There are smaller markers to meet within those sections, but that’s pretty much it.

The reason structure is important is because it’s the most satisfying way to hear a story. When someone tells you a story, even if it’s just about their day, it works best if that person sets up the scenario, then tells you all the crazy stuff that happened to them, and then wraps things up with a big satisfying conclusion.

It doesn’t work nearly as well if someone sets up their day in a quick 5 seconds, then spends the next 20 minutes telling you what happened, then rushes through the resolution, spitting it out in 15 seconds.

The story feels off somehow, even for those unfamiliar with storytelling.

So these story beats are important because they exist within a framework that the receiver is familiar with.

My big issue with this script is that the first act is basically the first 60% of the screenplay (meet everyone, from Ruby to her father to her brothers to the home they stay at). Then we get our second act, which is the next 30% of the screenplay (kidnapped by the cave people), and then the final act is the last 5% of the screenplay (his escape).

When you read it, it feels lopsided.

Now, does this mean you should be a slave to structure? No. Of course not. Good writers should play with structure. But there has to be a good reason for it. Any altering of traditional structure has to feel like an organic extension of the story. 500 Days of Summer played with structure in that it jumped into different random days of the relationship. However, the chaos of that structure was baked into the concept.

Here, it feels like this should’ve been a traditionally told story. That’s why the extreme structural issues feel so off. This isn’t the kind of movie you do that with.

I’m assuming a few of you will have the following question: Why wouldn’t the moment Walter and Ruby head to her house, on page 27, be the beginning of the second act? Why am I saying that the second act doesn’t start until they’re stuck in the cave, on page 60?

Because whatever the big hook of your movie is, that needs to be the beginning of the second act. If you write Jurassic World, you better brace for a riot from ticket buyers if you don’t get to Jurassic World until minute 60. You gotta get there at the end of your first act, if not sooner.

The hook here are these cave people who kidnap them. So that’s gotta happen much earlier in the story.

Now, of course, all of this is debatable. There are no official rules when it comes to storytelling. But read this script and tell me its pacing doesn’t feel lopsided. It does. And that’s directly because of the structural issues.

Which is too bad because I think this script had a lot of potential. Zahler has come up with some really weird creepy creatures and he’s got an elaborate mythology backing up their history.

On top of that, Zahler continues to kick butt in the specificity department of script description. He’s one of the best at bringing you into scenes, scenarios, situations, and entire screenplays.

He paints really vivid worlds that make us feel like we’re there.

And he started off great with Walter and Ruby. Ruby was tough in an organic way (and not how female characters are written these days – tough because the climate demands it) and I really enjoyed how Walter and Ruby got together. It was romantic yet truthful. It felt like Zahler really knew these characters.

But after that, Ruby loses her gusto. I don’t know what happened but she becomes a passenger throughout the rest of the script and I was baffled by it because I liked her so much when I met her. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. Don’t just give your characters snazzy memorable opening scenes. Keep that personality blazing for the rest of the movie.

Characters who are passive and neutral are rarely interesting. Movie characters need to be polarized somehow. They should be either really intense negative or really intense positive. Because those extremes are where personalities shine. Nobody knows anyone who has a great middle-of-the-road personality. I wanted Zahler to take both of these characters up a notch.

Narrow Caves is a mixed bag. I would say if you’re a Zahler fan like me, definitely check it out. If you’re a horror fan, you might like it cause of the unique nature of its creepiness. But as a screenplay, the structural issues were too much to overcome.

Screenplay link: Narrow Caves

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Sometimes when we’re describing a situation, we can get caught up in trying to be “Writers” with a capital “W.” So, for example, let’s say we’re writing a heavy dinner scene with four characters. We might write, “Joe has an intense look of consternation in his deep-set eyes while Fran is fraught with anxiety yet doing her best to hide it. Nick shares a glance with Sara, the two of them plagued with the residue of a long week of too much work and not enough sleep.” Granted, Zahler is susceptible to this over-describing. But there was one line he wrote in a scene similar to this that I thought was perfect. He sets up that the people are sitting at the table then he writes: “Nobody looks happy.” Those three words did more for me understanding this scene than the 40 words I wrote above. Just remember with screenwriting, less is usually more. And a clear succinct description is usually more effective than a long lumbering one.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends get together in a remote cabin but their weekend of partying comes to an abrupt halt when a crazed woman wearing a broken ankle chain shows up at their door.
About: Today’s script comes from a new writer who made last year’s Black List with this script. The Unbound finished with 7 votes. For those of you wondering where the script would finish on my 2021 Black List re-ranking, I’d probably say around 48th, right behind Carriage Hill.  So at about the same place where it was officially ranked.
Writer: Sam West
Details: 125 pages

The horror madness continues!

And when I say madness, I mean madness!

Today’s script started off like Friday the 13th and ended like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it possible for a script like that to work? Read on to find out, my hombres!

20-something Philly resident, Rachel, has had an unfortunate year. She’s lost both her parents. Therefore, she’s reconnecting with some old friends in the Catskills to get back into the world.

Her former best friend, Margot, is waiting for her at the bus station with Jay, Margot’s brother and an almost-once-flame of Rachel’s. The two have some sexual chemistry but Rachel’s still mad at Jay for ditching her when her mom got sick.

Margot and Jay drive Rachel up to a cabin in the mountains. This is where we meet financial bros Jimmy (fat) and Hunter (country club). We also meet Margot’s sorority sisters, Nicki and Brooke.  Everyone’s drinking and getting ready for a meteor shower.

Finally, we meet Greg, Margot’s current boyfriend and the man she’s probably going to marry. Unofficially, Margot is looking for Rachel’s approval on Greg. Which she’s probably not going to get. Let me explain.

Late that first night, a decrepit woman in a broken ankle chain shows up at their door looking for help. Greg tells everyone he’ll deal with it. But then after he takes the woman into a private room, she ends up dying.

Rachel is veryyyyyyyy suspicious of this and lets everyone know it. After taking a quick walk to cool down, Rachel comes back to see that the house is on fire! She rushes upstairs to save Margot but Margot’s throat is slit. Huh?

Once back outside, everyone huddles together, trying to figure out what happened until, FWIT, an arrow pierces through Hunter’s face. And then also Brooke. Everybody runs into the forest, which, by the way, is freezing.

Once they get far enough away, Jay takes charge, convinced he can get them to a fire tower about a day’s walk away. But will they make it there before Crazy Greg catches up to them and arrows them all to death? Oh, and is Greg even their biggest problem out here? Might there be something bigger they must worry about??

When you read a lot of scripts, you start to see patterns.

Those patterns almost always result in certain outcomes. Sometimes they don’t. But usually they do. So when you see these red flags, an internal groan echoes within you because you know that the next 100 pages probably aren’t going to be very good.

What are these flags?

126 pages for a horror script? That’s a gigantic red flag.

A protagonist who melodramatically lost BOTH her parents, one to cancer and one to suicide? Huge red flag.

A meteor shower as your blanket “reason things start going crazy” device? That’s become one of the most cliched provocations for “crazy things start happening” I’ve come across over the last five years. I’m always seeing meteor showers in scripts.

Horror pages with this much text on them? Another big red flag.

Horror needs to be one of the easiest genres to read. There should be virtually zero effort on the reader’s part to make it through pages.

This was the opposite. It felt like you had to work to get through the pages. And that’s a screenwriting sin. As soon as if feels like work to the reader, you’re a crashed meteor.

Does that mean The Unbound is bad?

“Bad” would be an unfair adjective to describe the script.

Let me try to explain my frustrations with it, though. There are typically two types of horror movies. There’s the horror movie where a clear rule-set is introduced that the audience understands and, therefore, they can participate in and enjoy.

For example, zombies. We know the rules of zombies. You get bit, you turn into a zombie. It’s one of the reasons the genre is so successful.  The rules are so easy to understand.  Same thing with vampires. You get bit you turn into a vampire, you live forever, you crave blood. A little more complex but still easy to understand.

The second type of horror setup is when the writer comes up with a blanket provocation for horror that has no rules, and therefore anything and everything is allowed.

Writers, especially younger writers, love this because it allows them to basically introduce any horror scare they can think of. It’s like an endless playground of options to choose from. But, as a reader, or an audience member, these scripts feel like one gigantic slop-fest. Because without a rule-set, there is no logic to the horror. As a result, it always feels messy.

Here we have a meteor shower, a guy who hunts people down with arrows in the woods, we have our heroine being transported to another plane of existence, we have our characters running into mirror versions of themselves, but the mirror versions are dead.

I suppose if I was 16, I wouldn’t care as much about the shaky logic. But even when I was younger, I could tell the difference between a movie where the writer understood his mythology and crafted a really thoughtful story and the writer who just kind of made things up as they went along.

That’s what The Unbound felt like.

I think writers believe this wacky crazy approach makes their script unique. But it doesn’t. Because wacky crazy rule-less stories have their own cliches. I would’ve bet one my legs that they were going to end up walking in circles and appearing right back where they started. And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.

Because when writers don’t take the time to come up with rules and to really think about how the horror in their story operates, they lean on crutches. They lean on cliches. So if we’re in a forest, of course we’re going to end up where we started and everyone’s going to have a discussion about how “THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” – “There’s no way we could’ve ended up back here.”

I tell you, I read this stuff ALLLLL THE TIIIIIIME.

You need to do better.

You can’t trick screenwriting. There are no shortcuts. There are no backdoors.

Writing a story where you yourself don’t really understand what’s going on, and sort of hoping that the reader makes sense of your lack of effort. That is the surest way to a lousy script.

What’s interesting is that the writer does attempt to put together a character group we care about. After yesterday’s film (Friday the 13th), it was like walking into Bizarro World in how extensively we were getting to know these characters and their backstories. The first 40 pages is all character set up.

But that’s still a lesson to be learned. You can’t just take care of one area of your script. Scripts need every area to be solid. The concept, the characters, the plot, the mythology, all of it. If any section is neglected, the script feels weak.

Now, I admit that there are people out there who like these sort of vague mythology canvases, I guess because they like doing the work and filling in the logic gaps themselves. It’s why people like 2001. But I’ve always considered that film to be an outlier. When you don’t have a logical narrative and the movie works, that’s literally one of the hardest things to accomplish in storytelling. It can’t be replicated.  Just ask Richard Kelly post Donnie Darko.  I suppose, however, if you liked 2001, this is exploring similar territory, albeit through horror instead of sci-fi. If you like that sort of thing, you might like this script.

For me, I need logic. And I need to feel like the screenwriter understands every single part of his screenplay. I did not feel that here.

Screenplay link: The Unbound

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Horror scripts do need atmospheric writing. But don’t let the atmosphere take priority over the pacing. Even horror scripts that have slow builds need to move. There is no reason for your first big plot point – the girl with the ankle chain showing up – to happen 43 pages into the story. That needs to happen by page 30 at the latest. But I’d argue it should probably come at page 15. And there’s no reason that a horror script should be 125 pages. Absolutely none. Learn to shave your prose, get rid of scenes that aren’t pushing the story forward. And just, overall, it’s a screenplay, so lean into the philosophy: “less is more.”

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of camp counselors prepping a previously closed down summer camp are hunted down, one by one, by a mysterious killer.
About: Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham loved the title “Friday the 13th” so much that, even though he hadn’t made the movie yet, he put a giant ad in Variety with the title and the sentence, “The scariest movie ever made,” just to see what would happen. Everyone immediately started calling him, wanting in. He eventually made the film independently and Paramount bought it. They released the film in May of 1980 and the rest is history.
Writer: Victor Miller
Details: 95 minutes long

I’ve never seen a studio sneakier than Universal this weekend.

They made sure NOBODY on the planet knew that Halloween Ends was playing for free on Peacock Streaming. I follow this industry obsessively and I didn’t even know until I opened up Peacock and saw it there.

I think Hollywood needs to have a discussion with itself about these reboots. I understand rebooting a movie. That works for me. Especially if it’s happening after a long layoff and they bring back the characters from the original movie that we love. That makes sense.

I also understand that if a brand new movie does well, creating a trilogy out of it. Everybody likes to see those characters on the first movie come back for more adventures.

What doesn’t make sense is this trend of combining the reboot strategy with the trilogy strategy. The whole reason we were so excited to see the reboot was for nostalgic purposes. We wanted to revisit those beloved characters after 20+ years. That all goes away if you make a sequel to that reboot two years later, and another one right after that.

Even if you only brought back the franchise and not the original characters, like they did with the original Jurassic World movie, the nostalgia factor has been neutralized by the time the second movie comes out. Which means that the second and third films in the trilogy feel, not just unnecessary, but downright irritating. We’re sitting there asking, “Why are you still making us watch this?? There’s zero reason for it to exist!”

Ah, but then the market laughs at me, pointing out that Halloween 3 just made 45 million dollars. I don’t begrudge the series for making money. You get yours. Especially when you have a movie that’s named after a holiday and you debut it two weeks before that holiday. There may not be a surer bet in the business.

But I mean, come on. Halloween Ends looks so bad that I’m not even going to watch it for free on Peacock. My time is too valuable.

With that said, Halloween inspired this weekend’s Horror Re-Watch. Back in the day, there were two masked horror characters that ruled the roost. They were Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. I’ve already reviewed the original Halloween on the site. So I went back and watched the original Friday the 13th this time.

If you haven’t seen Friday the 13th, it takes place at a summer camp called Crystal Lake. A group of teenage counselors have shown up to help get the place in shape for the impending camp.

The group includes the smartest girl of the bunch, Alice. The wily Ned. The eager Annie. Kevin Bacon, who was in every single 80s movie ever made, plays Jack. You also have Marci, Bill, and Brenda.

The teenagers are really horny so they spend more time swimming in the river than actually doing work. Once the night comes, so do the hormones, and the group splits up to hook up.

That’s, of course, when things get ugly. A killer is walking around the premises, looking for excuses to use his knife. He usually stabs his targets but sometimes gets creative, going so far as to shoot them full of arrows. We never see the killer because we’re always in his POV.

Eventually, everyone’s dead except for Annie. And when the previous camp runner’s wife shows up (spoiler), Annie thinks she’s safe. Until the woman reveals that her name is Mrs. Voorhees and her son was drowned here 20 years ago because counselors were too busy having hanky-panky to pay attention to him. And now she’s here for revenge! Annie must fight the crazy beeeyatch off and escape Camp Crystal Lake.

The thing about Friday the 13th is that it was blatantly inspired by Halloween. Halloween had just come out in 1978 and was a big hit. Friday the 13th said, “We can do that.” And they were right, as the film was also a big hit.

How close were the two franchise in their battle for eyeballs? About as close as you can get. Halloween made 213 million dollars at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Friday the 13th made 216 million dollars, adjusted for inflation.

So what did I think of the film?

Man, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts.

What I loved about the movie was the spirit in which it was made. The original Friday the 13th is the definition of getting a bunch of people together and making a movie for no money, figuring out the myriad of production challenges along the way, and just getting it done no matter what.

The movie is stripped bare of any level of sophisticated production and it definitely hurts the final product. The acting is so stilted at times, you get the sense they only had time for one take with every setup.

I think the thing that most disappoints me though is the writing. I would go so far as to guess they didn’t have a screenplay. I’m not exaggerating. There was ZERRROOOOO story here. The only times when it felt like something was written was the beginning, when they got all of the characters to the camp, and the ending, where they had to wrap things up.

Let me tell you an easy way to identify when there’s no script. When you set things up that you don’t pay off. So there’s this scene early on where the guy who’s running the camp tries to convince Annie to stay on longer. He then touches her hair in a creepy way before she heads off to get her work done. This moment gets a lot of attention yet is never paid off at any point. It was just some random one-off moment.

From there, it was a series of scenes where you isolated characters and waited for the killer to strike. There was literally ZERO thought put into these scenes. It was shocking, to be honest. I thought, “Wow, they didn’t even try here.”

But then I put myself back into my 13 year old brain and realized why this worked. There were two lines of suspense pulling every scene forward. One, your inherent teenage desire to see nakedness. And two, waiting for the killer to strike. Every scene was pulling double duty in that sense and, although the strategy is simple, it’s a very effective strategy for a 13 year old audience.

There was one big creative chance the movie took which paid off.  Friday the 13th looked at that classic opening Michael Myers sequence (where Michael, as a child, kills his sister in POV) and said, “What if we did that the entire time?”

So our killer is only presented in first person POV all the time. We never see him. And this was an effective way to deal with the killings. Because it didn’t just heighten the kills, it kept this mystery going. Who was the killer??

That leads me to the ending which was shocking for a couple of reasons. Spoilers, of course. For one, I couldn’t believe that Jason wasn’t the killer! That it was his mom! They went full on with their inspirations, as the mom is some weird half mom half version of Jason, who’s in her head or something, making her kill people for questionable reasons. It was like a reverse “Psycho.” I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the choice. But it’s hard to be scared of an older lady killer who probably couldn’t last seven minutes on the treadmill.

But the biggest shock was that there was no mask!!!!! There was no hockey mask!! I chose this movie specifically to see that iconic hockey-masked murdering psychopath and I didn’t even get the mask!

So, if anyone wants to add a new question to their movie trivia archive, that question is, “When was the hockey mask introduced into the Friday the 13th franchise?” The answer is: NOT IN THE FIRST MOVIE.

Finally, the film has one last stand-out moment. Our heroine, Alice, has escaped the crazed Mrs. Voorhees and paddled down the river all night to safety and the sun is finally rising and the safe music is playing and we’re finally able to breathe and then JASON FREAKING VOORHEES THE KID SHOOTS OUT OF THE WATER and grabs her, pulling her into the lake.

That moment brought me back to the first time I watched the film and I remember the visceral reaction I had to it. It helped make the movie memorable. But then it turns out it was just a nightmare. Which was not cool. I wish writers would stop doing that in horror films.  Oh, that’s right. They didn’t have a writer.

Friday the 13th looks like it would’ve been a blast to make. Sometimes I think about taking a month off and just going and making a low-budget horror film because they look so fun. With that said, I can’t recommend any movie that doesn’t have a screenplay.  This is a screenwriting site for Heaven’s sakes!  To do so would be blasphemy!

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Suspense is an extremely powerful tool in the horror genre. This movie, which didn’t even have a screenplay, spawned a billion dollar franchise. How did it do this? Behold the power of putting people in danger and drawing out the suspense of when the danger is going to strike. It’s such an effective tool that it alone was able to power an entire feature-length narrative.