Taking a look at the 5 best concepts in The Blood & Ink Showdown

(Today’s article references pitching for the Blood & Ink Showdown. If you want to learn more about the showdown, here’s the original post).

Now that the fun of pitching horror concepts is behind us, the hard work begins. Many of you wondered what I meant when I said that, by receiving a “YES” from me, the writer would also receive “special treatment.” What is this special treatment you speak of, Carson?

What it means is that I’m going to be taking a more active interest in the development of these five concepts, since they are my favorite concepts pitched to me. Part of that will be featuring the concepts in articles, like today. But I also plan to check in with the writers and, with what time I have available, help guide them when I can.

So, what I want to do today is lay out all five concepts and, based on my experience reading so many screenplays, talk about 1) where these ideas can go wrong and 2) how to get the most out of the ideas. Also, since I know some of the scripts I choose for these showdowns confuse writers, I will tell you exactly why I chose each script.

Let’s get to it, shall we!?

Title: And All The Sinners Saints
Logline: After her family is murdered by the mob, a religious woman lets herself become possessed by a demon in order to get revenge.

Why I chose it: The main thing I’m prioritizing when choosing concepts is whether I can realistically see a path for them to become a movie. The road towards a produced film is riddled with hundreds of obstacles. So, the more clearly a concept is as a movie, the easier it will be to overcome those obstacles. And All The Sinners Saints is the highest ranking Blood & Ink concept based on that criteria. It’s one of those no-brainer ideas. But what really sets it apart is the interesting choice the main character is making at the heart of the story. She’s risking harming herself in order to achieve her goal. Journeys are always more captivating when the main character must pay a tax in order to achieve the objective. The higher the stakes are attached to that tax, the more powerful the story engine will be. Which is this idea in a nutshell.

Where it can go wrong: These concepts fall apart when they choose a generic path. Action scripts can be the most boring scripts to read because 70% of the writing is about running, dashing, ducking driving, shooting, fighting – just really boring monotonous scenes to read. You’re obviously going to have to incorporate some of these things into your action script. But it shouldn’t be page 1 to page 110. Try to be thoughtful with your action scenes instead of writing 30 scenes that we’ve seen in every other action movie.  The more I feel that a writer has thoughtfully crafted an action scene (the setting is unexpected, every character in the scene wants something, there’s some x-factor that we don’t typically encounter in an action scene), the more readable that scene becomes.

How to do this concept right: There are two main things you must focus on getting right. 1) Make the main character easy to root for. The whole dead wife and dead dog thing in John Wick was cheap but it did the job of making us sympathetic to him. Once you have that, you need FIVE SET PIECES that COULD ONLY HAPPEN IN YOUR SPECIFIC MOVIE AND NOT IN ANY OTHER ACTION MOVIE. In other words, your set pieces must focus on what is unique to your concept, which is this girl who’s willingly possessed. In other words, if you have a choice between stealing the famous Daredevil hallway fight set piece, and a set piece in a giant church during mass, choose the latter. The former could occur in any movie. A church fight scene is specific to this subject matter.

Title: Bite After Bite
Logline: From bite to bite, we follow the zombie infection as it spreads – each victim’s story unfolding from the moment they’re bitten to when they pass it on.

Why I chose it: I said the main criteria I used in judging ideas was how realistically I could imagine them becoming movies. BUT. I only said that was the “main” criteria. I didn’t say it was the only criteria. About 10% of the entries I picked because they felt different. They’re not your typical movie. I knew Bite After Bite was not a slam dunk. It’s a risky premise. But it reminded me of those mid-90s indie films where filmmakers were taking more risks. And that was exciting to me.

Where it can go wrong: Scripts like this can go wrong quite easily, actually. The second you move away from a single protagonist hero’s journey, you’re flying blind regarding structure. And without structure, screenplays fall apart quickly. Because without a clear objective pushing the narrative forward (kill Thanos), stories can easily wander. That’s going to be the biggest challenge by far.

How do to do this concept right: What I would do is create structure in the form of eight sequences. You don’t have the clear GSU formula working for you. But, if you break things down into eight 12-page sequences, each following someone getting bit then gradually turning, then becoming a zombie on the hunt for its next bite, you’ll get back some of that structure you lost. From there, you want to tell 8 different stories within those 8 different zombie turns. They should all feel different. For example, in one, it’s a mom inside her house with her children. We know she’s turning and will be a threat to her kids soon, but she’s in denial about it. Dad is on the way home but will he get there in time to save his kids when she turns? Then the next is a zombie who’s walking through the neighborhood. In other words, his story is completely different from the story of the mom in her house. And I would treat them each like individual 12-page mini-movies. And, of course, there should be some twists and turns along the way.

Title: Black House
Logline: When the President’s increasingly erratic behavior brings the United States to the brink of nuclear war, a young White House correspondent becomes convinced the most powerful man in the world must be forced into an exorcism.

Why I chose it: This one felt like a movie the second I read it. It’s big. It’s high concept. This is the kind of script that would’ve sold for a million bucks twenty minutes after it was sent out back in 1996. And while these ideas don’t have the same cachet as they used to, big ideas still get lots of interest. And I love new takes on old ideas that raise the stakes considerably. The Exorcist was a great movie but the stakes were local. Here, the stakes are enormous. The president could be leading the world into a nuclear war. That’s as high stakes as it gets.

Where it can go wrong: It’s pretty clear where movies like this can go wrong. If you lean too hard in either political direction, you lose half your readers. But that’s okay because it should be easy to not make this political. Anytime you have an outside threat – in this case China (or Russia, if you prefer) – the country tends to unite. So as long as you’re focusing on that and not hot button political topics, you should be fine.

How to do this concept right: I was thinking a lot about how to execute this story. And I realized, you can’t just jump into the possessed crazy nuclear-weapons button-pushing insanity right away. There needs to be a lot of build-up, just like the original Exorcist, which, if you go back and watch it, you’ll be shocked at how much setup there is with her becoming possessed before they bring in a priest. And the way I think I would do this is to have the story focus on a young priest’s assistant. The threat of nuclear war with China is increasing by the day. The main priest liaison to the White House comes in for a publicity photo shoot with the president. He’s going to bless him and pray for peace. But, while there, the assistant priest (who’s a bit of an unorthodox modern priest) notices some things are off about the president. He shares with his boss afterwards that he thinks the president may be possessed. And this starts a chain of events where major religious figures in the area secretly get together and discuss if this could be true. Most aren’t buying it but the young priest is insistent.  They come to the conclusion that they need more information. This needs to be handled delicately. So they want to first interview the president. Ask him some questions to covertly find out if he’s possessed. This is complicated by the fact that some people in the White House aren’t at all religious and they have no interest in letting this happen. But the point is, they have to work their way up to confirm that he is possessed and then, once they think he is, they have to perform the exorcism, which is its own shitshow in getting approved. And it’s just a night of total chaos.

Title: RED SHIFT
Logline: His first night on the job, a paramedic must contend with the reality that the city he is working is on the brink of a zombie outbreak, and the patient he’s got in the back of his van is ground zero.

Why I chose it: To me, the most exciting part of any zombie movie is the initial outbreak. That’s where all the chaos is. That’s where you get all the fun stuff. So by constructing a concept that allows you to play exclusively in that period is exciting. But what took the idea over the top was creating this specific job we see the outbreak through: the paramedic. You can create so many fresh movie ideas just by changing the point of view of how we’re watching the story unfold. Rushing around in an ambulance during a zombie outbreak is an extremely exciting angle to tell this story from.

Where it can go wrong: Funny enough, I did not like part of this logline. I never resonated with the patient in his ambulance being patient 0. I just don’t see how that makes the story better. Who cares who patient zero is in the middle of a chaotic zombie outbreak? Patient zero isn’t going to help you now. I bring this up because I want to remind everybody who writes a logline not to think you’re beholden to it. That’s just your starting point. It is not written in stone. If you can come up with a better main character or a better goal for the story, I don’t care if those things conflict with what you originally conceived. You should always make the choices that are best for your screenplay and sometimes those ideas come to you long after you’ve written the logline.

How to do this concept right: Of the five concepts that received a yes, this one should be the easiest to write (no pressure!). I say that because this concept comes with a cheat code. You can create the next bit of story momentum whenever you want by simply injecting a new dispatch. The operator tells him where he needs to go next and then it’s a race to get there, as the outbreak is worsening. And the drama will come from each dispatch being harder to execute than the last. I also suspect that, at some point, he’s going to be placed on a run for a high-profile person needing assistance. And that will be the hardest run of all.

Title: IT’S THE WORST TIME OF THE YEAR
Logline: Two successful, single businesswomen from the big city get trapped in a Hallmark movie nightmare where it’s always fall — but weirdly somehow also always Christmas. They’re forced to open a bakery, enter the pie contest, solve the weekly town murder, and date the impossibly hot plaid-wearing widower — all while trying to find a way to escape before increasingly aggressive townspeople trap them in this hellscape, force them to give up their lives and drink pumpkin spiced lattes….forever.

Why I chose it: This is the most interesting concept in the entire competition, in my opinion. That’s not to say it’s a slam dunk. This is a unique take on a horror film and that means it may not work. But if the writer executes it well, it could be genius. I’ll tell you the exact part of the logline that gave me the hope it could achieve that. It was this part: “…but weirdly somehow also always Christmas.” That line tells me that the writer understands the world of Hallmark movies on a microscopic level. Because that’s exactly what they’re like. They want the best of both worlds – the cozy fall stuff for the romance and then Christmas for the family conflict and something to build the climax around.

Where it can go wrong: When you have unique ideas, you have to be willing to take more risks with those ideas. Because the worst thing you can do when you have a weird idea is to execute it in an obvious, predictable fashion. I will give you some ideas below for the script but I don’t trust those ideas because it only took me one minute to come up with them. You should be spending hours thinking about the directions in which you could take this. And push yourself to explore avenues that the average writer wouldn’t have thought of.

How to do this concept right: I would start by asking the writer, why does it have to be two businesswomen? Shouldn’t it be a man and woman who work at the same company who are here on a business trip, who aren’t attracted to each other at all, but maybe that romance grows over the course of the movie? That way you’d have a real relationship to compare to all these fake manufactured cheesy Hallmark relationships. Or, if you want to go darker, maybe they’re both in separate relationships but cheating on their spouses. That way, they’re also in contrast with the perfect smiling happy couples in Hallmarkville. As for the plot, it should be easy to pull off. Your heroes have a goal: To get out of this. But they have to work within the Hallmark movie structure, which is classic generic screenplay structure (everything is leading up to the big town Christmas dance). And you would somehow set it up so that, if that Christmas dance comes and goes, they’re stuck here forever. So, they need to find a way out before that dance.

Curious to hear your thoughts on where these writers should take their scripts. All ideas welcome!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a psychiatrist and his sickly wife travel to their country cabin for a quiet Thanksgiving weekend, they will have to deal with an unexpected visit from one of his patients, who claims his dead twin brother is after him for revenge.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dani Feito
Details: 113 pages

(note: I strongly encourage you to read this script before reading the review. This is a spoiler-heavy screenplay).

A funny thing happened when I went through the loglines on the 2024 Black List to see what to review today. There isn’t a single logline on that list that’s better than the top 75 loglines in the Blood & Ink Showdown.

My bar for loglines has risen considerably after this month. And everything on the Black List is just so tame in comparison to what we were able to generate for the Blood & Ink Contest. So, good on you guys.

The reason behind my decision to read this script is that I like these setups. I like when people are in a remote area and you throw some potentially dangerous x-factor character into the mix. I love the psychological games that are played in those early parts of the screenplay, before all has been revealed. I like that you can take advantage of dramatic irony, choosing which information to share with the reader before sharing it with the characters. They’re just fun setups to play with and fun setups to read.

But this is the Black List! And as I was just telling a couple of writers the other day, the industry only pays attention to the top 5 scripts on the list these days. I’m the only one in town who really pays attention to anything past the top 10. And I do that because there are still a handful of gems in those bottom 60 and it’s fun to discover them.

Case in point: There is a swimming pool.

Extra Scriptshadow points to those who know that reference.

Is today’s script the next “there is a swimming pool?” Let’s find out.

Dr. Howard Lacey, 50s, is a psychiatrist who’s recently ventured into podcasting to detail some of his patients’ woes. Specializing in twins, his latest series focuses on David, who had a twin brother with cerebral palsy. Later in life, his brother would die in an accidental fire in his home and David has always felt guilty about it.

Howard is looking forward to Thanksgiving with his wife, Karen, who’s recovering from open heart surgery after a heart attack. The two head up to their remote cabin in the mountains and share a meal with their neighbors, George and Megan.

Afterwards, Howard gets a call. His patient, David, is outside the house! He claims that his brother is trying to kill him. Karen is terrified and begins hyperventilating but Howard insists he can de-escalate the situation, letting David in.

David insists his brother is in the house. Karen is deteriorating quickly. Howard gets into a scuffle with David. And the next thing we know, David has Howard on the floor and strangles him to death. He then turns to Karen, insisting that she is his dead twin, and comes to kill her but it doesn’t matter. She has a heart attack and dies.

(Spoilers start now)

As soon as she dies, Howard stands up. He’s… fine? Not only is he fine but David starts speaking in a British accent? Ah, it turns out that this was planned out months ago. David is a completely constructed person. He never had a twin. It was all a lie to lead up to this moment. Howard’s business is crumbling. He’s in financial duress. And his wife (along with all her annoying medical expenses) was bleeding him dry. So he needed her 5 million dollar life insurance policy.

Howard and David rejoice. Howard goes to get David’s share of the money and when he comes back, shoots David. He was never going to give this punk a dime. He then orchestrates a pretend freaked out phone call to the police, and soon they’re there. But there is now a problem. It turns out that Karen is still breathing!

They take Karen to the hospital as Howard tries to figure out what to do. That’s when he’s confronted by Amanda. Amanda is David’s ACTUAL twin! And she wants the money that was owed to David. When the hospital only agrees to release Karen back to Howard if there is a nurse present, Howard and Amanda concoct a plan where she’ll be the nurse and the two will scare Karen to death (as Amanda will pretend to be David’s original ghost twin) so she’ll have her final heart attack. Will this plan work? You tell me!

When screenwriter Dani Feito went to the Twist Store on La Brea and Olympic to buy herself a prime twist for her screenplay, the store must’ve been offering a deal. Cause instead of picking up just one, she bought half a dozen!

Does it all work?

No.

You can’t possibly make a script work with that many twists. But, is the script entertaining?

Welllllllllll… let me put it this way: It sure as hell tries to be.

Everything leading up to that first twist is great. I mean it really is. I thought I might be giving out an “impressive” rating, which doesn’t come often for Black List scripts these days.

But a big question lingered: How does a script with 80 pages left to go get better after a world-beater of a twist? I didn’t see how it was possible. And I turned out to be right.

Every 20 pages of Twin Soul gets sillier than the previous 20 pages.

The first issue was the hospital. We were neck-deep in conflict and suspense and excitement for those first 30 pages. Everything before that twist was built up at the perfect pace. Now, all of a sudden, we’re waiting around?  Doing nothing?

Feito has to abide by some level of real-world believability in regards to the hospital and police allowing Karen to come back home. So, we have to wait 24-48 hours for her to be released from the hospital. And, when that happened, all the momentum and energy seeped out of the story like air out of a cheap balloon.

Then David’s real twin, Amanda, shows up, and I knew the script was cooked. It feels way too forced. And then when the two come up with a plan to work together to kill Karen, whereby Amanda is going to be pretend to be the nurse – any hope that the script could rebound melted away like ice cream on a hot summer day.

Why didn’t this work?

Because the writer already established a very clever first act. I wouldn’t say it was perfect in the sense that you could believe Howard would get away with it. But it was definitely plausible. He thought of everything and was very careful about even the smallest of details.

Meanwhile, once the wife comes back to the house and he and Amanda are planning to kill her again, Howard literally does two-dozen sloppy things that any cop would easily catch. In retrospect, it destroyed that genius opening. Because all of that meticulous planning was erased by the sloppiest murder plan ever.

How could this have been fixed?

For one, the script can’t be 113 pages. It needs to be 100. More pages just means more areas to screw up in a script like this. Keep it lean. Have the shocking murder twist happen at the midpoint as opposed to the end of the first act. Now, you only have 50 pages to fill instead of 80. You’re in a much more manageable place structurally.

I would get rid of the stupid female twin character and bring in a real mandatory nurse for Karen, as was originally suggested by the hospital. That nurse is the only thing standing in the way between Howard being able to kill his wife or not. You could add some ticking time bomb whereby Karen’s mom, who lives across the country, is showing up in two days to help her daughter recover. So, he’s only got two days to kill her. And this nurse character gives you one more opportunity for a final twist (she could have her own agenda).

In other words, keep it simple. Where these scripts suffer is when writers try to add too many variables. The more variables, the more sloppy things are, the more the writer has to keep track of. And because it’s impossible to keep track of everything, you inevitably create a ton of plot holes.

There were so many good things in the first 30 pages of this script. But with how spectacularly the plot falls apart after that, I unfortunately can’t recommend it.

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

What I learned: Cleverness in screenwriting demands precision. There’s no tolerance for sloppiness, not even a trace. When you promise the audience intelligence, you’re committing to a script without holes. In fact, you want the opposite: every creative choice must be meticulously crafted and purposeful. That level of care clearly wasn’t maintained in Twin Soul beyond the first act. Which is too bad. Because boy what a first act it was.

Pitched as “Home Alone on acid.”

Genre: Magical Realism
Premise: An eleven-year-old boy left alone while his parents vacation stumbles upon a surreal late-night TV broadcast of lizard musicians, leading him into a strange adventure through Chicago’s hidden corners where he runs into a bizarre guy known as The Chicken Man.
About: Recently, Benny Safdie debuted his The Rock film, The Smashing Machine, at the Venice Film Festival, where Safdie took home the ‘Best Director’ trophy. The two must have had a great time working together because, just yesterday, they announced that they were making another movie. This is the first time Safdie is using material other than his own for a film. Lizard Music was published in 1976 by Daniel Pinkwater. It is considered a cult classic in children’s literature, combining a basic story about a kid home alone with a tone that embraces the drug-fueled craze of America’s wildest decade.
Writer: Daniel Pinkwater
Details: about 170 pages

Believe it or not, I do appreciate good directing. It’s not all about the screenwriting for me.

But there really aren’t many interesting directors left. Marvel has turned the profession into a glorified TV director gig, where you’re a hired hand that makes sure you get all the required shots for the day. Try to impose your artistic vision and you get canceled faster than Roseanne.

So thank god young talent like Benny Safdie is still out there. One half of the former brother directing team that made Good Time and Uncut Gems, Benny is the more celebrity-obsessed of the two, eagerly accepting any opportunity to get in the spotlight.

But he’s still talented as hell. I infamously gave his pilot script, The Curse, that he wrote with Nathan Fielder, a “what the hell did I just read” rating. Then I saw the show and realized it was genius! In order to overcome screenwriting weaknesses that big, you have to be exceptionally talented. And this guy is the real deal.

11 year old Victor lives in the Chicago suburb of Mcdonaldsville with his parents and 17 year old sister, Leslie. His parents head off on a vacation, leaving Leslie to take care of Victor. But the second the parents are gone, Leslie tells Victor she’s going on a camping trip with her friends, leaving Victor all alone.

Victor starts off spending his time watching a lot of TV. In the 1970s, that’s basically all you did, and Victor is no exception. However, late one night, Victor is surprised to see that four lizards, in a band, are playing music on television. Their music is hypnotizing and Victor is sad when their set is over.

The next day, he decides to go to a nearby town called Hogboro on the bus. It’s on that bus that the Chicken Man shows up. The Chicken Man takes off his hat, which has a chicken underneath it of course, which then starts doing all these tricks. Later, Vince sees the Chicken Man in town and the Chicken Man opens his hand which has in it, A LIZARD!

Victor freaks out and books it home. He is now convinced that the Chicken Man and the late night TV lizard band are connected somehow. But how? He has to know. So he does some investigation and gets in touch with Chicken Man (who has like a dozen different names), and the two meet at the Hogboro Zoo.

Chicken Man explains that the Lizards are from another planet, or more like, another existence. And that there music is, like, important or something, man. Because Victor is now obsessed with the Lizard Group, he gets Chicken Man to help him figure out where they are. He must meet them! As he is sure that the Lizard Group will have all of life’s answers, or at least a few to get him through the rest of the summer.

Lizard Music is a terrible book yet I have no doubt that Benny Safdie will turn it into a great movie. This reminds me very much of what Spike Jonez did with Where The Wild Things Are. It’s going to be a kids book adaptation but with some dark adult gravy slathered over it.

So, what’s my problem with this? My problem is that Lizard Music was clearly written in one draft. It’s got that “I’m coming up with all of this on the fly” feel to it. You can almost feel the writer realizing story developments as they come.

One of the easy ways to identify this is when writers repeat locations right away. For example, Victor is talking to Chicken Man at the zoo and convinces Chicken Man to have a meeting with him. He asks Chicken Man when and where their meeting should be and the Chicken Man says, “We’ll do it tomorrow at the zoo.” Well, we’re already at the zoo. Why wouldn’t we just have the meeting now?

If the Chicken Man is busy now, then, it makes more sense to meet somewhere else tomorrow. But, when you’re writing quickly, you don’t want to strain yourself. Your brain doesn’t give you great options. It knows the characters have to meet somewhere, it knows we’re at the zoo.  So let’s have them meet at this same zoo! It’s lazy and it’s usually something you fix in rewrites. But if you don’t rewrite, then you never fix it. And that’s what a lot of this book reads like.

There is a bonus to writing this way, though. First drafts, while often sloppy, tend to have the most energy of any draft you’re going to write. So even though there’s a lot of repetition and meandering, you can feel the writer’s excitement on the page. And the writer will often take more chances in the first draft, which can be more interesting than the safer edited options you use down the road.

So, there can actually be a strategy to only writing one draft. And I know that, back in the 70s, there was more of a freewheeling approach to writing. So I’m sure that worked its way into the writing of Lizard Man.

And while this freewheeling approach helped some of the sequences such as the bus ride when we first meet Chicken Man and see how weird he is, it hurts the book in so many others. There are countless scenes of Victor just sitting on his living room floor watching TV. Which is incredibly boring to read.

Another way I can tell when a writer hasn’t written many drafts is when the main character is a complete loner. We tend to think about what we WANT TO DO IN A STORY as writers so obsessively that we forget to ask what would really be happening in this person’s life. Writing a singular character all by himself is so much easier than trying to imagine a full life with friends and relationships.  So you write the easy version.

You’re telling me Victor doesn’t have a single friend? Not one!? And this is the 70s. You couldn’t not have a friend if you tried. They were forced upon you!

If you know the primary things I get upset about in screenwriting, you know that laziness is up there near the top. If I feel that a writer just slapped together a story without a lot of thought, I get pissed.

So, then, why did this sell? It sold because Benny Safdie is a weirdo (in a good way). He likes weird stuff. This story is definitely strange. And it also has a bizarro character that actors would love to play, in the Chicken Man.

I would not try to replicate a story like this yourself. This is the definition of a random purchase. It’s unlikely anything like it will happen again.

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

What I learned: Put a chastity belt on your logical mind when writing the first draft of any script that benefits from a strong imagination. If you’re writing The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter or Lizard Music, you want to let yourself fly in that first draft because these types of scripts don’t do well when there’s restriction. But you do need to reel in the stuff that’s too crazy in future drafts. You have to ground the core journey so that the story feels like it has an actual purpose and isn’t just a trippy writing experiment.

ANNOUNCEMENT – I HAVE DECIDED THAT ALL MAYBES IN TODAY’S POST ARE OFFICIALLY ***IN*** THE BLOOD & INK SHOWDOWN.  CONGRATS!

(The following article is a follow-up to the Blood & Ink Contest. If you would like to learn more about the contest, you can go here)

First of all, I have to point out that this weekend was the biggest worldwide opening for a horror movie ever (The Conjuring). Oh, and three of the biggest movie surprise successes of the year – Weapons, Sinners, and Final Destination – were all horror films. We are coming up with this contest at the PERFECT time. Cause, for the next year, studios are going to rabidly pursue horror concepts. So, good for us for being timely.

Now, I want everyone to give yourselves a hand. We worked effing HARD this month. This was not easy. But I believe all the effort was worth it. We’ve found nearly 100 legit good horror movie ideas. And that’s something that never would’ve happened had we not done the Blood and Ink pitches.

I think all of us have learned just how valuable putting your ideas out there for feedback is. Most writers base their script choices on gut, which is unreliable. But here, if you had a bad idea, there were crickets. So, you knew that you had to come up with something better. And I saw that. I saw writers come back stronger after some early duds.

And I think we all learned that the fastest way to logline death is a vague logline. Especially when it gets vague at the end. There’s nothing more frustrating and I feel that all of you will move forward not making that mistake anymore.

Another thing you learn from seeing so many pitches is that a lot of people have similar ideas to you, which is an indication that you’re not digging deep enough when generating ideas. You’re not trying to come up with something truly original. So, hopefully, I’ve motivated you to look deeper and challenge your imagination when coming up with ideas.

Another thing I loved about this experience was the emergence of posters to help your pitch. That’s been a fun surprise. There were several instances where the poster specifically helped push the logline over the top. Grendl’s satanic building poster, for example. It totally helped me see the tone of that movie. Maybe we’ll do a posters-only showdown at some point. That could be fun.

Okay, let’s get down to business. First, I want to highlight our four classic commenters and who they voted in.

Jaco – ACHILLES by Joseph Jay Carroll Jr. – “When a German chemical weapon reanimates fallen soldiers as savage zombies, an immune messenger dog named Achilles becomes the Allies’ last hope, carrying the only known antidote across No Man’s Land to his handler’s camp.”

Scott – THE DEMONOLOGIST by Grant David – “A young priest joins a veteran exorcist as his apprentice, only to discover his mentor doesn’t exorcise demons out of people – he’s putting demons inside them.”

Poe – HELL AND BACK by Nolan Moore – When literal horned devils emerge from the tunnels of a West Virginia coal-mining town and abduct a handful of locals, a cynical WW1 veteran turned sheriff and the newly arrived reverend must lead a group of miners into hell to rescue their loved ones.

Brenkilco – #POSSESSED by Stefen X – After her deliberate attempt to become possessed for likes is actually successful, a fame-hungry influencer fights to rid herself of a manipulative demon who forces her to create increasingly horrific content that grows her audience for its pièce de résistance – her live death.

And now, we have our final leg of the competition. A lot of pitches almost made it into the big leagues with “maybes” but couldn’t quite get there. Therefore, I am posting my ten favorite “maybe” concepts and I’m asking you to vote for your favorite (from these ten) in the comments. Do this by simply writing in the TITLE of your favorite entry. The top THREE vote-getters will make it into the Blood & Ink Showdown. Here are my ten favorites.

Title: Relapse
Logline: A fading actor desperate to cure his addiction turns to a spiritual healer’s ancient ritual for a cure. The ritual awakens an entity that brutally punishes the ones he cares about every time he relapses, growing stronger with each slip – forcing him to fight the addiction and the entity before its too late.

Title: Dark Ice
Logline: On the anniversary of a tragic accident at the lake, six townspeople are found eerily sealed beneath its ice. A grief-stricken ranger must uncover the deadly force behind the entombments before it claims more lives.

Title: Chit Chat
Logline: After returning to the office from an uneventful weekend, a lonely Londoner fields increasingly aggressive small talk from everyone around him. As he escapes to the streets of London, the crowd and their furor grows as they attack him for answers to life’s smallest questions.

Title: Something Old
Logline: When a commitment-shy cop finally proposes with his grandmother’s engagement ring, the ritualistic killings that plagued his small town and claimed his grandfather start up again, while his fiancée acts more like Grandma every day.

Title: Karoshi: The Drive
Logline: People are working themselves to death – taxi drivers drive for days then crash, roofers work until falling to their deaths, an author writes a whole novel before dying at his keyboard. And then the cynical cop investigating these incidents realizes he can’t sleep or rest either. Growing ever more tired, weak and confused he must break the curse before it kills him too…

Title: The Zakim
Logline: A group of motorists become trapped when a monster intended to be the ultimate killing machine gets loose on Boston’s Zakim Bridge and the military won’t let anyone off until the beast feeds.

Title: My Demon Best Friend
Logline: A drug addicted prostitute on the brink of death from an overdose instead finds salvation and a new life when she gets possessed by a low-level but resourceful demon looking for redemption, and together they set out to reunite her with her family while battling her former pimp and his gang, and a high-ranking demon lord trying to claim her soul.

Title: Anyone
Logline: After a good Samaritan saves a recluse from a series of attacks by random people, she must uncover why strangers are compelled to murder him before she succumbs to the deadly urge herself.

Title: The Subtle Samurai
Logline: An oligarch motoryacht smuggling weapons becomes adrift in the Pacific Ocean before finding refuge on a deserted island. The heavily booby-trapped island of torture is the hunting ground for one dedicated Japanese soldier, who has spent 50 years preparing for this invasion.

Title: Everyone’s Watching
Logline: When a glamorous influencer family moves to a small coastal town, buys businesses, and starts their own church, a neighboring couple soon realizes that behind the charm lies cruelty, exploitation, and ruthless control — and resisting could cost them everything.

Start voting!  (voting ends at 10:00 pm Pacific Time tonight)

A couple of final reminders. If you got into the Blood & Ink Showdown in ANY way, please e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line “INK.” I need your e-mail because I’m putting the Blood & Ink writers on a special mailing list, which will provide news, updates, info, and future deadlines, on the competition. So definitely e-mail me!

And I’m going to announce your first Mini-Showdown RIGHT NOW. This is for Blood and Ink writers only. We’re having a First Scene Showdown for your scripts on Friday September 26th. Deadline is Thursday September 25th. I’ll give you more information as we get closer. This showdown is NOT mandatory.  I just want to get you guys writing.  :)

ALL PITCHING IS NOW CLOSED!

I have a direct line to, arguably, the biggest person in horror in all of Hollywood. This person has been in the trades relentlessly lately. And he trusts my taste implicitly. If I send him a script that I say I love, he’ll start reading it within 10 minutes.

This was the impetus for this contest. I want to send this guy a great horror script. But I thought, “How do I find a great horror script?” A truly great horror script from an amateur writer hits my desk once every four years. I wanted to speed up that process.

The answer came quickly. Increase the number of good movie ideas that are being sent my way. Which means get the writer BEFORE they’ve written the script instead of after. And have them keep pitching ideas until we find an awesome one. That strategy has nabbed us 80 really freaking good movie ideas so far. And my plan is for this weekend to make it an even 100.

If you want to know more details about my plan, here’s the initial post.

But now, it’s time to start pitching again.

How does this work?

You pitch your horror logline down in the comments. Include your title and subgenre (i.e. horror comedy, horror thriller, etc.) and I will tell you whether the idea is good enough to advance to the official competition, in which case, you will write the entire script.

Here are the responses I will leave after your pitch and what they mean.

No – Doesn’t make the cut.
Maybe – No but you can improve the logline and pitch again immediately.
Strong Maybe – You’re in.
Yes – You’re in plus special treatment.

You get FIVE logline pitches this weekend.

If you’re worried that I’m too hard to please, consistent commenters, Brenkilco, Jaco, Poe, Scott Crawford, and Arthur all have a “YES” vote, so they can save you.

You can also get in if your concept GETS UPVOTED 15 TIMES.

So, I encourage everyone here to be constantly screening the newest entries and upvoting any concept you like. It could literally change a writer’s life. And this supersedes a “no.” So, even if I “no” a concept, it can still advance with 15 upvotes.

A few final thoughts.

There are no more “soft maybes.”

You get to campaign for your logline ONE TIME. So if you’re close to getting 15 votes, feel free to link to your logline comment and make your pitch for why you deserve to be voted in.

Finally, there’s one more way to get in. On Monday, I’m going to be posting my 10 favorite ‘maybe’ loglines that were pitched over the past month. You guys will vote for your favorites. The top THREE vote-getters will make it into the official competition. So you want to at least leave this weekend with a ‘maybe.’

Here are a few recent logline articles I have written to help you out –

LOGLINE ARTICLE 1
LOGLINE ARTICLE 2
BONUS ARTICLE 3

Between sleep and weekend activities, there will be periods where I can’t moderate or rule on your entries. So be patient!

I’m excited to see what you guys are going to pitch me this weekend. Go at it!

P.S. If you are already in with a ‘strong maybe’ or a ‘yes,’ PLEASE E-MAIL ME with the subject line, “INK,” along with TITLE and LOGLINE in the message body.  Everybody who’s a part of this contest will be placed on a special newsletter so I can keep you updated on important announcements.  If you’re not on that newsletter, you will miss a lot of very important information. E-mail me at: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

P.P.S. If you want to have more of a conversation about your logline pitches, rather than just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or you want to pitch your ideas in private, you can order my logline service. It’s $25 for a logline analysis (along with a yes or no) and $50 for unlimited e-mails where we workshop a weak logline into something that is potentially contest worthy. There are no guarantees, though. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. If you want to use this service, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.