Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: In a future where people are enhancing their lives with smart technology implants, a successful criminal defense attorney has her body hijacked by an anonymous hacker and struggles to prevent him from using her to commit a series of proxy murders.
About: Today’s script finished in the top 20 of last year’s “Hit List,” the list of the best spec scripts of the year. The writer, Mark Townend, adapted Anthony Bourdain’s novel, BONE IN THE THROAT, which was later produced (although it didn’t do well). I’ve reviewed another script of Townend’s – the high concept, Contingency Protocol – about the government using time travel to hide high-profile witnesses in the past. Warner Brothers picked up this script with an eye on It Girl, Margot Robbie, to star.
Writer: Mark Townend
Details: 109 pages
To be clear, I knew nothing about this script when I opened it other than the genre and that it made The Hit List. There’s nothing I love more than going into sci-fi scripts cold then getting bowled over by a brilliant hook point.
For this reason, I had NO IDEA I’d be reading something that was so similar to the movie I just reviewed last Monday, Upgrade. Yet again we have a dude in someone’s head who can control them. The only difference is that this is a real person and in Upgrade it was a computer.
This should serve as a reminder that it’s REALLY DIFFICULT to come up with original ideas, especially when you’re dealing with science fiction. If a sci-fi idea comes to you easily, there are probably loads of other writers working on something similar. Hold that sci-fi idea of yours to a higher standard and really try to come up with something fresh. A one-of-a-kind idea is a huge advantage in this space.
But hey, Augmented might still kick ass. Or, it might control someone else who kicks ass. Or, it might control us so that we kick ass. Oh, let’s just start the review.
In the near future, 40 year old defense lawyer Olivia Holloway is preparing for one of the biggest closing statements of her life – defending the heir to a giant corporation who’s been accused of killing a young woman.
We quickly learn that in the near future, everyone is augmented with an operating system called “GLAZE.” A chip is built behind your eye that allows you to have a virtual HUD in your field of vision at all times. For this reason, we’re more focused on answering our e-mails and chatting with our friends than we are interacting with the people right in front of us.
There is no one more guilty of this than Olivia, who barely even notices her husband, Brandon, and only addresses her two children to tell them, ironically, to turn off their GLAZEs. She then slyly uses her own GLAZE to target the volume of her kids and turn it down to zero. A cruel action I’m sure every parent who’s reading this review right now wishes to God they had access to.
At trial, Olivia stands to give her closing statement when the unthinkable happens. She can’t move. It’s like she’s having a stroke. Then a voice comes through her ears. A man known as “Judge” tells her he’s now controlling her body. And if she doesn’t tell the entire courtroom that her client is guilty of murder, he will pick up a pen and stab her with it. So she obliges.
Judge then forces Olivia to hurry out of the courtroom and do everything he says – which begins with finding a local cop and killing him. Once done with the cop, he tells Olivia to find a high profile client that she helped beat a murder rap. It’s here where Olivia realizes she’s dealing with the son of the woman that client murdered. He’s using Olivia to get his revenge.
Since Olivia has no control of her extremities, she will need to use all of her wits to manipulate her puppet master, or else face where this is inevitably going – when Judge is finished using Olivia to kill everyone on his list, he’s going to kill her as well.
One thing I like about Townend. He doesn’t mess around with small concepts. He thinks big. He also knows how to write a spec. This script reads very very fast. He knows that when a reader reads a spec – a spec that doesn’t have IP attached and therefore doesn’t have a good shot at getting made – that you have to grab the reader from the first sentence and never let them go. To lose someone for even a minute in a spec could be the difference between success and failure. So he makes each scene count, each line of action count, each line of dialogue count. I dare you to read this script and be bored.
However, the script is fighting an uphill battle in that it feels familiar. We’ve seen a lot of these movies where a dude calls someone and makes them do everything they say “or else.” The twist here is that the bad guy has control over the main character’s body, giving him an extra element of control. But is it enough to freshen up the well-worn idea? Ehhh… I’m not sure it is.
With that said, the script does some interesting things from a screenwriting perspective. In a progressive move, Townend makes his female protagonist a deadbeat wife and mother who gleefully cheats on her husband. One of the oldest “rules” in screenwriting is that you can make your male protag a cheater. But the audience will never accept a female protag who’s a cheater. Neither male nor female audiences get behind a female cheater.
By ignoring that rule, it made Augmented, an otherwise Save-The-Cat formatted thriller, a bit risqué.
Another thing writers will want to pay attention to is how Augmented approaches exposition. When you have a lot of backstory or exposition to convey, have the relevant character be FORCED to give it up. I guarantee no one will know you’re throwing reams of exposition at them.
Judge’s ultimate goal is to get Olivia to admit that she knew the murderer she represented killed Judge’s mother, and yet still defended him. As a result, he’s constantly making her tell him what happened, threatening to stab her if she doesn’t. This allows Olivia to get into all sorts of backstory about why she represented the man and what he said to her and how the trial went down, all without us thinking for a second that we’re being bombarded with exposition.
If there’s a problem with the spec it’s that it all feels a bit boilerplate. Like a beach read. And I understand that that’s the risk you run when you write a balls-to-the-wall thriller. The genre isn’t built to dig deep. But I can’t help but feel like Townend should’ve given us more meat to chew on. Without the meat, it’s hard to get audiences to have an emotional reaction to the proceedings. And while scripts can survive just fine without emotion, the ones that don’t have it fade from memory a lot quicker. So while I think this is worth checking out, I don’t know if I’ll remember it a month from now.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Subtextual Conflict – Remember, overt conflict between characters (screaming, butting heads) has its place, but is often seen as on-the-nose. A better way to explore conflict is through subtext. Read the opening scene of this script. It has Olivia’s family (husband and two children) getting ready for their day. Not once do Olivia or Brandon argue with one another. But boy is there a ton of conflict going on. A disappointed look from Brandon after Olivia doesn’t back him up when he tells the kids to turn off their GLAZEs. A constant lack of eye contact. Olivia putting her GLAZE e-mails as a priority over her husband, who’s sitting right in front of her. Short quick answers to each other’s questions. I have a better feel for this relationship due to its use of subtextual conflict than I do most of the relationships I read after entire scripts.
Today I take a second look at a movie that has slowly and quietly become a sci-fi classic.
There is no movie in recent years that has gained more fans after underperforming at the box office than Edge of Tomorrow. I can tell you from personal experience that no fewer than a dozen people (many of them casual moviegoers – not industry types) have said to me, unprompted, a variation of, “You know what’s a great movie that nobody knows about? Edge of Tomorrow.”
When Edge of Tomorrow first came out in script form as a million dollar spec-sale slash adaptation (its original title was “All You Need Is Kill”), I loved it. But the second Tom Cruise came on board, I was confused. The script’s main character was 18, and much of the story was built around the fear you have as an ignorant young soldier. Tom Cruise was 50+ when he was cast. That’s a huge change. How, I wondered, is this going to work after you take away one of the defining elements of the story?
It turns out it didn’t work. Or, at least, it didn’t work for me. In this new iteration, Cruise was a veteran officer who was inexplicably forced to become a soldier. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE THEY NEEDED A MOVIE. It made zero sense and I never got past it. The entire movie was built off of artificially constructed writer logic to get our way-too-old main character into the same situation that the original, 18 year-old, character had been in. To me, that’s when the movie ended. When it sold logic down the river.
But clearly, others weren’t bothered by this. In fact, I’d guess that if you polled 100 average moviegoers who saw this film, not one of them would’ve brought up this problem. And this speaks to the analysis mindset myself, executives, producers, and agents are obsessed with. You see, we know how difficult it is to get a movie made. We know that the more things that are in place, the better the chance is that the movie will be produced. Therefore, when we see a glaring error like a character who would never be in this situation being placed in this situation, we tell the writer, “You need to change this or else.”
But to an audience member, this makes all the sense in the world. It’s Tom Cruise. OF COURSE he’s going to have to fight. What are you going to do? Have him sit in an office the entire movie? They don’t care how Tom Cruise gets on the battlefield. As long as he gets on the battlefield.
So where’s the disconnect here? Why is it that I get all up in arms about this and won’t accept the movie after the choice is made, yet the people who made the film and the people who watch the film had no problem with it at all? The answer is complicated and comes down to the process a script goes through and how what may be important in one step will not be important in another.
When you’re writing a spec script, it’s crucial you get this kind of plot beat right. Remember, your movie is not getting made at this point. You’re a nobody with words on a page. Therefore, every single beat of your screenplay – in particular the pillar beats, the ones that hold up your story – will be scrutinized. This is why in the original All You Need Is Kill, we have a young scared soldier. Because that’s consistent with the reality of young men getting drafted into war.
However, once your script reaches the “Actor Attached” stage, it’s less about logic and more about getting things as good as you can get them by the time the cameras start rolling. The film is getting made whether you solve the “50 year old dude gets drafted into the army” problem or not. So you do the best you can do, knowing that the audience isn’t going to be as discerning as the script reader who needs things to be as logical as possible to recommend the script to their boss and not get yelled at.
It’s one of the trickier realities about screenwriting – that the same rules don’t apply across the board. While this can be confusing, it’s important to remember that when you’re on the bottom rung and your script needs to stand on its own, plot beats like this have to make sense. You don’t get the “we’re making this movie whether we solve this problem or not” leeway.
This is a long way of saying I wanted to give this film another shot. I want to remove the internal script analyst in me and try to enjoy this film as the 2 hour shot of entertainment adrenaline it became for so many others. And I feel like I have enough distance from the film and its script to do that. With that in mind… what did I think?
For those who’ve forgotten, Edge of Tomorrow follows a public relations officer, Cage, who, due to the escalating nature of an alien invasion, is forced to become an on-the-ground soldier. When Cage is killed during a D-Day attack on a beach, something happens that sends him into a time loop. Every time he dies, he wakes up at the beginning of the day again. This allows him to master the art of battle through repetition, kind of like a video game. Along the way, he meets Rita, a young woman who had the same power as him, but who’s since lost it. Rita uses her knowledge to help Cage find and destroy the mother alien.
Okay!
So what did I think??
You know what. This screening was DEFINITELY better. Way better than I expected. And that surprised me. I was fully ready to feel the same way about the film. The opening still bothers me (in addition to Cage’s age, why are we putting a man in a 5 million dollar suit he’s never trained in before then throwing him into battle an hour later?), but I zen-meditated through it all and focused on the other aspects of the story that did work.
Speaking of, I noticed that the Groundhog Day-like time-looping device was so fun, it helped divert attention away from the script’s weaknesses. I had to remind myself that while I knew the time jumping was coming (because I read the script), the people who skipped this movie in theaters and stumbled onto it on digital were likely shocked when Tom Cruise died in the first fifteen minutes, only to be reborn again. That was the hook point, and once it happened, nobody was thinking about whether a 50 year old would be an army grunt.
The script also handles exposition and plot development much better than I remember. The mythology of the Scourge (the invading alien species) is complex, with a hierarchy of alien fighters, several of which (Alphas) carry an “antennae” feature that allows them to see into the future and direct the army so that the Scourge can always predict the humans’ next move. When Cage kills an Alpha and the blood covers him, he inherits the same power.
It’s far-fetched when you think about it, but in an early exposition scene, a doctor character lays out all of this very simply. As a result, I was never confused about what was going on. That’s a major level-up as a screenwriter – when you can take complex mythology and explain it simply. It’s an art to know just how much information you need to give the reader and not a letter more. And the writers here nailed it.
The script also fixes a loophole that has doomed many a time travel script in the past: non-existent stakes. Remember, whenever a character travels in time and fails, he can just go back in time and try again. This is one of the reasons The Terminator series can’t be revived, despite attempts to do so every five years. We know if the Terminator fails to terminate… they can just send another one. So where are the stakes?
One of the cooler script choices in Edge of Tomorrow is when Officer Cage loses his power before he’s accomplished his goal – to find and kill the future-transmitting alien. Remember, up until this point, he has a safety net (the loop), allowing him to test new things every day. But when that power is all of a sudden gone, the stakes are sky high. He doesn’t get any more lives. Knowing he couldn’t screw up even once in the final act made for a really tense finale.
There are still some things that bother me, such as the fact that we spend the entire first half of the movie trying to bust through the defending Scourge on the beach. However, once they accomplish this, they’re inexplicably able to freely drive a truck down long stretches of country highway. Seeing as we’re on a landmass as giant as Europe, wasn’t there an easier way to get to this highway than through a beach full of killer aliens?
And yes, it still bothers me that there is literally NO reason for why Officer Cage is sent to the front line. They don’t even try to come up with an explanation. The Commander just says, “I’m sending you to the front line,” and that’s it, lol. BUT, at least this time around, I didn’t let it get in the way of the rest of the story. And I’m glad, because if you let that go, you realize that Edge of Tomorrow is a damn good movie.
What I learned: LEVEL UP BY CONSOLIDATING EXPOSITION – One of the most important skills a screenwriter can possess is the ability to take complex mythology and/or plot elements, and distill them down to short and clear exposition passages. Most amateur writers view exposition as information that needs to be conveyed, regardless of length. Instead, they need to see exposition as information that needs to be consolidated.
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: When a young widow’s son mysteriously disappears in Crater Lake National Park she will have one week to find him before the snowy season begins & buries any trace.
Why You Should Read: Much of my writing has always been complex, so I took this opportunity to write something simple, short, sweet and a quick read. I call it Flightplan in the woods. Mother loses son and will do everything to get him back, but has everything in her way. Singular park location with limited characters, a mysterious level of suspense and intrigue, mixed with the paranormal. As this is my first foray into something this simple, I’d love to hear any feedback the group has and take in any suggestions.
Writer: Treaty
Details: 97 pages
It’s official “Kids Disappearing Weekend!” That’s right. If you’re looking for some entertainment, you can check out the computer screen missing daughter thriller, “Searching,” at your nearby multiplex. Or you can stay home, spend a lot less money, and read Crater Lake!
Today’s screenplay is as simple a movie premise as you’ll get. Son goes missing. Mom must find him. I talk about the importance of simple premises all the time. But when is a movie idea too simple? That’s the factor I’ve always struggled with. Because often I’ll read a script with a simple concept and be bored out of my mind.
I think Crater Lake answered that question for me. A movie is too simple when it’s both simple AND predictable. If we’re 40 pages ahead of the story the whole time, we’re going to be bored. So the trick is, when writing these uber-simple premises, to keep throwing in unexpected plot beats, misdirects, surprises, mysteries – anything that keeps the reader curious.
Crater Lake introduces us to 30-something therapist widow Zoey Hayes. After finishing up a weird session with a patient who believes in parallel worlds, Zoey heads home and starts getting ready for a weekend adventure with her 7 year old autistic son, Sam.
The two are going to national park, Crater Lake, where Sam will get to do his favorite thing in the world, take pictures of birds. The two have a perfect system going, with Sam dictating the majority of the operations and scheduling.
Driving along the highway on the way to the park, Zoey spots something in her rearview mirror and screeches to a stop. We never see what she saw, only Zoey jumping out and chasing after whatever it was. She comes up empty handed, chalks it up to her imagination, and the two complete the drive.
After setting up camp, Sam begins bird-watching, and Zoey walks down to check out a nearby stream. Only a few minutes pass, but when Zoey returns, Sam is gone. Zoey freaks out, running around and asking other campers if they saw her son. Nobody has. Soon she finds a park ranger, and a full-on search party is formed to look for Sam.
Strangely, there isn’t a trace of him anywhere. And when staunch female cop, Sheriff Collins, shows up, she’s not much help. In fact, she’s not even convinced Zoey is telling the truth. Nobody at the park saw her come in with her son. And there’s not a shred of evidence that he was in the spot where she supposedly last saw him.
As a result, Zoey is forced to go out into the park and find her son herself. It’s there where she meets mysterious hermit, Aaron Stevens, who it turns out lost his little girl to the park many years ago. According to Aaron, there are mysterious forces working in this park, and that Sheriff Collins has been covering up disappearances for years. Zoey doesn’t care about any of that. She just wants to find her son. Will she?
I absolutely loved the first half of Crater Lake for the reason I listed above. It was simple, but it kept you guessing. There were these great little mysteries tossed in every 10 pages. One of my favorites was them finding Sam’s camera miles away from where he’d supposedly last been seen coupled with us learning that Zoey had been secretly drinking the whole trip. Might she have been responsible for her son’s disappearance and not known it?
However, little things would pop up here and there that gave the impression the writer hadn’t put 100% into his story. The script was written to make us think they were in some remote park with no one around. However, the second Sam went missing, there were all of a sudden a million campers to talk to. Whether they’re isolated or around people is an important detail to establish in a missing kid script. We shouldn’t be finding out there were all these people around after the fact.
Or one second Zoey has an asthma inhaler and the next second it’s gone. Not just gone but completely irrelevant. She never had a single moment from that point on where she struggled to breathe. So why bring up the inhaler in the first place?
Whenever I see stuff like this, I get worried. Especially in mysteries. Because mysteries are all about intricately plotting a story to have a shocking, but more importantly, satisfying, final reveal. So if the writer is flippant about the small stuff, they’re going to be flippant about the big stuff as well.
Sure enough, the ending didn’t live up to the hype. The story introduces this notion of the park being a supernatural place where people can transfer to parallel worlds. The rules for these parallel worlds were fuzzy at best. There was a vague implication that water was how the worlds connected. And… well, that was all we got. Not to mention we’re learning these rules with, like, ten pages to go.
Naturally, when it came time to explain where Sam was, the fuzziness took over, leading to an unsatisfying ending that was a big let down. And I say that because I was so invested in Sam’s survival. That alone is so hard to do – make a reader care about a fictional person who’s an accumulation of words. So when a writer accomplishes that, yet botches the ending, you’re so mad.
With that said, the script is worth developing. I would ask Treaty to consider a draft without the supernatural stuff. OR. Or you can have the hermit believe in the parallel worlds theory, and tease that as a possibility, but in the end it turns out it’s something he’s using to cope with what he knows, deep down, to be true – that his daughter is dead.
I think the better storyline is beefing up Sheriff Collins. She’s a villain with a huge upside. I saw her as a potential rival to Nurse Ratchet for best female villain of all time. If you could build a scenario by which she’s orchestrating all this to cover her ass, and has been doing so for years, that could be a really satisfying ending.
Oh, and you also HAVE to do more with the lost camera. Lost cameras with full rolls of a film in them are gold mines as far as creating mystery. There should be several weird pictures on there that don’t make sense and only lead to more confusion.
There’s SOMETHING to this script. No doubt about it. But right now it feels like a speed-draft where the writer hasn’t done his due diligence of exploring the full potential of the story.
Script link: Crater Lake
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Act like you’re going to give the audience an answer, then make them wait for it. Treaty does a TREMENDOUS job of using this device. It was one of the main reasons I stayed so invested in the story. For example, Zoey informs a young ranger who’s helping her about the hermit, whose daughter also went missing mysteriously. So we watch the ranger look this up. And we see him find the story, and he’s about to read it, and we’re about to find out what really happened with this weird recluse and his daughter and right as we’re about to get our answer… we cut back to Zoey’s pursuit of her son. Noooo! Now we have to keep reading before we can find out the truth about the daughter’s disappearance.
TIP 1: Have at least one character in your script who experiences a major transformation.
TIP 2: Beware “I can do that too” writing, where you’re basically rewriting your favorite films.
TIP 3: Avoid “dirty” pages. These are pages with a lot of dashes, ellipses, bolded or italicized text. Keep things clean and easy to look at.
TIP 4: There should always be a sense of doubt that your main character will succeed. If there isn’t, why would we care?
TIP 5: For every solution you provide your character, make sure it leads to a new problem.
TIP 6: If a scene is boring, it’s usually because you haven’t injected any conflict into it.
TIP 7: If a scene has an adequate amount of conflict and is still boring, it’s usually because there’s nothing on the line (If you write a breakup scene where neither character cares whether they break up, we’re not going to care when they break up).
TIP 8: Unless voice over is organically infused into the story’s presentation (Fight Club), it’s almost always a lazy device.
TIP 9: If you haven’t combined at least two of your characters into a single character by your third draft, you’re not consolidating enough.
TIP 10: The less your hero speaks, the more active he needs to be (Drive, Mad Max). Nobody likes a quiet hero who doesn’t do anything (Mute).
TIP 11: The comic relief is not the guy trying to be funny. It’s the guy being himself who is inadvertently funny.
TIP 12: If you’re strong with concept and plot, gravitate towards features. If you’re strong with character, gravitate towards TV.
TIP 13: If a character is boring, start back at their introduction. You’ll almost always find that they have a flaccid boring intro. Give them a stronger intro and they instantly become a stronger character.
TIP 14: Due to the insane number of bad screenplays Hollywood has had to endure, everyone who reads your script will go into it assuming it’s bad. This is why it’s so important to yank them in right away with a great first scene.
TIP 15: A sudden twist (the hero’s boyfriend is the killer!) impacts the audience for five seconds. Dramatic irony (the audience knows the hero’s boyfriend is the killer but she does not) can impact the audience for half a screenplay.
TIP 16: At some point in the third act, your hero should face an impossibly hard choice.
TIP 17: If you wouldn’t watch what you’re writing, why would you expect anyone else to?
TIP 18: That’s you guys. Leave your best tip in the comments!
Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Blood List) When a pregnant social worker is called upon to investigate a murder involving a teenage mother, she uncovers an insidious plot with possible ties to the occult that has her questioning her sanity and the very nature of her unborn child.
About: Today’s screenplay landed on the 2017 Blood List, a list of the best horror, sci-fi, and thriller scripts of the year! This writing team made last year’s Blood List as well with “Summer of 84,” which went on to get produced.
Writers: Matthew Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
Details: 106 pages
I’m a sucker for pregnancies in horror films. It dates back to how well it was done in Rosemary’s Baby but I also think it’s a naturally horrifying plot element to inject into the genre. When it isn’t just your hero who’s in danger, but their unborn baby, it’s like getting double the meat on your Subway sandwich. Everything is twice as tasty.
Not only that, but a late-stage pregnancy works as an invisible ticking time bomb for your story. Whereas everyone else is forcing these artificial, “You have 72 hours to find your wife or I blow up Manhattan” time constraints, we know in any pregnancy horror flick that the movie is ending when that baby is born. So you don’t even have to think about the “Urgency” component of your GSU.
Needless to say, I’m excited for this one. Let’s check it out!
A bloodied 16 year-old Alexis Rose stumbles out of a field holding her newborn baby. She walks up to a highway, blankly stares forward, then HURLS her child into traffic.
Cut to social worker Lauren Madden, who’s 8 months pregnant. Lauren’s finally moving past the death of her husband, Ben, using the age-old coping mechanism of throwing herself into her work. And boy did that work get interesting. She’s been assigned to Alexis Rose’s case.
Lauren tries to find out why Alexis would do such a thing to her child, but Alexis doesn’t remember what happened other than hearing voices that said she had to kill her baby.
The case is so bizarre that Lauren starts sniffing around, only to find out that there have been two other recent cases of young women killing their newborns. All three women are tied to a Doctor Bellamy. So Lauren finds Bellamy and asks him what’s up. Bellamy has no idea why this is happening, but something about the guy screams “sketchy,” so Lauren puts a pin in him while she keeps looking around.
Eventually, Lauren finds that these women may have inadvertently been tied to the occult. And when she starts looking into that, she finds that more and more people are interested in her own unborn child. At one point, a random man corners Lauren in her car, says, “They’re wrong about you,” pulls out a gun to shoot Lauren, only to have a truck whip by and turn the man into fender meat.
But the real clincher is when her doctor tells her that due to the timing of her husband’s death, it would be impossible for him to have gotten Lauren pregnant. Since Lauren hasn’t slept with anyone else, how could she possibly be pregnant? As Lauren becomes more confused and more afraid, she risks repeating exactly what the rest of these women did – killing her newborn child the moment it’s born…
This was a solid script.
The decision to make the main character pregnant paid many dividends. I’ve read plenty of screenplays where the writer wouldn’t have thought of this. They would’ve made the main character a normal woman. Or even a man. By making her pregnant, our heroine becomes directly connected to the story.
Leslie and Smith also do a good job of BUILDING their story. You guys hear me talk about this a lot – the importance of “building.” Every ten pages needs to feel slightly bigger than the previous ten pages. You do this by upping the stakes, adding new storylines, throwing bigger obstacles at your characters, unveiling revelations. This script is a very good example of that. Unlike yesterday, there were no dead spots. Things were always escalating.
This is also a textbook case of how to pull a reader in immediately. There’s no genre where a teaser is more important than the horror genre. You really have to grab us with that opening scene, preferably with something we’ve never seen before. I’ve definitely never seen a young mother stumble out of a field with her newborn baby then hurl it onto the highway. If I was in any way blase about the read, that changed it.
But the big thing I want to talk about with today’s script is the notion of enriching your character’s existence. One of your goals as a screenwriter is to make your hero (and, really, your core group of characters) feel as realistic as possible. The more we see your hero as a real person, the more invested we’re going to be in their journey.
The best way to do this is by showing us meaningful parts of your hero’s life, usually through relationships. So, for example, here, Lauren’s mother is in hospice care. Lauren visits her a few times over the course of the story, usually to decompress from all the craziness that’s going on in her investigation. In addition to this, we meet Lauren’s sister, who has some issues with Lauren’s level of commitment to seeing her mom, causing conflict between the two.
Now you don’t NEED to include any of this in the screenplay. In fact, if you take this subplot out of the story, nothing changes. The plot is exactly the same and nothing needs to be moved around. However, what you do lose is a piece of your hero that makes them more human to the reader. Without this personal struggle, Lauren loses a dimension, and becomes closer to that dreaded “2-D” character readers hate.
The trick to getting this enrichment right is not to linger in these side stories. You want to get in and out of the scenes quickly so that they add depth to your character but don’t interfere with the pace.
And keep in mind, this changes from genre to genre. If you’re writing a drama, then these scenes will be longer, maybe even centerpieces of the story. But this is a horror film with a tight plot where the mother is an ancillary character. Hence, she’s there to enrich your hero, not take over the plot.
If I had a beef with the script, it’s that it was too predictable. I could’ve used more surprises. For example, once it’s established that all the girls who were pregnant hadn’t had sex with anyone, I was waiting for the obligatory scene where Lauren found out that Ben didn’t get her pregnant. And it came 60 pages later. I think this writing team would do better if they threw more unexpected moments into their screenplays (I felt the same thing about Summer of 84).
With that said, The Harrowing does have a nifty last second twist that I DID NOT see coming. If they could bring some of that surprise and shock earlier into the script, this would’ve gotten a higher score from me. As it stands, it’s still a solid horror entry.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: CANCER AND CAR CRASHES – As someone who’s read a countless number of screenplays, I can tell you that 90% of backstory deaths (death of a spouse or death of parents) are written as cancer or car crashes. In The Harrowing, for example, Lauren’s husband, Ben, died in a car crash. I know why writers do this. Both options read as “tragic.” But if you want to stand out, work harder. Come up with something not as obvious. I just read a script where the main character’s mother died from complications from Huntington’s Disease. It was so specific that it made everything feel more believable. Keep that in mind the next time you’re killing off a spouse! :)
