Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Blood List) Peter has always been told the voice he hears at night is only in his head, but when he suspects his parents have been lying, he conspires to free the girl within the walls of his house.
About: Today’s script finished at the TIPPY-TOP of the 2018 Blood List!
Writer: Chris Thomas Devlin
Details: 97 pages

One thing that not enough screenwriters care about is writing scripts that are easy to read, scripts that move along quickly. I shouldn’t have to remind you that as a SPEC screenwriter, your scripts are being given a fraction the attention as the other scripts readers encounter. That’s because if you’re working on assignment or dealing with IP, your script is in a much better position to get made. The only way to compete with that, then, is to give readers a life-sized experience in a bite-sized package.

I don’t know if there’s any script that symbolizes that motto better than Cobweb. This script is so determined to be quick that almost every paragraph is one line long. This is a script that so wants your eyes to shoot down the page, it doesn’t use punctuation. This is a story so simplistic in execution, it can be read while multitasking. But all this begs the question… When has minimalism gone too far? We’re going to find out today.

8 year old Peter lives in a spooky house at the top of a spooky hill. Like lots of 8 year olds, Peter hears noises at night. And while most of these noises are your average thumps and creaks, every once in awhile, Peter hears tapping. Specifically tapping within the walls.

We get the sense that any discussion with his parents about this tapping is grounds for punishment. So, for the most part, Peter keeps the noise to himself. Until, that is, he starts hearing a voice on the other end of the tap. A young girl. A girl who wants to help him. When Peter brings this up to his parents, they convince him that he’s imagining things and remind him that if he keeps bringing these nightly noises up, he’s going to be grounded.

But then the tapping girl tells Peter to start standing up for himself at school. The next day, instead of allowing the school bully to, once again, embarrass him, Peter pushes him down the stairs, injuring him badly. This gets Peter expelled, and his creepy parents decide to home-school him.

From there, the noises only get louder and the girl only talks more. We begin to understand that this may be Peter’s sister – that his parents have locked her up for some reason. So when she tells Peter to save her, he concocts a plan to poison his parents and set his sister free. That’s all well and good, until his plan works, and he’s faced with a new possibility. What if his parents locked his sister up, not because they’re evil… but because she is.

I have to admit, it took me awhile to get used to the writing here. It’s so minimalist that it’s almost off-putting. One line for every paragraph. Most of the time, those lines didn’t even make it halfway across the page. And interspersed between this would be lots of NOISE-SOUNDS (TICK TOCK TICK TOCK) which would take up their own lines, resulting in pages you could read in 15 seconds flat.

As I said earlier, readers generally love this. They want their reads to be fast. But there’s a caveat, and it’s a trap that most scripts fall into. There’s so little on the page, that there isn’t any character development. And if there isn’t any character development, it’s hard to care about the characters.

I was a good 40 pages into this and the only character I knew anything about was Peter. The parents are mysteries wrapped in enigmas, and even the teacher, who gets second billing, is about as garden-variety as they come. Her lone character trait is that she’s concerned about Peter. That doesn’t tell me a whole lot about her.

To be honest, I was about to give up on this one half-way through. There simply wasn’t enough going on. But around the halfway point, the script shifts from the repetitive storyline of “somebody’s making noises in the wall” to “Who’s this girl?” And that’s when things got interesting. I can pinpoint the exact moment, even, where my interest shifted. It was when Peter caught his mom grinding up leftovers in the blender. I thought, “Who’s she feeding ground up leftovers to?” Before this, the girl could’ve been a figment of Peter’s imagination. But now we now she’s real and that the parents are involved.

That led to an exciting rescue mission sequence (about 20 pages), only for that plotline to get flipped on its head, and we learn that maybe the girl is being imprisoned for a reason.

Outside of the first half of the script being too minimal, the only other problem I had was, why did it take until now for the girl to start talking to Peter? He’s 8 years old. Wouldn’t he have heard her before this. The script fudges over this part, implying that Peter HAS heard her for awhile, but the details are vague enough that you feel like the writer’s cheating. It’s a sneaky way to not have to answer a tough question.

I also give the script credit for its gradual build into horror. After the first 20 pages, I thought this was going to be a Goosebumps clone. Or that new Jack Black horror movie with the clocks in the walls. That made its gradual descent into something far darker a lot more fun. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is actually some effed up shit here. Okay, I’m in.”

I still think the script is leaving movie on the table, though, especially in its first half, which can best be summed up as “The Tapping and Bullies” Half. There’s only so much tapping and so much bullying the audience can take before they’re like, “Yo, I didn’t sign up for public service announcement. This is a horror film.” Do a little more in that section, try and build more character development into the key characters, and you’ve got yourself a good horror flick.

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

What I learned: I’ve always felt that the scariest situation is the one you’re born into. If your parents are evil, there’s nowhere to run. You’re stuck with that. How is anything more terrifying? And once we got to the midpoint here, I felt that playing out in Cobweb – that sickening feeling that there was nothing this poor boy could do to escape these evil people.

What I learned 2: Sometimes a script won’t allow you to develop characters. Cobweb, for example, can’t develop the parents, because the script only works if they’re mysteries. We have to wonder if they’re bad or good. That limits how much you can be around them (The Sixth Sense had the same problem – it could really develop the wife because she was part of the twist). If you find yourself in this predicament, spend that time developing other characters. Miss Devine, for instance, could’ve had a lot more going on. If all you have is a single three-dimension character, your script is going to feel empty.

Genre: Horror
Premise: Something terrifying awakens within a middle-aged mom when she finally decides to watch the now-classic horror film that she starred in as a child.
Why You Should Read: To this day, rumors persist of a supposed “curse” attached to the modern classic horror film, “The Beholder”. The movie enjoyed both critical acclaim and box office success upon its premiere in October of 1983, and it is still commonly hailed as being among the most terrifying films in the history of American cinema.

But the film’s production was plagued by an endless string of on-set accidents, misfortune and tragedy. And the “curse” only seemed to intensify in the months and years following the movie’s release with the mysterious and untimely deaths of many of the cast and crew, including director John Friedman and lead actors, Betsy Cartwright and Peter Monahan.

Only nine years old at the time, the film’s youngest star, Joanne Harvey, seemed poised to take the movie industry by storm. But in the wake of an auto accident that claimed the lives of her parents after the premiere of “The Beholder”, Joanne Harvey disappeared from Hollywood, never to be heard from again.

Writer: Nick Morris

Details: 88 pages

It’s funny that I read this script when I did. Just yesterday, I was watching Halloween for the 10 Tips article I wrote, and noticed that the little girl Laurie’s friend was babysitting in the movie looked familiar. I went on IMDB to find out that her name was Kylie Richards. I then googled that name to find out that Kylie Richards was now on the cast of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Ah-ha, I thought, that’s where I recognized her from. If you need proof that child actresses are doomed to a bizarre trauma-filled life, look no further than where that young girl ended up.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, Nick Morris has won yet another Amateur Offerings, and in a competitive situation. I can’t remember the last time every script got at least three votes. Usually, a couple of scripts are left with 0 or a single vote, which tells me this may be Nick’s biggest win yet. I also heard Nick say he hopes this is finally the script that gets him that “worth the read.” Let’s find out if it does!

45 year old Joanne Bennet’s best years are behind her. One look at her family life and you get a sense why. She’s stuck on her second husband, a trucker who cares more about Call of Duty than couples time, and his weirdo 12 year old son, who’s basically a clone of his father. Even Kaley, Joanne’s 22 year old daughter, is saddled with a newborn that prevents any quiet moments at home.

One morning, while on her way to work, Joanne gets rear-ended by a hipster in an Audi, Brent, who immediately recognizes Joanne. It turns out Joanne was a famous child actor in the horror classic, The Beholder. Brent freaks out because The Beholder is known for being cursed. Many of the people who worked on it mysteriously died. Nobody even knew what happened to Joanne. After geeking out, he invites Joanne to the Dallas Horror Fest, where she’ll be able to make a ton of money signing autographs.

Joanne’s reluctant as she’s never seen the movie. She knows of its “cursed” past and simply figured it was better not to watch it. But she needs the money so she goes. The experience turns out to be a blast, with Robert Englund and Linda Blair admitting they’re big fans. Joanne heads home on a high, and when Kaley suggests finally watching the film, Joanne figures, why not?

The two sit down to watch the movie, which centers around a couple of cursed parents who want to kill their daughter. After the movie, Joanne starts seeing glowing eyes in the house, only to later rip out her own eyes, becoming a “beholder” herself. She then kills her poor daughter, then waits for her husband and stepson to show up so she can kill them too. She succeeds, killing them all, then later goes on to star in the sequel to the film, Beholder: Redemption.

While I tried to stay out of the comments, I did catch a few tidbits about the script – the first being that Nick was rushing to finish the script in time. The second being a lot of people had problems with the third act. Both of these issues affected my read as well. I could tell this script was rushed, and I couldn’t get on board with the ending.

The script started out strong. I loved the way the family was set up. Compared to Wednesday’s script review, and even yesterday, with the original Halloween, this family felt more complex and more interesting than any of the characters set up in those two scripts. The scene where Joanne comes home and her husband and step-son are playing Call of Duty while her daughter is nursing her grandchild – it painted such a clear picture of what this woman’s life was like.

Unfortunately, after that, each subsequent scene felt more rushed than the previous one. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that our hero wasn’t carving her own path. She was waiting for the writer to carve it. It was the writer who crashed a car into our hero. It was the writer who, coincidentally, made the driver of that car the Horror Fest Coordinator. It was the writer who brought our hero to the Horror Fest. Our hero wasn’t doing anything but following the lead.

It wasn’t until the third act that Joanne started acting on her own. But by that point, things had gotten so ridiculous (she’d ripped her eyes out and was running around killing people) that I was now focused on new problems. Usually, in these movies, the main character is either running or trying to defeat the monster. But in Evil Eye, she’d become the monster. And she was killing characters we liked, like the daughter. So I had all these confused feelings as I was reading the climax.

The thing is, there’s SOMETHING TO THIS IDEA. When I read this logline, I liked it. But I didn’t imagine something this cheaply thrown together. I wanted the same kind of depth that was given to the family to be applied everywhere, the plot in particular. Why can’t Joanne watch the film in the first act, and then, as she goes through her daily life, she starts seeing these glowing eyes in the eyes of the people she knows. So she’s trying to figure out if she’s going crazy or not. By the end, of course, she does go crazy. And that’s when she kills her family.

But if you’re going to do that, you need to spend a lot more time with the family. We need to get to know the dad, the stepson, and daughter, beyond that first scene. Because once you switch Joanne into a demon, we need someone else to root for. And you’re probably going to want that to be the daughter. Or, if you want to take this to a dark place, you can make the daughter a bitch as well, and that way when we kill the entire family, we feel like they got their just due. But right now, half the family is good and half is bad, so it’s confusing when they’re all killed.

Here’s the reality of screenwriting. Any reader worth his salt can tell when they’re reading an early draft. You can’t hoodwink them. I know when a writer is rushing things along because everything in the script happens too easily and many of the choices are uninspired. Good choices come from putting your script through the ringer, going through the rewrites and asking yourself, repeatedly, “Is this the best scene I can write?,” “Is this the best plot twist I can come up with?” And if the answer’s no, you one-up it. And if you keep one-upping things every draft, you’re eventually going to have a good script.

What’s so frustrating about The Evil Eye is that there’s a movie here but the script is maybe 25% of where it needs to be. Every aspect of this story needs to be expanded. We need more detail, more specificity, more stuff to happen. I don’t even think there’s a character goal in any of this. Which is a big reason why the plot feels so empty. I don’t know if I’m repeating what others have pointed out or if this is new information, but regardless, I love Nick’s passion for horror and hope he turns this into something great.

Script link: The Evil Eye

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

What I learned: I’m not sure you can turn your hero into the villain for the final act. There may be a few movies that have done it. But it’s confusing for an audience member who’s been rooting for a hero the whole movie, to then be asked to root for everyone besides the hero. I don’t know how that works.

Great teasers are expected in horror scripts – When you write a horror film, you HAVE to write a great teaser scene. It’s expected. The teaser in 2018’s Halloween was the most memorable scene in the film. And the same can be said for this Halloween – a boy wearing a mask murders his naked sister in POV. If a horror script gives me a lame teaser, it’s a guarantee that the rest of the script is going to be lame as well.

Bodies in motion – I like when scripts start with something HAPPENING. The characters are IN MOTION, on their way to something. In contrast, bad scripts often begin with characters sitting around. Nobody wants anything. Nobody’s trying to do anything. This sets the tone for a slow dull movie. Get your characters moving after the teaser, preferably doing something that sets the story in motion. After the teaser in Halloween, we cut to Dr. Loomis and a nurse in a car driving to the mental institution to talk to Michael. We’re off to the races already!

Save the Cat still works! – If you’re ever in doubt about whether your hero is likable enough, give them a Save the Cat! scene. It doesn’t even have to be some big production. Like saving an old woman from getting hit by a car. With Laurie, it’s a simple scene where she runs into the boy she’s babysitting that night. The boy clearly loves Laurie, and she’s adorable with him, adhering to all of his demands (watch a movie, make jack-o-lanters, read to him, make popcorn). It’s a short scene, but just like that kid, we now love Laurie as well. The scene speaks to the power of simplicity in storytelling, as pretty much every choice in Halloween is a simple one.

Build build build – In a horror movie, you don’t want your killer to start killing people right away. You want to BUILD towards it. Tease it. Draw out the suspense. Someone’s broken into the local hardware store and stolen a bunch of stuff. Laurie sees a strange figure in a mask standing across from the school. Then a couple of additional times, behind a bush, and in her yard. We’re building building building before the terror is unleashed.

The scariest things don’t have to be complicated – The reason Michael Myers is still terrifying after 40 years is that he’s so simple. A killing machine in an expressionless mask who never says a word. I bring this up only because people think today’s characters have to have really elaborate backstories and motivations. And while that works when done well, sometimes all you need is a simple terrifying monster.

Horror works best under a tight time constraint – Halloween takes place in less than a day. The majority of it takes place in real time. That’s when horror cooks the hottest, when the threat is so immediate that your characters have to deal with it NOW.

Integrate both active and passive storylines – One of the problems with these horror-slasher screenplays is that the victim is passive. Laurie doesn’t know that this man is after her. So she can’t go after anything herself. All she can do is live her life, and unfortunately, our lives are pretty boring. The solution to this is to add an active storyline. This is usually done by bringing in a policeman or detective who’s chasing the bad guy. Halloween does it with Dr. Loomis. He knows Michael will go back to Haddonfield, which is why he goes back there, to try and catch him. This allows you to cut back and forth between Laurie’s passive storyline and Dr. Loomis’s active one.

Dramatic Irony Alert – Remember that dramatic irony is when the audience knows something the character does not. It’s a device you should be using a lot as a horror writer. After Michael kills the guy who’s gone to grab a beer for his girlfriend, Michael puts on a sheet and walks upstairs to the girlfriend, who’s waiting in bed. She giggles when she sees her “boyfriend” in the sheet, and asks for her beer. WE know this isn’t her boyfriend. SHE does not. Hence the dramatic irony. This allows us to squirm and scream, desperately hoping she’ll find out before it’s too late.

The False Kill – Nearly every horror movie has a false kill of the monster/killer near the end of the film. Unfortunately, audiences have gotten hip to this and don’t believe it anymore. “Make sure he’s dead!” they’re screaming as the hero ignores this obvious advice. So if you’re going to do this these days, you want to use every trick in the book to convince the audience the monster is dead. That way, when they come back, we’re genuinely surprised. Unfortunately, Halloween is not one of these movies. Laurie weakly stabs Michael, who falls down behind a couch, and Laurie assumes he’s dead without even checking. Of course, only minutes later, he’s back on her trail.

We’ll forgive a basic plot if we like the hero – Yesterday I said that a cool plot cannot survive weak characters. The opposite is also true. A bad plot can be saved by strong characters. And when I say “characters,” I’m really talking about your hero. This might be the biggest screenwriting hack of all. If you give us a hero we really like, we’ll pretty much forgive everything else. Everything in Halloween is predictable. A killer escapes a mental institution. Some teenagers are baby-sitting that night. The killer finds them and kills them one-by-one. That’s basic horror movie 101. But we like Laurie so much that we don’t need a big fancy plot with lots of twists and turns. All we want is for her to survive. If that happens, we’ll have enjoyed the experience.

Today’s review asks the question, “When it comes to Horror, is slow the way to go?”

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of twenty-somethings go camping in the forest for the weekend only to find themselves trapped by a growing form of man-eating sludge.
About: This script made last year’s Blood List. Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer are writer-directors who made Starry Eyes, Holidays, and who just recently completed shooting the new Pet Cemetery.
Writers: Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer
Details: 89 pages – 3/8/17 draft

You would think, when it comes to horror, that the scariest things would be the things that strike the fastest. And while in real life, that may be true, the opposite seems to be the case in film. Zombies move at one-fifth the speed of the average man. Yet there’s nothing more terrifying than a group of zombies stumbling towards someone when there’s nowhere to hide. A ghost who appears on the opposite end of the room is equally terrifying. And it doesn’t have to move at all.

Why is this the case? Well, it’s because horror works best in the LEAD-UP to the attack as opposed to the attack itself. The slower the monster moves, the more you get to milk the suspense. And the suspense is where our fear resides. This isn’t always the case, of course. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 was pretty damn fast. But it serves as a reminder that when you’re picking your horror concept, not to overlook slow.

Twenty-somethings Rich, his girlfriend Katie, Fitz, and his girlfriend Ziggy, are taking the weekend to explore a cool isolated waterfall Rich knows about deep in the woods. Katie’s convinced her younger resistant sister, Kimberly, to join them. Millennial mindsets lead to a lot of bickering about how far they have to walk, until they come across a large fence, which Rich doesn’t remember being there. Eh, no worries. They cut through the fence and finally find the spot.

After Kimberly refuses to join the crew in a skinny dip, bitch Ziggy starts heckling her. The two get into a scuffle and Kimberly storms back to the car. Unfortunately, she doesn’t make it. While crossing a seemingly normal pathway, she begins to sink into the ground. She screams for help, but no one hears, and she slowly disappears below the surface.

Back by the water, Katie starts to worry about her sister, and recruits the others to look for her. Rich branches off, finds a large mud patch, and sees the outline of Kimberly inside of it. Rich runs over to pull her out, but quickly finds himself sinking as well. The rest of the group arrives, and Rich explains to them that they have to stay away. He’s in some kind of quicksand, but it’s not like normal quicksand. It burns.

As the group tries to figure out a way to save Rich, Rich decides to get the car keys out of his pocket so the rest of them can go for help. He gets the keys, but when he lifts his hands, the skin and flesh fall away like hot oatmeal. Definitely not your average quicksand. Rich dies soonafter, sinking into the muck, but his hand and the keys remain lifted in the air. “Why hasn’t he sunk all the way?” they ask. “It’s taunting you,” Katie says. It’s then that they realize, this death-quicksand is alive. And it’s going to eat each and every one of them before they can escape this place.

As you can see, our antagonist is about as slow as can be. Sludge. It needs you to walk into it, as opposed to it coming to you. And once you’re in it, you don’t die right away. You die a slow agonizing death. This allows you to create long drawn-out suspenseful scenes where characters get caught, and all you can do is watch from the sidelines as they dip deeper and deeper into their grave.

As a writer, this is a dream scenario, because you can belt out large sequences that are inherently nail-biting. One of the primary scenes in the script – Rich getting stuck in the mud and needing to get keys out of his pocket so the rest of them can escape – is 17 pages!! That’s one-sixth of your screenplay right there! That’s what you call your premise doing your work for you.

Unfortunately, the writers make a classic horror mistake. They don’t put enough work into the characters. The audience only cares about a character in peril if they care about the character. So it doesn’t matter how suspenseful a scene is if we don’t care about the people participating in that suspense. Everyone in The Swallow is a cardboard cutout. You want to know how the first character in the script is described? “RICH (23, rugged, handsome).”

That’s it. That’s an actual description. Do you want to know how many characters I’ve seen described as “rugged and handsome” in the 7500 scripts I’ve read? At least 500. Probably more. If you’re going to describe someone generically, how can I not see them as anything other than generic?

There are some writers who will argue that you want to keep your descriptions generic because, that way, you keep the casting as wide open as possible. I can go along with that IF the characters then take action or make choices that define them. You don’t need to give Han Solo some Pulitzer-winning description as long as you have him kill Greedo a couple minutes later. That ACTION just told me everything I need to know about Han Solo, regardless of what his introduction was.

Likewise, I’ll forgive a sparse description if the characters reveal themselves through dialogue. Go watch The Breakfast Club. Those characters are the defining examples of characters we know due to what they say. I’m looking for originality, specificity, and creativity in dialogue, particularly from characters this young. 22 year olds are going to be on the cutting edge of slang. Here, the dialogue is extremely basic. There’s no personality to it at all.

So if you’re going to get a horror script right, guys, you have to get the characters right. I mean look at Monday’s film, Halloween. It wasn’t perfect. However, there was a LOT of character work stuffed in there. Laurie Strode had a super-extensive backstory. The granddaughter is dealing with the complexity of wanting her grandmother back in the family despite the fact that her own mom has disowned her. In The Swallow, the only backstory is the car ride it took to get here. Without depth, without originality, without personality, how can we connect to your characters.

Honestly, I blame 80s horror for this. A lot of people see that decade as the Golden Age of horror and it basically amounted to a cool killer and a bunch of nameless victims. Not to say some of those movies aren’t fun. But filmgoers are more discerning today. They need to connect, if only a little, in order to stay invested. Remember, they’ve always got their phones and their computers next to them if you don’t do your job.

The Swallow is a pretty fun idea. And I could see this being made. But you need someone to come in and rewrite these characters. Right now, they’re not enough.

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

What I learned: Don’t describe a character in a way that you can SHOW the character. One of the characters here is described as “quick-witted.” Why would you tell us that? Just show us. The very first time somebody says something to that character, have that character come back with something quick-witted. Boom, you’ve done your job. We now know they’re quick-witted.

Out of the office today, everyone. :) Couldn’t leave you totally hanging, though. So here’s a tip you can integrate into your script RIGHT NOW. That’s right, I want you to go write a scene as soon as you’re done reading this.

TIP: One of the easiest ways to write a a good dialogue scene is to give us one character who doesn’t want to talk and one character who does. Resistance creates conflict. Conflict drives dialogue. We saw this to the extreme in yesterday’s review, where the podcaster at the beginning of the movie wants to talk to Michael. But Michael doesn’t want to talk to him. Personally, I think this is more fun if the secondary character does some talking. But go ahead, try it out. You usually get a good scene out of it.