Today’s script would’ve easily won Tagline Showdown!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends find their lives disrupted after experimenting with a new drug that first makes them hear something, then see something, then become hunted by something.
About: This script finished pretty high on last year’s Black List and comes from new screenwriter, Sean Harrigan.
Writer: Sean Harrigan
Details: 110 pages

Halle Bailey for Shae?

I would say that if everyone in Hollywood were told that they could only market one genre and their paycheck would depend on those movies doing well, they’d choose Horror. Cause Horror is the most dependable genre in the business.

With that being said, there still seems to be an underlying ignorance to which of these films is going to do well and which will do poorly.

Big marketing campaigns were put together for Immaculate and The First Omen and both of them tanked.

Whereas this nothing little Australian horror film, Talk to Me, comes out of nowhere and becomes a mini-hit.

What gives?

The answer is more complicated than I’d like to admit. I know that the studios test all their horror movies ahead of time and if they get a certain score, they release them theatrically. In essence, they already know if the movie is going to play well. This is why Talk to Me got a wide release. Cause they saw how well audiences were responding to it.

But then you have stuff like The First Omen and Immaculate, which the studios had decided they were going to release wide even before they made them – one because of its rising star and the other because it was a franchise – despite the fact that their test screenings told them they were duds.

Whenever I get confused, I go back to basics. Come up with an original idea and then write a script that exploits that idea as much as possible. That’s why I loved The Ring. That’s why I loved The Others. That’s why I loved The Orphanage. That’s why I loved the original Scream.

Does “First You Hear Them?” achieve this? Let’s find out.

24 year old Shae Howland is so focused on dealing with her mother’s struggles with addiction that she hasn’t been able to begin her post-college career. In the meantime, the African-American aspiring nurse spends her nights with her Filipino roommate, Poppy, and gay Mexcian best friend, Javier (talk about a writer who knows what the Black List wants) spend their nights going out and having fun.

One night, while out at the club, the group tries a new drug – a sort of mangy brown pill. The clan has no idea where the drug came from or what it does but who cares!  They’re young and invincible. It turns out it doesn’t do much. They get an average high, dance around, then everyone goes home.

But the next morning, Shae starts hearing a tapping noise, like someone nearby is tapping on a window – this, even when Shae’s nowhere near a window. The others confess to hearing the same thing but when they take another of the mangey pills, the sound goes away.

Soon, Shae’s ex-boyfriend Carson (cool name) comes into the mix. He seems to have a beat on this new drug and tells everyone that they have to keep taking the drug. “Or else what?” Or else they’ll not just hear them, they’ll see them. And if they don’t take the drug again, they won’t just see them, they’ll be hunted by them.

Carson tells the group that they need to secure more  pills. Unfortunately, they’re expensive. So everyone’s going to need to get as much money as possible out of their bank accounts ASAP. Cause if they don’t get product soon, they’re going to move into the second phase (“Then you see them.”). From there, they’re only hours away from entering the third phase, which is when these things come after them. Once that happens, it’s game over.

In the upcoming weeks, I’m going to be placing a lot of focus ON DIALOGUE. I just wrote a book about it. It’s fresh in my mind. So I want to explore when writers excel at dialogue and when they falter.

If you’ve read my dialogue book, you know that I say, every single decision you make BEFORE you write your script is going to affect the dialogue. That includes genre. If you remember, I point out that Horror is one of the “non-dialogue-friendly” genres. It’s not known for birthing good dialogue.

So you already have an uphill battle ahead of you.

However, I also point out that if you’ve got a young cast, you can supercede this issue. People between the ages of 14-25 tend to have more colorful creative conversations. They’re using slang more often. They’re more playful with each other. And when you have younger characters, you’re looking to be more creative with the dialogue in general.

So I was disappointed with the lack of memorable dialogue here. It was all standard stuff. Not a single character had any unique identifiable phrases they used (something I talk about in the book). Every conversation was used strictly to push the scene forward and nothing more. Which is exactly what I told you not to do. You have to add some flair! You have to entertain, not just exposit.

Here’s an example on page 20.

Note that the only purpose of this dialogue is to get to the next scene. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. It is a scene fragment. Not a scene. It’s almost impossible to create good dialogue from scene fragments. The dialogue doesn’t have a chance to grow.

The only scene in the entire script where the dialogue is actually built to entertain is in the scene I’ll use for today’s “What I Learned.” But even that scene didn’t milk the dialogue for everything it could’ve been.

To be fair, as I said in the book, Horror is not built for dialogue. Every genre has the thing that it’s best at. Horror is best at scaring. So all that really matters is, does the script scare us?

It does. Just not enough.

The script leans almost too heavily into its premise in that the first rule (“First you hear them”) of the three doesn’t allow for a whole lot of scariness. We don’t even get our first “SEE THEM” moment until more than halfway into the screenplay. That’s a looooong time to wait to be scared.

That leaves the first 60 pages as basically “sound scares.” Are you scared by sounds? I suppose if I thought those sounds could turn into a killer monster, I might be. But here, I just felt that the sounds were annoying. It’s annoying that I want to brush my teeth but I have to hear tapping while I’m doing it. My preference is a non-tapping teeth-brushing evening.

Of course, once we get to the SEE THEM part, it gets scarier. And there is this naturalistic suspenseful arc to the game. Sort of like how, in The Ring, we knew that in 7 days, we were screwed. Here, we know that, after we hear them, after we see them, they come for us. So that suspense somewhat makes up for the inactivity.

I just wanted more to happen.

And it goes back to the dialogue. If your characters would’ve had more interesting conversations and weren’t muttering perfunctory things to get through the scenes, I would’ve been more entertained in the meantime. But if you’re giving me weak dialogue and no big scares for 60+ pages in a horror script, I’m going to complain.

I’m not saying this movie won’t be good. It’s got a great tagline (“First you hear them. Then you see them. Then they come for you.”). In fact, it would easily win Tagline Showdown this month. It even has a little depth to it. There’s a message here about how, when you become addicted to drugs, the high is your “normal.” So you have to keep doing drugs just to feel “normal.” If you stop, you descend into misery.

But I still gotta be entertained, man. And this script was only entertaining in spurts.

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

What I learned: In my dialogue book, I talk about the importance of situational writing. Situational writing is when you build your scene around a familiar situation that has rules, which, in turn, gives the scene structure. In one of the better scenes in the script, we see situational writing in practice. Our group, who is moving into the second phase of the rule (“Then you see them”), gets stopped by a couple of cops. Here’s how the scene plays out.

If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

I believe in fighting for the little guy.

I believe in giving non-traditional movies platforms to do well at the box office.

So I admire Jordan Peele using his muscle over at Universal to get them to give Monkey Man a 3000 theater release.

But the one thing I believe in more than anything when it comes to screenwriting is writing a story that people understand.

Cause it doesn’t matter if you’re a 300 million dollar Marvel movie or a 5 million dollar indie movie – if we watch your trailer and we’re not sure what your movie is about?

YOU’RE EFFED.

You are capital “E,” EFFED.

You can’t tell me after watching the Monkey Man trailer that you knew what it was about. It was all over the place. Which is why the movie barely cleared 10 million dollars on this, its opening weekend, despite getting the holy grail of movie release scenarios: 3000+ theaters.

Peele was trying to give Patel the same career-making break that he got: Make that passion project you’ve been slaving over forever, put it up on the big screen, and watch everyone come.

Except the only people who came were the people who visit sites like this or live in Los Angeles or run errands for busy agents at WME. No actual regular people saw this movie because they watched that trailer and they said, “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

Don’t believe me? What was the last big movie that released an “I don’t know what I’m looking at” trailer thinking everyone was going to show up and no one did? Beau is Afraid.

How did that movie do again? I’ll give you a hint. Nobody saw it. Why didn’t they see it? Because you watched that trailer and you had no idea what you were looking at.

All this ties back to screenwriting, guys. Come up with a strong, but also CLEAR concept. Make the story simple to understand. If you do those two things, people will read your script. People will like your script. People will want to make a movie out of your script. When that movie is finished and a trailer debuts, people will want to watch that movie. So, lots of people will show up for that movie.

It’s a very simple formula.

I’m surprised Peele, who’s been championing this movie, doesn’t know this. It’s the very reason everyone in the world knows his name. GET OUT was so easy to understand when you saw the trailer: White girl brings home black boyfriend to meet her rich white parents. We immediately understood that simple premise.

I’m sure a few people will chime in and give a couple of examples of complex weird movies that have done really well at the box office. Yeah, it does happen. But it happens an infinitesimally smaller amount of time because the only time those movies do well is when they’re AAMMMMMMAAAAZZZZING and, as a result, the word of mouth spreads. But they have to be perfect in their execution of what they’re trying to do.

So, yeah, if you think you’re capable of making one of the top 30 nontraditional movies of all time, then sure, write something super complex that can’t be conveyed in a trailer. But I mean most of those top 30 movies are top 30 out of luck. George Lucas had a million things go wrong in the making of Star Wars, obliterating his original vision of the film, yet that weird concoction of mistakes somehow resulted in a masterpiece. You just can’t plan this stuff.

But I’m getting off track!

The point is: Come up with a good idea, make it clear, and we’ll show up.

Funny enough, this is the exact reason why two other recent films did poorly at the box office.

We have The First Omen, which barely made 8 million bucks this weekend and then Immaculate, the Sydney Sweeney horror movie that did poorly a couple of weeks ago.

Both films have clearer premises than Monkey Man. But not by much. Note how there’s no way to tell what either movie is about if you just look at the posters. I’m not saying that your movie has to be picture-perfect-poster-clear. But it’s usually a bad omen (sorry, had to do it) if it isn’t. Cause it probably means there’s something not clear enough about your story.

Even the title of “The Omen” is weak-sauce. I see it and I’m not sure what it means or what the movie is about. That’s usually a bad sign. Then the trailer starts and, okay, someone gets pregnant with maybe a demon. And then the rest of the trailer is just scary images. Where’s the story?  What’s the endgame???

Remember that old Wendy’s commercial? “Where’s the beef?”

“Where’s the story?”

And then with Immaculate, you’re talking to the inaugural card-carrying member of the Sweeney Fan Club here. If there was anybody who was an easy sell to go see a Sweeney movie, it was me.

So why didn’t I go?

Cause I watched the trailer and I wasn’t clear what the movie was about after the nun gets pregnant. It seemed like she walked around a lot and, occasionally something weird would happen around her, and then she’d walk some more. That’s not a narrative. There is no story in that. If a trailer is having a hard time conveying the basic story, that’s a huuuuuuuge indication that the script is weak.

As much as it pains me to admit, the reason Godzilla x Kong is killing at the box office is because it’s so easy to understand in all three phases of what I discussed above.

The Title
The Poster
The Trailer

But let’s just say that you like to write more challenging offbeat stories. Are you screwed? No. Those stories are actually the ones that get screenwriters noticed. Cause all the readers in Hollywood are reading the same predictable stuff. So some offbeat subject matter with a challenging story is going to stand out, as long as it’s written well.

But that’s probably going to be the extent of how far the script goes. It will get you meetings, which may get you jobs, which hopefully gets your career up and running. But stuff like that rarely gets made into movies because, when it does, it loses people money, like Monkey Man is going to do.

Right now, at this very instant, Jordan Peele is having to make some very difficult apology calls. He’s the one who made Universal release this wide when they wanted to release it on streaming.

We’re going to be having this discussion all over again in a couple of weeks when Challengers comes out, the Zendaya tennis movie. You guys know I liked the script. It was unique. It was challenging. And, unlike most of these scripts, someone took a chance on it and it got made. Which is awesome for the writer.

But no one’s going to see it. Because nobody who watches that trailer is going to understand what it’s about. A sex triangle tennis story? Like, come on, man. I’m Mr. Tennis and I’m not paying to see that movie. I’ll see it on streaming. Which is my point. These scripts get you noticed. If you’re lucky, they get made and go on streaming, which gives you that IMDB credit, which helps start your career.

But if you want that 3000 theater release, you have to write John Wick. You have to write Bullet Train or Smile. Things that people understand in under five seconds.

It’s not a bad thing. Almost every story you’ve ever fallen in love with has been simple. You’re just adding to that legacy.

Two years in the making, the definitive book on writing dialogue is finally here. You can buy the e-book RIGHT NOW over on Amazon. Those of you who receive my newsletter already know this (if you want to sign up, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com). The rest of you? What are you waiting for? It’s only $9.99, which gets you an unheard-of number of dialogue tips. A lot of these tips are things you can start applying immediately to improve your dialogue.

If you’ve already purchased a book, go write a review. Love it or hate it, it helps! I want to share all this knowledge I’ve accumulated with as many people as possible. So go get it!

One more announcement. This month is Tagline Showdown. Every month, I do a logline showdown. You send in your title, genre, and logline for your script. I post the best five loglines on the site. People on the site vote for their favorite. The winning logline gets a script review the following week.

This month we’re adding a twist! In addition to the usual information, you’re also going to send in your movie tagline. A movie tagline is the fun line they put on the poster. For example, The 40 Year Old Virgin tagline is, “The longer you wait, the harder it gets.” Army of Darkness: “Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.” Memento: “Some memories are best forgotten.”

Start sending in those entries. Here are the details on how to submit!

What: Tagline Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Tagline
Competition Date: Friday, April 26th
Deadline: Thursday, April 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Week 13 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”

As I was ramping up to write today’s screenplay lesson, I stumbled upon a recent quote from Jonathan Nolan, who’s going through the press tour in the leadup to his new Amazon show, “Fallout.”

Nolan is the writer-director who made HBO’s Westworld.

A big topic of discussion around town is the condensing of television writing jobs because there have been too many shows and nobody’s watching most of them. So they’re cutting down shows and that means less jobs.

So everyone’s trying to learn LESSONS from this “Peak TV” period that just passed. And here’s what Jonathan Nolan had to say about it: “If the lesson was to ease back on complexity or weirdness, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”

I can’t emphasize how angry this quote makes me. Because Jonathan clearly doesn’t understand the difference between complexity/weirdness and making weak creative choices. He thinks, as long as he’s not making the obvious choice, that’s “good.”

But that’s only the first half of the equation. The second half is the quality of the choice itself. The choice actually has to be strong enough to create good story threads! It can’t just be different for different’s sake. The reason Westworld became unwatchable was not because it was too complex or too weird for the average viewer.

People stopped watching that show because the writers, which included Nolan’s wife, repeatedly made weak creative choices that turned the narrative into a slog.

Every story has a “work/reward” ratio to it. As long as the rewards are bigger than the work, we’ll keep watching. But the second the work we have to do becomes bigger than the rewards? That’s when we say ‘seeya.’ Which is exactly what happened with that show.

And this is when it struck me that there’s really only one lesson in the entire screenwriting skillset that matters. There’s only one thing you have to do. What is that thing?

MAKE THEM CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

That’s all that matters. The second the reader no longer cares about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, they’re out. Whether they physically stop reading or mentally stop investing, they’re no longer interested in your story.

Therefore, every creative choice you make in screenwriting should revolve around that rule: “Does this make the reader care about what happens next?”

Cause if it does, THEY WILL WANT TO KEEP TURNING THE PAGES.

That’s what we want them to do, right? We want them to keep turning the pages.

I’m sorry for being rude but when you’re talking about nepotism, a strong argument can be made that Jonathan Nolan is the biggest beneficiary of nepotism in all of Hollywood. And if I’m wrong? Prove me wrong. Who’s gotten more from less talent out of their Hollywood family connection?

But let’s get back to this concept because I want this to be flashing in your head whenever you’re writing. Whether it be now, in pages 81-90, or any section of the screenplay.

Does what I’m writing make people want to find out what happens next?

Obviously, there’s subjectivity at play here. But you’re better at evaluating weak creative choices than you think. One of the most common things that happens when I do screenplay consultations is I’ll send the notes back to the writer and they’ll say to me, “I had a nagging feeling that this was a problem but I needed to hear it from someone else.”

You know. You always know when you make a weak choice.

What do I mean by weak choices? Well, let’s talk about a key choice that affects the end of a classic script, since that’s what we’re talking about today. Did you know that in the original Back to the Future script, the time machine was a stationary refrigerator in a junkyard?

In subsequent drafts, they turned it into a car.

I want you to think about those two creative choices for a second. Because each version leads to vastly different story endings.

In one, our characters have to run back to a junkyard. How interesting is that?

In another, they have to meticulously time a time machine on wheels to hit 88 miles per hour at the very second that a lightning strike occurs.

It’s the creative difference between night and day.

That’s what strong creative choices can do for your screenplay.

I was just talking to a screenwriter about this. Their ending was pretty good. But it didn’t push the envelope enough. The stakes didn’t feel big enough. The obstacles didn’t feel insurmountable enough. The goals felt sufficient but far from exciting.

The ending is where you have a chance to create MAGIC. You’ve been writing this entire story for this moment so don’t get careless here. This is where you have to land that triple axel. And it starts with writing creative choices that make your ending EXCITING and not just a copy of the endings you’ve seen before.

Cause when I look back at Back to the Future, I never saw an ending like that BEFORE. And I’ve never seen an ending like it SINCE.

All of this is to say that you’re trying to come up with bold exciting creative choices that MAKE US WANT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

So what does happen next in pages 81-90, since those are the pages we’re on now? As we discussed last week, this is your MOMENT OF DEATH.

In a 110 page script, somewhere between pages 82-86, THERE MUST BE DEATH. I think Blake Snyder’s beat sheet calls this the Dark Night of the Soul? Whatever you call it, it’s got to be the second lowest moment in the character’s entire journey. The lowest moment will come just 15 pages later when they take on the bad guy and the bad guy seemingly defeats them. That will be their ACTUAL lowest point in the story.

But this one’s pretty darn close. The way you want to look at it is, this is the moment where the reader should feel like, “That’s it.” There are no other options. The hero has lost. This should be so convincing that EVEN THOUGH the reader knows there are 25 pages left, EVEN THOUGH seasoned moviegoers sense there are still 25 minutes left, you’re SO CONVINCING in this moment, that we truly think it’s over. If you can achieve that, you have NO IDEA how exciting your ending will be.

Because one of the secret tricks of screenwriting that makes readers feel something deep, is when you bring them ALL THE WAY DOWN and then you bring them ALL THE WAY BACK UP AGAIN.

I remember the moment I learned this lesson – although I didn’t understand it at the time. But when I first watched E.T. as a kid, and E.T. dies in that end of the second act moment… I don’t know if I’ve ever been more devastated in a theater. I was a wreck. So when they then brought him back to life??? That rush I got from going all the way from the depths of story misery to the peak of story euphoria – I wouldn’t be surprised if that feeling I had that day had something to do with me pursuing this art of storytelling. Because I wanted to learn how to make other people feel that way.

So figure out how to bring your hero down to his lowest low. It could be the death of a close family member or friend. It could be their own death. Or it could just feel like there are no other options left. I highlighted Life of Pi last week and that’s a good one. There’s this moment late in that movie where their sails are broken and they’re in the middle of the sea and they’re starving and they’re dehydrated and it’s clear that there’s no one who’s going to save them.

You kind of have to be a sadist in this moment. You have to be cruel to your heroes. To TRULY set the tone of how destitute they were, the writers of Life of Pi added a distant cargo ship. Their LAST HOPE. And they watch helplessly as it chugs on, never seeing them. Think about how hopeless you would feel after that moment.

That’s what you want to do to your heroes at the end of the second act. And that’s the same feeling you want the reader to have. That’s your pages 81-90 homework. :)

JUST TWO MORE WEEKS LEFT!

And then we move on to our rewrite strategy. :)

Genre: Horror
Premise: Monsters that roam in daylight keep a small, rural family confined to a nocturnal existence, but when their son starts to question the monsters’ existence, the entire balance of the family is thrown off.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 8 votes. Screenwriter Nick Hurwitch is the winner of the Nate Wilson Joie de Vivre Award from the UCLA Professional Program and the Austin Film Festival Pitch Competition.
Writer: Nick Hurwitch
Details: 107 pages

Sometimes I think that coming up with movie ideas is the hardest thing to do in the world. Because there seems to be this balance you have to hit that’s so precise, even if you’re a millimeter off, the idea falls apart faster than a Jenga puzzle on a Roomba.

That balance includes coming up with a concept similar to what we’ve seen before. But also is JUST UNIQUE ENOUGH that it feels fresh. And the crazy thing is that you don’t always know if it’s hit that sweet spot until it’s released into theaters.

No movie encapsulates this better than M3GAN. Extremely familiar concept – Kid buys a spooky toy that’s possessed. Then all they did was turn the “possessed” element of the doll into AI. And the movie did gangbusters.

What throws everything off is that, every once in a while, a movie slips through that doesn’t do anything new, and then somehow does great at the box office. The John Wick script (for the original film) still perplexes me to this day. It’s about as basic a “guy with a gun” idea as you get. Those are the ones that keep me up at night.

Today’s script seems to bear some of this same DNA. Based on the logline, I feel like I’ve seen it before. Let’s hope that I’m wrong.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

At the beginning of our movie, we see a farming family having lunch outside and a monster peering through the nearby cornstalks at them.

Cut to another farming family, who’s waking up just as night falls. The mother of this family is Lynne, a nice kind woman. The father is Gary, an intense type who just wants to get work done. And then there’s 16 year-old Caleb.

The family lives in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters roam the land during the day. Therefore, humans can only come out at night. Which frustrates Caleb to no end. Cause he never gets to experience daytime.

Lynne gets a whiff of Caleb’s growing frustration and starts taking him outside in the mornings, when Gary is asleep. Caleb loves these 10-15 minutes of daylight and his mood shifts. He works harder on the farm. He does better with his studies. He’s happier overall.

But then two things happen. Gary finds out Lynne and Caleb are doing this and is not happy at all. And Caleb becomes more and more interested in what’s out there in the sunlight. Finally, Jeanine sneaks Caleb down to the barn and reveals the truth to him (at the script’s midpoint).

She shows him a meteor that they built the barn over – a meteor that carried Caleb here from the stars. They weren’t saving Caleb from monsters. CALEB IS THE MONSTER. When he’s in sunlight for too long, he grows into a human-tree-like thing with superhuman abilities.

Confused about this new identity, Caleb escapes into the world, where he runs into humans. When those humans try to attack him, he has no option but to fight back. He ends up badly injuring a local man and now that man’s family wants revenge. And they know where the monster came from.

I went from meticulously analyzing the choices in the early part of this script to getting completely lost in it. That’s what a good script is SUPPOSED to do. It’s supposed to make you forget you’re reading a story, whether that’s someone like me, who reads for a living, or someone who reads for enjoyment. The goal is to get the reader to forget they’re reading.

This script did that for 53 pages. That’s when the twist arrived. And it was a good twist! I wasn’t expecting it.

But here’s the problem when you introduce a radical twist at your midpoint. Yes, you create a surge of excitement within your reader. But you also burn the bridge that brought you over into this half of the story. Cause nothing that happened before this twist matters anymore.

You’ve reset your story so you have to come up with a new engine. Now that we know Caleb is the monster, what is this story about? Hurwitch comes close to getting it right. But he makes a big mistake. He goes all in on the “Wacky Aunt” character.

This wacky Aunt/nurse thinks that Caleb was sent here to save the planet — re-plant it or whatever. We’re not interested in that. We’re more interested in the Frankenstein angle of this story. You’ve got this local group of rednecks, one of whom Monster Caleb nearly killed, determined to get revenge.

That alone would’ve been enough to power the second half (them trying to find where this monster lived and then attacking). But if you wanted to, you could’ve grown that group and added 50-100 townspeople and now you’ve got a mob chasing Monster Caleb. That’s all you need. That will give you your second half of the movie.

The Aunt Wackadoodle plot wasn’t script-destroying. But it just wasn’t the right creative choice. Which is one of many hard things about screenwriting. You have to make these crucial creative choices throughout the script and the closer you get to the ending, the more those choices matter. Cause if you don’t make the right ones, we start losing interest during the most critical part of the story. The ending is when you need us obsessively turning the pages, not curiously turning the pages.

I’m Mr. Big Midpiont.

Because what a good midpoint does is it makes the second half of the movie feel different from the first half. That’s exactly what Sundown does. It’s two completely different stories.

However, you can’t come up with a plot-changing midpoint like this unless you have a GREAT plan for the second half of the script. It can’t be one of those scenarios where you shrug your shoulders and say, “I’ll figure it out somehow.” No, you need a plan.

Because the first part of this script was really good. It’s powered by two big story engines. One, the question: Are the parents being truthful with Caleb? And two: Caleb’s conflict. Whenever our hero is stuck in a place they don’t want to be in, it creates this underlying tension that drives the narrative since we know that conflict needs to be resolved.

Once those two story engines are jettisoned by the midpoint, what are you replacing them with? An annoying Aunt who wants to use Caleb’s powers to save the world. I guess that’s technically a story engine because it’s a goal. But we have to care about the character with the goal in order to be interested in the pursuit of that goal.

Then you have this family that wants to kill Caleb. That’s a real story engine but it’s not pushed hard enough. It feels too casual.

But, with all that said, this script still has more good than bad. Hurwitch does a really nice job with the mystery aspect of the story. He integrates a lot of compelling flashbacks that add more fuel to the mystery. And he makes us think he’s going in one direction (the parents made the whole monsters thing up) to then using that against us, pulling the rug out from beneath our feet, and giving us this great reveal. That alone is worth a “worth the read.”

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

What I learned: Making gigantic thematic statements in your script (i.e. about race, about climate crisis, about the 1%) is not something you can do casually. You have to go all in and make your entire movie about that. You have to meticulously weave all of that stuff into every part of the story and characters. Because if you try to make some statement about the climate crisis in your script, it’s not going to affect us if it’s half-baked. This whole thing about the Aunt and him being half-plant — there wasn’t nearly enough there for us to understand the point that was being made. I bring this up because I see it quite a bit in scripts. Focus on telling a great story first. If you want to go that extra mile and make some grand statement about the world, that’s fine. But understand that it is going to be AN EXTRA MILE. It’s not going to be 8 or 9 feet. Which is the length of effort that most writers offer.