Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends get together in a remote cabin but their weekend of partying comes to an abrupt halt when a crazed woman wearing a broken ankle chain shows up at their door.
About: Today’s script comes from a new writer who made last year’s Black List with this script. The Unbound finished with 7 votes. For those of you wondering where the script would finish on my 2021 Black List re-ranking, I’d probably say around 48th, right behind Carriage Hill. So at about the same place where it was officially ranked.
Writer: Sam West
Details: 125 pages
The horror madness continues!
And when I say madness, I mean madness!
Today’s script started off like Friday the 13th and ended like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it possible for a script like that to work? Read on to find out, my hombres!
20-something Philly resident, Rachel, has had an unfortunate year. She’s lost both her parents. Therefore, she’s reconnecting with some old friends in the Catskills to get back into the world.
Her former best friend, Margot, is waiting for her at the bus station with Jay, Margot’s brother and an almost-once-flame of Rachel’s. The two have some sexual chemistry but Rachel’s still mad at Jay for ditching her when her mom got sick.
Margot and Jay drive Rachel up to a cabin in the mountains. This is where we meet financial bros Jimmy (fat) and Hunter (country club). We also meet Margot’s sorority sisters, Nicki and Brooke. Everyone’s drinking and getting ready for a meteor shower.
Finally, we meet Greg, Margot’s current boyfriend and the man she’s probably going to marry. Unofficially, Margot is looking for Rachel’s approval on Greg. Which she’s probably not going to get. Let me explain.
Late that first night, a decrepit woman in a broken ankle chain shows up at their door looking for help. Greg tells everyone he’ll deal with it. But then after he takes the woman into a private room, she ends up dying.
Rachel is veryyyyyyyy suspicious of this and lets everyone know it. After taking a quick walk to cool down, Rachel comes back to see that the house is on fire! She rushes upstairs to save Margot but Margot’s throat is slit. Huh?
Once back outside, everyone huddles together, trying to figure out what happened until, FWIT, an arrow pierces through Hunter’s face. And then also Brooke. Everybody runs into the forest, which, by the way, is freezing.
Once they get far enough away, Jay takes charge, convinced he can get them to a fire tower about a day’s walk away. But will they make it there before Crazy Greg catches up to them and arrows them all to death? Oh, and is Greg even their biggest problem out here? Might there be something bigger they must worry about??
When you read a lot of scripts, you start to see patterns.
Those patterns almost always result in certain outcomes. Sometimes they don’t. But usually they do. So when you see these red flags, an internal groan echoes within you because you know that the next 100 pages probably aren’t going to be very good.
What are these flags?
126 pages for a horror script? That’s a gigantic red flag.
A protagonist who melodramatically lost BOTH her parents, one to cancer and one to suicide? Huge red flag.
A meteor shower as your blanket “reason things start going crazy” device? That’s become one of the most cliched provocations for “crazy things start happening” I’ve come across over the last five years. I’m always seeing meteor showers in scripts.
Horror pages with this much text on them? Another big red flag.
Horror needs to be one of the easiest genres to read. There should be virtually zero effort on the reader’s part to make it through pages.
This was the opposite. It felt like you had to work to get through the pages. And that’s a screenwriting sin. As soon as if feels like work to the reader, you’re a crashed meteor.
Does that mean The Unbound is bad?
“Bad” would be an unfair adjective to describe the script.
Let me try to explain my frustrations with it, though. There are typically two types of horror movies. There’s the horror movie where a clear rule-set is introduced that the audience understands and, therefore, they can participate in and enjoy.
For example, zombies. We know the rules of zombies. You get bit, you turn into a zombie. It’s one of the reasons the genre is so successful. The rules are so easy to understand. Same thing with vampires. You get bit you turn into a vampire, you live forever, you crave blood. A little more complex but still easy to understand.
The second type of horror setup is when the writer comes up with a blanket provocation for horror that has no rules, and therefore anything and everything is allowed.
Writers, especially younger writers, love this because it allows them to basically introduce any horror scare they can think of. It’s like an endless playground of options to choose from. But, as a reader, or an audience member, these scripts feel like one gigantic slop-fest. Because without a rule-set, there is no logic to the horror. As a result, it always feels messy.
Here we have a meteor shower, a guy who hunts people down with arrows in the woods, we have our heroine being transported to another plane of existence, we have our characters running into mirror versions of themselves, but the mirror versions are dead.
I suppose if I was 16, I wouldn’t care as much about the shaky logic. But even when I was younger, I could tell the difference between a movie where the writer understood his mythology and crafted a really thoughtful story and the writer who just kind of made things up as they went along.
That’s what The Unbound felt like.
I think writers believe this wacky crazy approach makes their script unique. But it doesn’t. Because wacky crazy rule-less stories have their own cliches. I would’ve bet one my legs that they were going to end up walking in circles and appearing right back where they started. And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.
Because when writers don’t take the time to come up with rules and to really think about how the horror in their story operates, they lean on crutches. They lean on cliches. So if we’re in a forest, of course we’re going to end up where we started and everyone’s going to have a discussion about how “THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” – “There’s no way we could’ve ended up back here.”
I tell you, I read this stuff ALLLLL THE TIIIIIIME.
You need to do better.
You can’t trick screenwriting. There are no shortcuts. There are no backdoors.
Writing a story where you yourself don’t really understand what’s going on, and sort of hoping that the reader makes sense of your lack of effort. That is the surest way to a lousy script.
What’s interesting is that the writer does attempt to put together a character group we care about. After yesterday’s film (Friday the 13th), it was like walking into Bizarro World in how extensively we were getting to know these characters and their backstories. The first 40 pages is all character set up.
But that’s still a lesson to be learned. You can’t just take care of one area of your script. Scripts need every area to be solid. The concept, the characters, the plot, the mythology, all of it. If any section is neglected, the script feels weak.
Now, I admit that there are people out there who like these sort of vague mythology canvases, I guess because they like doing the work and filling in the logic gaps themselves. It’s why people like 2001. But I’ve always considered that film to be an outlier. When you don’t have a logical narrative and the movie works, that’s literally one of the hardest things to accomplish in storytelling. It can’t be replicated. Just ask Richard Kelly post Donnie Darko. I suppose, however, if you liked 2001, this is exploring similar territory, albeit through horror instead of sci-fi. If you like that sort of thing, you might like this script.
For me, I need logic. And I need to feel like the screenwriter understands every single part of his screenplay. I did not feel that here.
Screenplay link: The Unbound
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Horror scripts do need atmospheric writing. But don’t let the atmosphere take priority over the pacing. Even horror scripts that have slow builds need to move. There is no reason for your first big plot point – the girl with the ankle chain showing up – to happen 43 pages into the story. That needs to happen by page 30 at the latest. But I’d argue it should probably come at page 15. And there’s no reason that a horror script should be 125 pages. Absolutely none. Learn to shave your prose, get rid of scenes that aren’t pushing the story forward. And just, overall, it’s a screenplay, so lean into the philosophy: “less is more.”
Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of camp counselors prepping a previously closed down summer camp are hunted down, one by one, by a mysterious killer.
About: Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham loved the title “Friday the 13th” so much that, even though he hadn’t made the movie yet, he put a giant ad in Variety with the title and the sentence, “The scariest movie ever made,” just to see what would happen. Everyone immediately started calling him, wanting in. He eventually made the film independently and Paramount bought it. They released the film in May of 1980 and the rest is history.
Writer: Victor Miller
Details: 95 minutes long
I’ve never seen a studio sneakier than Universal this weekend.
They made sure NOBODY on the planet knew that Halloween Ends was playing for free on Peacock Streaming. I follow this industry obsessively and I didn’t even know until I opened up Peacock and saw it there.
I think Hollywood needs to have a discussion with itself about these reboots. I understand rebooting a movie. That works for me. Especially if it’s happening after a long layoff and they bring back the characters from the original movie that we love. That makes sense.
I also understand that if a brand new movie does well, creating a trilogy out of it. Everybody likes to see those characters on the first movie come back for more adventures.
What doesn’t make sense is this trend of combining the reboot strategy with the trilogy strategy. The whole reason we were so excited to see the reboot was for nostalgic purposes. We wanted to revisit those beloved characters after 20+ years. That all goes away if you make a sequel to that reboot two years later, and another one right after that.
Even if you only brought back the franchise and not the original characters, like they did with the original Jurassic World movie, the nostalgia factor has been neutralized by the time the second movie comes out. Which means that the second and third films in the trilogy feel, not just unnecessary, but downright irritating. We’re sitting there asking, “Why are you still making us watch this?? There’s zero reason for it to exist!”
Ah, but then the market laughs at me, pointing out that Halloween 3 just made 45 million dollars. I don’t begrudge the series for making money. You get yours. Especially when you have a movie that’s named after a holiday and you debut it two weeks before that holiday. There may not be a surer bet in the business.
But I mean, come on. Halloween Ends looks so bad that I’m not even going to watch it for free on Peacock. My time is too valuable.
With that said, Halloween inspired this weekend’s Horror Re-Watch. Back in the day, there were two masked horror characters that ruled the roost. They were Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. I’ve already reviewed the original Halloween on the site. So I went back and watched the original Friday the 13th this time.
If you haven’t seen Friday the 13th, it takes place at a summer camp called Crystal Lake. A group of teenage counselors have shown up to help get the place in shape for the impending camp.
The group includes the smartest girl of the bunch, Alice. The wily Ned. The eager Annie. Kevin Bacon, who was in every single 80s movie ever made, plays Jack. You also have Marci, Bill, and Brenda.
The teenagers are really horny so they spend more time swimming in the river than actually doing work. Once the night comes, so do the hormones, and the group splits up to hook up.
That’s, of course, when things get ugly. A killer is walking around the premises, looking for excuses to use his knife. He usually stabs his targets but sometimes gets creative, going so far as to shoot them full of arrows. We never see the killer because we’re always in his POV.
Eventually, everyone’s dead except for Annie. And when the previous camp runner’s wife shows up (spoiler), Annie thinks she’s safe. Until the woman reveals that her name is Mrs. Voorhees and her son was drowned here 20 years ago because counselors were too busy having hanky-panky to pay attention to him. And now she’s here for revenge! Annie must fight the crazy beeeyatch off and escape Camp Crystal Lake.
The thing about Friday the 13th is that it was blatantly inspired by Halloween. Halloween had just come out in 1978 and was a big hit. Friday the 13th said, “We can do that.” And they were right, as the film was also a big hit.
How close were the two franchise in their battle for eyeballs? About as close as you can get. Halloween made 213 million dollars at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Friday the 13th made 216 million dollars, adjusted for inflation.
So what did I think of the film?
Man, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts.
What I loved about the movie was the spirit in which it was made. The original Friday the 13th is the definition of getting a bunch of people together and making a movie for no money, figuring out the myriad of production challenges along the way, and just getting it done no matter what.
The movie is stripped bare of any level of sophisticated production and it definitely hurts the final product. The acting is so stilted at times, you get the sense they only had time for one take with every setup.
I think the thing that most disappoints me though is the writing. I would go so far as to guess they didn’t have a screenplay. I’m not exaggerating. There was ZERRROOOOO story here. The only times when it felt like something was written was the beginning, when they got all of the characters to the camp, and the ending, where they had to wrap things up.
Let me tell you an easy way to identify when there’s no script. When you set things up that you don’t pay off. So there’s this scene early on where the guy who’s running the camp tries to convince Annie to stay on longer. He then touches her hair in a creepy way before she heads off to get her work done. This moment gets a lot of attention yet is never paid off at any point. It was just some random one-off moment.
From there, it was a series of scenes where you isolated characters and waited for the killer to strike. There was literally ZERO thought put into these scenes. It was shocking, to be honest. I thought, “Wow, they didn’t even try here.”
But then I put myself back into my 13 year old brain and realized why this worked. There were two lines of suspense pulling every scene forward. One, your inherent teenage desire to see nakedness. And two, waiting for the killer to strike. Every scene was pulling double duty in that sense and, although the strategy is simple, it’s a very effective strategy for a 13 year old audience.
There was one big creative chance the movie took which paid off. Friday the 13th looked at that classic opening Michael Myers sequence (where Michael, as a child, kills his sister in POV) and said, “What if we did that the entire time?”
So our killer is only presented in first person POV all the time. We never see him. And this was an effective way to deal with the killings. Because it didn’t just heighten the kills, it kept this mystery going. Who was the killer??
That leads me to the ending which was shocking for a couple of reasons. Spoilers, of course. For one, I couldn’t believe that Jason wasn’t the killer! That it was his mom! They went full on with their inspirations, as the mom is some weird half mom half version of Jason, who’s in her head or something, making her kill people for questionable reasons. It was like a reverse “Psycho.” I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the choice. But it’s hard to be scared of an older lady killer who probably couldn’t last seven minutes on the treadmill.
But the biggest shock was that there was no mask!!!!! There was no hockey mask!! I chose this movie specifically to see that iconic hockey-masked murdering psychopath and I didn’t even get the mask!
So, if anyone wants to add a new question to their movie trivia archive, that question is, “When was the hockey mask introduced into the Friday the 13th franchise?” The answer is: NOT IN THE FIRST MOVIE.
Finally, the film has one last stand-out moment. Our heroine, Alice, has escaped the crazed Mrs. Voorhees and paddled down the river all night to safety and the sun is finally rising and the safe music is playing and we’re finally able to breathe and then JASON FREAKING VOORHEES THE KID SHOOTS OUT OF THE WATER and grabs her, pulling her into the lake.
That moment brought me back to the first time I watched the film and I remember the visceral reaction I had to it. It helped make the movie memorable. But then it turns out it was just a nightmare. Which was not cool. I wish writers would stop doing that in horror films. Oh, that’s right. They didn’t have a writer.
Friday the 13th looks like it would’ve been a blast to make. Sometimes I think about taking a month off and just going and making a low-budget horror film because they look so fun. With that said, I can’t recommend any movie that doesn’t have a screenplay. This is a screenwriting site for Heaven’s sakes! To do so would be blasphemy!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Suspense is an extremely powerful tool in the horror genre. This movie, which didn’t even have a screenplay, spawned a billion dollar franchise. How did it do this? Behold the power of putting people in danger and drawing out the suspense of when the danger is going to strike. It’s such an effective tool that it alone was able to power an entire feature-length narrative.
Where is Zendaya’s movie on this list??
It is time for the official RE-RANKING of the Black List. As we all know, at this point, the Black List ranking system is all over the place. It’s being manipulated by managers and agents. It’s promoting agendas that don’t include the quality of the script. It ignores scripts from seasoned writers with no clear delineation about who’s allowed and who’s not allowed to be on the list. We all have major reservations at this point. That’s not to say I think the list is irrelevant. There are still good scripts on it. They’re just not ranked correctly. Which is why you have me! I’ve read the scripts so I can tell you what’s good and what’s nowhere close to good. You can see the original rankings here.
There are twelve scripts on this list I haven’t read yet (Operation Milk and Cookies, Believe Me, Shania, Hello Universe, A Hufflepuff Story, St. Mary’s Catholic School Presents The Vagina Monologues, Lift, Sleep Solution, Thicker Than Ice, The Unbound, The Way You Remember Me, Ways to Hinder Winter). Eight of them I would rather lower myself into a boiling pot of water and die slowly inside, than read, so it’s safe to say they’d probably be non-factors on this list. But I will review a few more and, if anything is good, I’ll retroactively add it to this list. I’m excited to see what the true Top 10 looks like! We’re going from worst to best, here. Let’s get started!
59. Candlewood by Jason Benjamin and Jessica Granger
Logline: In 1992 a seaplane crash in a lakefront community sparks a relationship between three young sisters and the mysterious, injured female pilot.
Votes: 11
Original Rank: 27 (Tie)
Thoughts: This was one of the most baffling entries on the list. The story is so light and airy and devoid of conflict it’s almost as if it doesn’t exist. Everything from the random choice in time (set in 1992???) to the lesbian subplot that feels more like a ploy to get on the list than a genuine story choice, it’s one of those scripts you see on the list and just shrug your shoulders cause you have no idea why it got there above many more deserving screenplays.
58. Lady Krylon by Brandon Constantine
Logline: Two rival graffiti artists engage in a series of street battles, culminating in an otherworldy duel after the art starts bleeding into th ereal world.
Votes: 12
Original Rank: 22 (Tie)
Thoughts: To use an apt analogy, this script was like quickly scribbled graffiti art. It was so messy, I didn’t know what the artist was trying to paint. At the end of this script, the writer is making up mythology on the spot. Nothing is set up. It’s all random. I don’t now how this made the list.
57. Fiendish by Edgar Castillo
Logline: While meeting her boyfriend’s dysfunctional family at their ancestral manor, a young woman finds herself entangled in a bizarre and terrifying mystery when the family’s patriarch claims to have been cursed by a demon.
Votes: 9
Original Rank: 39 (Tie)
Thoughts: A horror script without enough original scares and without enough scares period.
56. Whittier by Filipe Coutinho and Ben Mehlman
Logline: While looking into a client’s murder, a Los Angeles social worker stumbles on a political conspiracy in the wake of the 1987 Whittier earthquake.
Votes: 15
Original Rank: 12 (Tie)
Thoughts: I remember reading this logline and thinking, “This is either going to be a huge miss or great.” Cause it wasn’t your typical setup for a movie. I liked that. But whenever I see these loglines with pieces that don’t organically connect, it almost always bleeds into the screenplay itself. And that’s what happened. It had a “Chinatown written by a first-time screenwriter” vibe to it.
55. Loud by Whit Brayton
Logline: A famed experimental musician finds himself embroiled in the race to solve Earth’s primary existential threat: A deafening sound that never stops, forcing all of humanity to survive in silence.
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Thoughts: Nooooooo! I was so looking forward to this script. It had one of those newish high concept ideas I’m always looking for. The big critique I had for this one was that it was unsophisticated. And it’s trying sooooo hard to be the opposite. So every time it tries, it shines an even brighter light on how it’s failing. It didn’t feel like the writer had enough life experience to know what he was writing about.
54. It Was You by William Yu
Logline: With the future of Manhattan’s Chinatown at stake, a stubborn store clerk battles against an innovative CEO’s expansion plan, while both are unaware they’ve been falling in love with each other on a new, anonymous dating app.
Vote: 9
Original Rank: 39 (tie)
Thoughts: The Shop Around The Corner or You’ve Got Mail but not nearly as good. Wonky rule-set that doesn’t really make sense.
53. Skeleton Tree by Paul Barry
Logline: When an accident sinks their boat, two teenaged boys must learn how to survive the wilds of the remote Alaskan coastline, endure one another, and to come to terms with a long-held life-altering secret.
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: If the central relationship in your story isn’t working, nothing will work. And the central relationship between these two boys didn’t work. With that said, if you liked “Mud,” you might want to check this out.
52. The Dark by Chad Handley
Logline: When stranded on the far end of Manhattan by a mysterious city-wide blackout, a group of inner-city middle schoolers must fight through seemingly supernatural forces to make their way back to their parents in the Bronx.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: A lot of you rightly pointed out that this was, basically, Attack the Block. Writers make this mistake all the time (especially young ones). They inadvertently rewrite their favorite movie. They’re so blind to it that they can’t see it. But we all do.
51. Killers and Diplomats by John Tyler McClain and Michael Nourse
Logline: The true story of the murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 and the low-level American diplomat who teamed with his most dangerous informant to smoke out their killers. Based on Raymond Bonner’s work for The Atlantic.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: This script was just a big fat bummer. It never felt like a story that needed to be told. I’m not going to say, “who cares” about these women. But what’s the point of telling this story in 2022?
50. Indigo by Ola Shokunbi
Logline: An art thief who takes priceless objects from museums and private collections and redistributes them to their original countries of ownership is tracked by a dogged FBI Agent across the globe.
Votes: 11
Original Rank: 27 (Tie)
Thoughts: A James Bond wannabe with an art thief as its protagonist. Not the worst idea but this was a 747 plane that never got off the ground due to its faulty premise logic about stealing paintings from one museum and giving them to another. It’s like that script you write when you’re 22 and know nothing about how the real world works. You make up your own world rules which is fun as heck until you start sending the script around and people look at you cross-eyed. Although I guess this did get 11 votes.
49. Cauliflower by Daniel Jackson
Logline: Under the cruel guidance of a mysterious coach, an ambitious high school wrestler struggles to become a state champion while battling a bizarre infection in his ear that both makes him dominant in his sport and threatens his sanity.
Votes: 32
Original Rank: 1
Thoughts: The only thing I remember about this script was how messy it was. Just a year earlier, there was a great script on the Black List called Magazine Dreams that covered a lot of the same territory. And Magazine Dreams was smart, specific, sophisticated, and had a strong voice. It showed how these scripts *should* be written. We didn’t get anything close to that with Cauliflower, which felt like the low-rent version of Magazine Dreams.
48. Cruel Summer by Leigh Cesiro and Erica Matlin
Logline: During the summer of 1998, five camp counselors accidentally kill a stranger in the woods.
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: A way too thin script with way too few laughs.
47. Carriage Hill by Emi Mochizuki and Carrie Wilson
Logline: A pregnant couple hoping to start their family in the suburbs find themselves embroiled in a decades long mystery which threatens to shatter their American dream.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: I love movies where people move into mysterious new communities and weird things start happening so I was kinda into this. But eventually things just stopped being believable.
46. Rabbit Season by Shanrah Wakefield
Logline: Supernatural horror about a woman stalked through a dark city park by the most monstrous manifestation of manhood during her walk home from her high school reunion.
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Thoughts: I barely remember this one. But from what I do remember, it felt unrealistic that the main character was stuck in the park the whole movie. If you’re going to set up a movie dependent on its rules, those rules need to be rock solid. These were not.
45. The Devil Herself by Colin Bannon
Logline: When an elite assassin is sent to the haunted Harz Mountains in Germany on an extraction job she intends to be her last, she quickly learns that the local legends about witchcraft are true and must face a sinister supernatural threat.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: Annnnnnd…. ACTION! And more action. And more action. And more action. The Devil Herself never slows down. And, ultimately, we can’t keep up with it.
44. Wheels Come Off by Kryzz Gautier
Logline: In the year 2065, a fiery teenager with a wild imagination, her paraplegic mom, and their clueless robot struggle to navigate the post-apocalypse; but when the mother’s wheelchair breaks, the trio must venture out into the dangerous “outside” for a chance to survive.
Votes: 11
Original Rank: 27 (Tie)
Thoughts: If this logline were a piece of jewelry, it would be one of the shinier ones on this list. Zany “out-there” concepts are fun to write. They really are. But I often feel they’re more fun for the writer than the reader. And that’s probably how I’d categorize this one. Kudos for giving us something different. But it’s ultimately too weird.
43. Sandpiper by Lindsay Michel
Logline: Still reeling in the wake of her husband’s death, master thief Viola Crier signs on to a risky, last-minute job set to take place inside a man-made time loop, but as the number of loops increases, the job begins to spiral out of control
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: As I helped develop a time loop script once, I can confirm they are some of the hardest concepts to pull off. There’s a lot of rule-setting that needs to happen and this script didn’t do its homework. I just remember this being big and cumbersome and confusing. It didn’t work for me.
42. Killer Instinct by Lillian Yu
Logline: After a Hollywood assistant is publicly fired for admitting while on a conference call that he’d love to kill his boss, he finds his boss dead in the office the next morning and goes on the lam to figure out the real culprit, all while being hunted by his boss’s assassin.
Votes: 23
Original Rank: 4
Thoughts: It’s never a good sign when I have to go back to the review to remember what happened. But after skimming the review, I immediately remembered my big problem with this script, which was that the writer wasn’t following the right protagonist. That is Screenwriting 101 so that failure meant this script didn’t do well with me.
41. The Masked Singer by Mike Jones and Nicholas Sherman
Logline: Mickey Rourke loses his mind after he’s forced to take a gig on television’s highest rated show: The Masked Singer
Votes: 12
Original Rank: 22 (Tie)
Thoughts: What I remember most about this script is that I thought it was going to be funnier. This happens a lot with comedy. You’ve got these really funny loglines. Which means you gotta deliver the funny in the actual script! This was still not bad, though.
40. Go Dark by Josh Marentette and Spencer Marentette (newsletter review – e-mail carsonreeves1@gmail.com to join!)
Logline: A team of black-ops soldiers use an experimental technology to travel into the afterlife and rescue their dead teammate.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: Oh how I was looking forward to this one. I saved it. Savoring that I had it in my back pocket for a tough day. This is a movie premise and then some! But this felt like a first draft. It was like Inception with all its cool imagery. But that imagery hadn’t been carefully woven together yet. In my estimation it’s at least 10 drafts from nailing its execution. Not a quick fix by any means.
39. Four Assassins (And a Funeral) by Ryan Hooper
Logline: The Adoptive daughter of a legendary assassin returns home for his funeral… and finds herself in the crosshairs of her four highly trained, highly dangerous siblings.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: One of the better titles on the list leads to a fairly decent script. I always admire writers who can tell you exactly what their move is in the title, and this does that.
38. Michael Bay: The Explosive Biopic by Sean Tidwell
Logline: Packed with enough C4 to split an asteroid in two, this tell-all Michael Bay origin story reveals the explosions that defined him, the fire that ignited his little heart, and the fate that sealed his Hollywood destiny.
Votes: 12
Original Rank: 22 (Tie)
Thoughts: In retrospect, this script had a tough task. It’s doing a biopic as a comedy. The comedy was definitely the focus, though, and it wasn’t up to par. There were some LOL moments. But, when it comes to successful comedy scripts, the reader should be laughing out loud 30-40 times. I laughed out loud maybe five times here? Needs more laughs!
37. Worst. Dinner. Ever. By Jack Waz
Logline: An estranged father and son have to survive terrorists, explosions, and, most terrifying of all, dinner with each other.
Votes: 16
Original Rank: 10 (Tie)
Thoughts: If we were ranking these scripts on which are most likely to become movies, Worst Dinner Ever would probably be in the top 3. It’s a really fun premise. I just felt that the execution was predictable and the comedy wasn’t very funny. I still think this will get made. It’s a good enough premise that you hire a name screenwriter to rewrite it.
36. Idol by Tricia Lee
Logline: The true story of American Idol viral sensation, William Hung.
Vote: 9
Original Rank: 39 (Tie)
Thoughts: In retrospect, I was probably too harsh on this script. I detest biopics so much that just seeing that genre denomination can cloud my judgement. At least the writer came up with an unexpected subject in William Hung. And she does treat him like a real person and not like a joke. If I had to do it over again, I probably would’ve given this one a little more love.
35. See How They Run by Lily Hollander
Logline: A blind mother moves into a remote farmhouse with her young daughter, but the mystery of the home’s previous inhabitants intrudes upon her attempts to repair their relationship.
Votes: 30
Original Rank: 2
Thoughts: I barely remember this script. It’s got a pretty good concept, which I suspect is why it made the list. And with horror, as we just saw with “Smile,” you don’t need a whole lot to win over an audience. But I still felt like the writer didn’t do anything special with the premise. I was hoping for more.
34. Mimi by Scarlett Bermingham
Logline: A successful illustrator finds herself friendless after her best friend gets engaged, forcing her to embark on an epic quest to “date” for new girlfriends — as an adult.
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: A bit try-hard with the illustration component rearing its head into the story. It’s something I’ve seen before. And the best part of the premise, the “dating for friends” stuff, wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. Rallies late but doesn’t ultimately live up to its promise.
33. Divorce Party by Rebecca Webb
Logline: Patricia Ford feels pretty good about trading her South Boston roots for a “perfect” life on New York’s Upper East Side, until everything falls to shit and her raucous girlfriends throw her a Divorce Party at the home she’s about to lose. As the night goes from wild to totally insane, Patricia takes back control of her life.
Votes: 25
Original Rank: 3
Thoughts: What I’ll say about this script is that when I read the logline, I remembered the story. What you have to keep in mind with readers is that most scripts are forgettable. You literally forget 99% of what happened within 72 hours. Because there just wasn’t anything in them that stood out. So this script had to have had something about it if I remembered the whole thing. I suppose its success will depend on how they cast it. But it definitely has “the female version of The Hangover” vibes.
32. Bella by Chris Grillot
Logline: A young college student is forced to confront her family’s dark past when a mysterious stalker appears, derailing her life and sending her spiraling into a web of anxiety and paranoia.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: This script feels current, sort of like a cousin episode to Euphoria. Like, “What if we followed Maddy into her own movie?” If you liked Black Swan, you’ll love this.
31. Hard to Get by Dan Schoffer
Logline: After Amanda is seemingly ghosted by the man of her dreams, she’s delighted to discover he’s actually been kidnapped — and takes it upon herself to be his rescuer, going on an adventure of epic proportions along the way.
Votes: 9
Original Rank: 39 (Tie)
Thoughts: I always smile when I read this logline so that’s a good sign. And I could see this script fetching an A-list actress, which may make it look more desirable. But I just thought the same thing that I think for a lot of scripts I read, which is that the writer didn’t go to enough lengths to give us a fresh experience. I felt like I’d been here before.
30. Chicago For One by Madeleine Paul
Logline: Based on Robbie Chernow’s hilarious viral solo adventure, a newly heart-broken groomsman takes Chicago by storm celebrating a solo Bachelor Party Weekend after the rest of the party — including the groom — get stuck over 700 miles away
Votes: 9
Original Rank: 39 (Tie)
Thoughts: This is a cute idea. It’s a cute screenplay. But this reminds me of the movie “Tag.” They had a viral story that didn’t quite work as a movie but they made it a movie anyway. That feels like what they’re doing here. It’s an okay script but don’t go looking for anything more than that.
29. Max and Tony’s Epic One Night Stand by Thomas Kivney
Logline: A disastrous Grindr hookup goes from bad to worse when a meteor unleashes a horde of aliens on New York and the two ill-matched men must depend on each other to make it through the night alive.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: I commend the writer for coming up with a non-obvious LBGTQ story. I would watch this movie a million times over before I watched Bros.
28. Dennis Rodman’s 48 Hours In Vegas
Logline: Before game 7 of the NBA finals, Dennis Rodman tells Phil Jackson he needs 48 hours in Vegas. What follows is a surreal adventure with his skittish assistant GM that involves a bull rodeo, parachuting out of a Ferrari and building a friendship that neither one of them ever thought was possible but will end up solving both of their problems.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: This was a big spec sale! Of the comedies on the list, it’s probably one of the better ones. If you’re unaware of Dennis Rodman, it’s a pretty sweet ride. Cause he basically did a lot of this stuff for real. Okay, maybe he didn’t drive a Ferrari off a cliff and jump out in a parachute.
27. Ultra by Colin Bannon
Logline: When an ultramarathoner earns he is one of the ten contestants chosen to take part in a secret race known as “the hardest race on earth,” he is forced to confront his past when he realizes there are deadly consequences for breaking the rules.
Votes: 19
Original Rank: 6
Thoughts: Ohhhhhh! This one started off so good! And I loved the big concept. The mythology gets dicey at the end, though. When you’re building that mythology into your script, stay away from “absolutely batsh#t insane.” It sounds good in theory but it’s just going to leave your audience scratching their heads. This should be a good movie though.
26. The College Dropout by Thomas Aguilar and Michael Ballin
Logline: A young Kanye West’s intimate journey to create his seminal first album that reinvented hip hop music.
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Thoughts: A testament to the writers that I didn’t hate this script. Probably because Kanye West is one of the most complex people on the planet. He’s such an oddball and he’s got mental issues and he’s a musical genius. I do think it’s kinda cheap to write a biopic about him because anyone can do that and get on the Black List. But this was pretty good.
25. Jellyfish Days by Matthew Kic and Mike Sorce
Logline: A young woman and her devoted boyfriend’s lives are dramatically altered by a medical procedure that could potentially quadruple their lifespans.
Votes: 11
Original Rank: 27 (Tie)
Thoughts: One of the more frustrating scripts on the list. It has some good moments, including a surprising twist around the page 30 mark. But its a heavy script that doesn’t give you enough to justify all the work you have to do ploughing through those heavy parts. If they could get another screenwriter on this to clean it up, it could be good. Right now it’s teetering between okay and good.
24. Barron’s Cove by Evan Ari Kelman
Logline: When his young son is viciously murdered by a classmate, a grieving father with a history of violence kidnaps the child responsible, igniting a frenzied manhunt fueled by a powerful politician — the father of the kidnapped boy.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: I remember this script for having one great jarring chase scene. Also, for successfully tackling a difficult setup. It’s good enough to check out.
23. The Fire Outside by Yumiko Fujiwara
Logline: Peter, a seventeen-year-old painter, lives with his controlling mother in a lonely house in the wilderness. When he meets a mysterious stranger, he begins to question the reality he was raised to believe, gathers the courage to leave his mother, and unveils the sinister truth behind his upbringing.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: It should be noted that I remember the details of this script intimately. Which is strange because I didn’t exactly like it. But if I’m remembering details this many months after reading a script, there must be something to it. Sure, we guess the twist fairly early on. But the way that twist is executed still contains enough uncertainty to keep us hooked.
22. *Weird by Augustus Schiff
Logline: An autistic kid tries to do normal college things — making friends, figuring out if girls like him, getting over his mom’s death — while seeing life in his own “musical” way.
Votes: 14
Original Rank: 15
Thoughts: This one caught me by surprise. I thought it was quite good and did a good job of taking us into the mind of someone with autism. I’ve read a lot of younger characters with autism. I’d never experienced an autistic protagonist in college though.
21. Homecoming by Murder Ink
Logline: Ten years after graduation, one of New York’s most eligible bachelors and his eccentric wanderlust wingman try to pull their recently divorced friend out of his rut by taking him back to Howard University’s legendary Homecoming for the best weekend of their lives.
Votes: 15
Original Rank: 12 (Tie)
Thoughts: The big thing I remember about this script was that it was super-fun. When you’ve got a simple premise, like coming back to your school for Homecoming Weekend, you need to be able to create good characters and write strong dialogue because the plot isn’t doing anything for you. So it’s up to the characters and the dialogue to do that work. Which this did.
20. Mr. Benihana by Chris Wu (newsletter review – e-mail carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get on!)
Logline: When a short Japanese kid from post-war Tokyo decides to make it big in the US of A, he discovers a winning recipe of exploiting his heritage with good old-fashioned American entertainment, to the great shame of his traditionalist father. This is the larger-than-life immigrant story of the OG daredevil playboy tycoon: the one-and-only Rocky Aoki
Votes: 16
Original Rank: 10 (Tie)
Thoughts: Look, I may not like biopics. And you may not like the fact that I constantly remind you that I don’t like biopics. But if your biopic is written well, I will respect it. And this was written well. It wasn’t mind-blowing but it has a unique character and I found it to be entertaining.
19. The Villain by Andrew Ferguson
Logline: The completely outrageous and completely true story of “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli — from his meteoric rise as wunderkind hedge fund manager and pharmaceutical executive to his devastating fall involving crime, corruption and the Wu-Tang Clan — which exposed the rotten core of the American healthcare system.
Votes 21
Original Rank: 5
Thoughts: Hey, have I told you I don’t like biopics? Luckily, this dude is a pretty interesting guy. I definitely think it’s braver to chronicle a villain in a biopic because it’s harder to make us care. So the writer gets points taking that challenge on. And the script does exhibit some voice. Not bad at all.
18. Apex by Jeremy Robbins
Logline: When an adrenaline junkie sets out to conquer a menacing river, she discovers that nature isn’t the only thing out for blood.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: This script keeps changing things up at just the right times in the story, keeping you interested from start to finish. It isn’t blazing any trails. But it travels the already-traveled trails quite well.
17. The Family Plan by David Coggeshall
Logline: A former top assassin living incognito as a suburban dad must take his unsuspecting family on the run when his past catches up to him.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: This is a great example of how to write a comedy spec. It’s all in the concept. If you get the concept down, it will do a lot of the work for you. Your uncle is a retired John Wick? I can imagine 10 comedic scenarios in a couple of minutes from that premise alone. So I wasn’t surprised at all, after I reviewed this, when it came together as a film, which will star Mark Wahlberg.
16. Abbi and the Eighth Wonder by Matt Roller
Logline: When a misogynist explorer meets his sudden (and violent) end, his long-overlooked understudy seizes the moment and embarks on an adventure that will earn her a place in the annals of history.
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: Very funny main character. Also some great supporting characters. This script takes on questions of feminism and misogyny in a lighthearted way. I feel like Black List scripts these days are designed to trigger you. This was the opposite. Which is probably why I liked it so much.
15. Follow by Michael Kujak
Logline: When a social media influencer meets a fan at a meet-and-greet, she’s so taken with her cleverness and vulnerability that she invites the fan to intern with her for the summer. At first, they’re an unstoppable team, but soon, the influencer is forced to wonder who she has let into her life.
Votes: 10
Original Rank: 32 (Tie)
Thoughts: This one was great. It really got the stalker-friend dynamic right. These scripts are all about building that central friendship that the reader knows is going to explode at some point. And it wasn’t a disappointment when the explosion came.
14. Blackpill by Alexandra Serio
Logline: Awkward and lonely, Jared is only able to find a community online — until the day he realizes that his favorite Youtuber lives nearby. Desperate for a connection, he becomes determined to find a way into her life… whether she wants it or not.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: A fun little stalker script that doesn’t quite go how you expect it to. Had the potential to be even better, though, if it went deeper into its main character’s desire for fame.
13. Hot Girl Summer by Michelle Askew
Logline: After witnessing a drug deal gone wrong, thirteen-year-old (and exceptionally awkward) Beatrice accidentally finds herself in the middle of an underground drug ring…and on the perfect route to having a proper hot girl summer
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Thoughts: An unexpectedly fun fish-out-of-water script. Does a good job of going right up the line but never crossing it. I described it in my review as Little Miss Sunshine meets Euphoria. I don’t know if that’s totally apt, but it does seem to exist somewhere between those two universes. And it’s funny!
12. Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel by Michael Shanks
Logline: A man wakes up trapped in a mysterious hotel room. All alone in a mind-bending prison, his only chance for escape is teamwork: with himself.
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Thoughts: Easily the hardest of all the executions to pull off on this list. So Michael Shanks gets credit just for making us care the whole way through. This is the ultimate trippy low-budget production that has a big enough concept to potentially break out. There are some really clever moments in here. This one surprised me.
11. Wait List by Carly J. Hallman
Logline: A troubled millennial from small-town Texas will do anything to get into her top-choice law school, including murder.
Votes: 19
Original Rank: 7
Thoughts: This was a good script! It reminded me a lot of Promising Young Woman, which I loved. It’s not as well written but it shares a common theme of making you think this is going to be some “all women are amazing and all men are terrible” scripts, but then making its female protagonist do more and more questionable things. It engaged with the gray area when all anyone wants to do today is live in the black and white. This was a good one.
10. From Little Acorns Grow by Laura Kosann
Logline: After a woman becomes one of the first female presidents of a 1950s publishing house in New York, she draws a former college classmate into her orbit, who soon finds her literary empire is not what it appears to be.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: This is one of a handful of scripts on the list that I thought I may have been too harsh on with my review. It’s basically one of those “chess match” scripts, where two people are playing each other. And the script does a good job of exploring that. It is slow in its second act, but its big third act makes up for it.
9. False Truth by Thomas Berry, Isaac Gabaeff, and Nathan Gabaeff
Logline: The life of a cynical San Francisco criminal lawyer at the top of his career unravels when he agrees to represent a father accused of killing his infant son in an extraordinary case that challenges widely accepted medical beliefs, a biased justice system, and his own personal worldview. Based on true events.
Votes: 7
Original Rank: 57 (Tie)
Thoughts: Easily the biggest surprise of the list. If you would’ve told me ahead of time that I would’ve been riveted by a true story about “shaken baby syndrome” I would’ve told you you were bananas. But it looks like I’m the banana here cause this was actually good!
8. Yasuke by Stuart C. Paul
Logline: The true story of the first and only African Samurai in feudal Japan who rose from being a slave for the Jesuits to fighting as a Samurai in the unification of Japan.
Votes: 11
Original Rank: 27 (Tie)
Thoughts: Ava Duvernay, who used to get sent every African-American project town, once said, frustratedly, “Not every story about the first black person in a situation is worth telling.” And that went through my mind when I saw this logline. But I was happy to be proven wrong. This is not only a good story, it’s a script where the writer clearly cares about the subject matter. There’s a ton of specificity here that draws us into this world. A very strong Black List entry.
7. Symphony of Survival by Daniel Persitz
Logline: The incredible true story of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich writing an epic symphony during the deadly World War II siege of Leningrad — a work of art so powerful it would save him and his family, all while helping to unite his people with the Allies.
Votes: 12
Original Rank: 22 (Tie)
Thoughts: I went back to this review recently and, after thinking about it, I probably gave it more praise than it deserved. If I remember correctly, I hadn’t read a good script in a long time so I was just happy to read anything that was good. In retrospect, the script probably needs more depth. But it’s still a really good story. When they’re stuck behind enemy lines with no way out and they’re starving… I felt it. I felt that pressure and that fear. So this is definitely worthy of being a top 10 Black List script.
6. In the End by Brian T. Arnold
Logline: In the near future, terminal patients are given the opportunity to go out with a bang with personalized VR “perfect endings.” But when the best Transition Specialist gets far too close to a patient, he finds himself questioning everything in his life.
Votes: 17
Original Rank: 9
Thoughts: I was surprised when I re-read this review and saw that I gave In The End an “impressive.” I remember liking it, but it’s hard to get an “impressive” from me these days. Maybe I was bowled over by the fact that someone finally mixed the oil and water genres (drama and sci-fi) together and it worked. Definitely one of the better scripts on the list.
5. Grizz by Connor Barry
Logline: A car accident strands a young paramedic in the rugged Pacific Northwest where she is hunted by a ravenous grizzly bear.
Votes: 15
Original Rank: 12 (Tie)
Thoughts: I love simple stories told well and this is the perfect example of that. There isn’t a ton of plot going on here. But the tension stays high throughout and we’re invested all the way til the last page.
4. Ballast by Justin Piasecki
Logline: A naval engineer and her crew find themselves trapped in a deadly game on a shipping vessel in the middle of the Atlantic when they learn a series of car bombs are hidden amongst the thousands of vehicles on board.
Votes: 8
Original Rank: 46 (Tie)
Thoughts: Easily one of the coolest concepts on the list. While I get what some people are saying about it being too serious and cerebral and not enough fun, I thought the writer did an ace job with the execution. Yeah, it does’t play like a Die Hard movie but that’s what I liked about it. One of the few scripts on this list that I was looking forward to and, which, also delivered!
3. Challengers by Justin Kuritzkes
Logline: Framed around a single tennis match at a low-level pro tournament, three players who knew each other when they were teenagers — a world-famous grand slam winner, his ambitious wife/coach, and their old friend who’s now a burnout ranked 201 in the world — reignite old rivalries on and off the court.
Votes: 9
Original Rank: 39 (Tie)
Thoughts: As a tennis guy, it took me a while to be able to imagine Zendaya as a tennis pro. The girl doesn’t have a single muscle in her body. And she looks clumsy as all getup. Tennis is a graceful sport. But, once I got past that, I really liked this. So much so that it grew on me in the weeks since. And I’m thinking we might actually get the first great tennis movie ever (and no, King Richard is not a great tennis movie).
2. Air Jordan by Alex Convery (newsletter review)
Logline: The wild true story of how an upstart shoe company named Nike landed the most influential endorsement in sports history: Michael Jordan
Votes: 13
Original Rank: 16 (Tie)
Actual Rank:
Thoughts: One of the most effortless reads on the list. Maybe any Black List. Damon and Affleck have been trying to make their Jerry Maguire for years. They finally have it in this script. A really fun main character. I expect this to be a great movie.
1. Mercury by Stefan Jaworski
Logline: When a first date takes a dangerous turn, down-on-his-luck Michael risks everything to save his newfound love from her past. Little does he know, the night — and his date — are not what they seem. Michael soon finds himself on a high-octane cat-and-mouse race across the city to save himself and uncover the truth, armed with nothing but his wit, his driving skills, and a 1969 Ford Mercury.
Votes: 18
Original Rank: 8
Thoughts: Whatever the current trend in town is, readers will always hate it. Because every time they open a script, they’re reading another script in that trend. This gives writers an opportunity, though. Whatever the trend is, write something different. That reader will be so happy to finally be reading something fresh for once. This was just a really fun smartly-written enjoyable read. It felt like a movie from the very first page. This is why I continue to love reading screenplays. Because, every once in a while, you run into a “Mercury.”
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Genre: Horror
Premise: An aging rocker with a hankering for death-themed items purchases an old suit online that is said to be haunted, as it comes with the ghost of the man it belonged to.
About: This is an early adaptation of one of Joe Hill’s books. With the recent success of Black Phone, there’s a good chance the book will be thrust back onto the Hollywood deal table. Joe Hill’s title was pulled from Nirvana’s song, “Heart-shaped Box.” Neil Jordan, who adapts today’s script, has won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (The Crying Game).
Writer: Neil Jordan (based on the book by Joe Hill)
Details: 129 pages – 2007 draft
Keanu for Judas?
This might be the weirdest adaptation choice ever.
Neil “Crying Game” Jordan adapting Joe “Black Phone” Hill?
This feels like something Shay Hatten should be adapting. Isn’t he the Stephen King nut? (Joe Hill is King’s son, for those who don’t know)
I don’t know if I’d say that Neil Jordan feels “too good” for this, cause he hasn’t exactly been lighting up the movie marquee lately. But he definitely feels like an out-of-left-field choice. I’m not sure what to expect. But maybe that’s a good thing! Let’s find out.
Judas Coyne used to be a big time rocker in a “Megadeth” type band. These days, however, in his 50s, he’s spending a lot more time at home than on the road. It’s at his large mansion that he hangs out with his former-stripper girlfriend, Georgia. He calls her Georgia cause that’s where they met.
Judas loves to collect things like torture devices and skulls – anything that has to do with death. So when his assistant, Danny, spots a “haunted suit” online, Judas tells him to buy it. Several days later, the suit shows up (in a heart-shaped box), and Judas doesn’t even get to sleep that night before seeing James Craddock, the ghost of the man who owned the suit.
Judas soon learns that Craddock is here to kill him. More specifically, he’s going to make Judas commit a murder-suicide with Georgia. Freaked out, Judas and Georgia try and burn the suit. But that doesn’t do baloney. Craddock keeps showing up and taunting them.
Judas eventually learns that Craddock is the father of a groupie he once dated. When Judas ended the relationship, the groupie killed herself. Craddock is here for revenge. The only solution Judas can come up with is jumping in the car with Georgia, driving to Florida, and confronting the dead groupie’s sister, who tricked Judas into buying the suit.
Along the way, they stop at Georgia’s aunt’s place. Her aunt is a medium and, during a Ouija session, the dead groupie possesses Georgia. What we learn is that the cause of the suicide is a lot more complicated than originally thought. The sister may have been involved in it. So off Judas and Georgia go, this time with more purpose, to confront the sister, and get Craddock off their back for good.
I’m going to be honest – when I first saw Jordan’s name on this project, a little voice in the back of my head said, “Looks like someone needed to pay off the mortgage.” This had all the makings of a paycheck job.
And for a good 20-30 pages there, I felt like those fears were confirmed. You see, one of the biggest traps in horror is the “wait around for scares to happen” approach. This is where you put your hero in a house or a building or a barn or wherever, and they just wait for scary things to happen for 90 minutes. There is no activity. Only re-activity.
That approach doesn’t work unless your hero happens to be stuck in the location. The Shining, for example. The main character has to work here at this hotel for the off-season. He doesn’t have a choice. And they’re in the middle of nowhere, as well, so he couldn’t go anywhere even if he wanted to.
This setup wasn’t like that. The main character, Judas, lives at this house. But he can leave whenever he wants. Now, the writers try to stave off that arrangement with the old “latch-on curse” rule. Even if Judas leaves, the ghost can follow him. But I’ve found that that doesn’t work. It still feels to the reader like we’re sitting around a house waiting for scary stuff to happen.
Luckily, Judas finally says, enough is enough, grabs Georgia, and says we’re going to Florida to tell this beeyatch (sorry, that’s just how we talk in the clink) to take her curse off him so Mr. Stanky Suit can be decommissioned.
It’s amazing what purpose and goals do for a story. Cause, within a matter of seconds, we went from a “waiting around” horror story to one with actual momentum and activity. The engine driving the story revved to life, as if it had been begging to do so the entire time. And now we’ve got ourselves a movie.
From there, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful character piece. Jordan and Hill cleverly weave this concept of Georgia being a stand-in for Florida (the suicide girl). Judas has had so many women throughout his life that they’re all sort of the same. So Jordan and Hill are making this interesting statement that all the women are basically Florida. They’re interchangeable. So Judas isn’t just making peace with this girl who killed herself because of him. He’s making peace with all the girls he heartlessly disposed of.
At first, I thought Jordan was a bad choice for this. Through those first 30 pages, we get major “serious writer guy” vibes. Horror requires an undertone of fun. We don’t go to horror movies to be miserable. We go to feel fear and then anxiety and thrills and scares. But ultimately, we have to feel like we had a good time. I wasn’t getting that movie early on.
However, the further along we got, the clearer it became that Jordan was trying to do something real. And that realness eventually won me over. That’s not say there weren’t scares. Craddock was a scary dude all on his own. But I was definitely more invested in Judas’s personal journey than I thought I’d be.
After I finished this, I couldn’t help but be reminded how tough a place Hollywood is. I know this was written in 2007 when Joe Hill wasn’t as big. But it was also written a lot closer to when Neil Jordan was big. So you still had an author selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter – and even WITH THAT PACKAGE, this movie still didn’t get made.
That’s why when you hear me say, “Your script has to be great,” I’m not kidding around. Because you’re not Joe Hill. You’re not an Oscar-winning screenwriter. So if they’re getting passed up, imagine how easy it is to pass you up, an unknown writer without any credits.
The only way to overcome that enormous wall is to write something so un-put-downable that people will climb that wall for you to get it to the other side. Make sure your bar is high with you concepts and make sure it’s even higher with your execution. Cause those are the two things you can control. Everything else is up to the screenplay gods.
In the end, whether this was a paycheck job or a passion project for Neil Jordan, he’s such a good writer, that he made it work. It’s definitely worth checking out. And I’ve included the script so you can do just that!
Screenplay link: Heart-Shaped Box
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to character development in a horror script, you want to make decisions on a script-by-script basis. If you’re writing something with a more dramatic slant, like today’s script, you probably want to have some character development. If you’re writing something with more of a comedic slant, like An American Werewolf in London, you don’t need as much character development. Ultimately, it’s up to you. Deadstream was comedic yet still had character development. Just make sure you avoid FORCED CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. If it feels like you’re adding character development to keep people like me happy, it’ll show in the finished product. If it doesn’t feel natural and organic to the character, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Today we get a pilot script from Hollywood’s newest golden child screenwriter
Genre: TV Pilot – 1 hour – Horror/Slasher/Sci-Fi
Premise: Set 15-20 years in the future, a group of high school kids ensconced in future technology are shocked when one of their friends is murdered, seeing as murder rarely happens anymore.
About: Today’s pilot comes from Hollywood’s screenwriting wunderkind, Shay Hatten, he who has basically taken over writing all the John Wick movies. He wrote this pilot in 2018 for the SyFy channel. They cast the show and shot a pilot but it was apparently so bad they didn’t go to series with it. Hatten was on my list of Top 10 future great screenwriters in Hollywood.
Writer: Shay Hatten
Details: 54 pages
We’ve got ourselves a Shay Hatten script today.
Hatten is known for his big energetic writing voice, which he definitely brings to today’s pilot. Hatten, who is not shy about his desire to emulate his hero, Shane Black, gives us all sorts of 4th-wall breaking action to digest in (Future) Cult Classic.
“If this scene doesn’t make every single person watching it vomit, I quit. Andy’s Dad’s guts have been, like, forking splorked all over the Goddamn place.”
Since I know some of you hate that writing style, tread carefully going forward.
The year is 2025 or 2030 — somewhere in that range – and 17 year old cool rebellious girl, Bree, is heading to her best friend, Andy’s, place so they can go to the first day of school together. The two are besties times a thousand, although you kind of get the impression Andy loves Bree.
Needless to say, he’s not happy that Super Cool Guy, Henry, has lowered himself from his cool guy pedestal to date Bree. We know this wasn’t easy because the social credit app the teens use has lowered Henry’s popularity out of the top 1%. Meanwhile, Bree and Andy are the two lowest-ranked students on the app, on purpose. They do bad things to stay at the bottom.
After a few oddly injected “Trump is evil” remarks that didn’t have anything to do with the story, all the students put on their virtual reality goggles, where they’re then transferred into a virtual environment, where their principal makes several announcements about the coming school year.
After this VR excursion ends, the principal tells everyone to meet him in the auditorium as he just received some devastating news (I can’t emphasize how clumsy this is – after the principal greets them in the VR world, he then says he wants to greet them in the real world, creating two scenes in what easily could’ve been one!). The principal then announces that one of the students (who we met earlier at a party) has been killed.
What we eventually learn is that some masked killer is running around killing people. It’ll be up to Bree and her friends to figure out who it is. Of course, they’ll also be hoping it isn’t one of them.
I’ve seen some bad ideas before. But this is up there.
A horror slasher story set in the future with the unofficial tone inspiration being Back to The Future 2. Who needs a regular horror show when you can integrate virtual reality, social credit apps, and hoverboards?
I’m sorry but horror and the future don’t mix.
Let’s not forget the last horror movie that tried to be futuristic. Demonic? Remember that masterpiece? There were a confirmed 13 deaths from the 100 people who went to see that movie in theaters. Cause of death? Boredom.
Horror is the one genre that gets better the further back in time you go. If you go back just 30 years, we couldn’t call anybody when we were in trouble. We just had to deal with it. That alone makes for horror situations that are a thousand times scarier.
I just watched Silence of the Lambs again (yes, for my dialogue book, in case you were wondering) and I was thinking that great scene where Clarice accidentally visits Buffalo Bill’s house couldn’t have been written today. Her boss would’ve called her to warn her. And, if she didn’t answer, he would’ve texted, which she would’ve checked.
But things get really scary if you go back 50 years, 100 years, 150 years. In those days, not only was everything spookier, but you were really on your own if you were stuck in a bad situation.
The badness of this pilot didn’t stop there, though.
It’s set 15 years in the future and we would occasionally flash back eight years to when Bree was a kid. So now we’re flashing back despite the fact that this show’s flashback is still our present’s flash-forward. It’s just weird. It twists your mind in all the wrong ways. You’re thinking about things that have nothing to do with the story itself, which means the suspension of disbelief is constantly being broken.
Shay was probably frustrated because he was trying something different here. And isn’t that what we’re told to do as writers? Be unique. Show a new voice. Find a different angle. Be subversive.
Then we do all those things and everyone’s like, ‘well that was dumb’ so we shrivel up into a ball and spend three weeks eating 5 dollar donuts from Slider’s even though they make your tummy hurt cause all the yeast is natural and therefore expands way further than all that fake yeast and you promise yourself you will never ever try something original or eat donuts again. You’re going to play by the rules from now on.
Look, I’m not telling you to play it safe.
But “different” is a dicier path. It has a much higher failure rate. That’s because if something hasn’t been tried already, it’s not because you’re the one genius who came up with the idea. It’s more likely because it’s been tried before and failed badly, so everyone forgot about it.
This begs the question, how does a writer recognize that they have a bad idea?
Well, the best way to find out is to poll the idea with people who have no connection to you. Put your idea here in the comments and see what commenters say. Don’t listen to the commenters who are your friends as they will likely be nice to you. Look at the people who you have no connection to. They’re going to be the most honest.
If the ratio of dislike to like is around 5 to 1, you’ve got a bad idea on your hands. Anything worse, you’ve got a really bad idea on your hands. You want to be closer to the 4 likes for every 1 dislike ratio.
But let’s say you’re private about your ideas and don’t want to post them on the internet. What then? If you truly want to figure it out privately, you need to be extremely honest with yourself. Start by asking, is writing this script like pulling teeth? Does every scene and moment feel forced? Do you dread writing the script because it’s always difficult to come up with pages?
Deep down, do you have this constant feeling that the story doesn’t work?
If so, you probably have a bad idea. I’m not going to go so far as to say this is true all the time. Some genius works are hard to write. But I think we all know, deep down inside, if something is working or not. And if you’re unsure, you always have me. You can get a consultation and I’ll tell you straight up, if you genuinely want to know, whether the idea works or not. You can even get a logline consult done BEFORE you write the script to potentially save yourself a lot of time.
Also keep in mind that you can pivot. You don’t have to completely abandon a script if you love the idea. Sometimes it’s a matter of changing the main character POV. Sometimes it’s about changing genres (from a slasher to a mystery, or a drama to a horror). Sometimes you haven’t unlocked the best angle to tell the story from yet.
When it comes to today’s story, it does start to come together a teensy bit towards the back end of the pilot. Once we start looking into Emily’s murder, there is a slightly fresh perspective we’re exploring this genre from – this idea that a murder has been committed in a world where murder has basically been eradicated.
But, again, the tone is so off here. The comedy and the horror don’t mix organically. You throw in the “Back to the Future 2” future speculation stuff (“Zoinks! There’s one of them hoverboarders!”) and it gets even jankier. The story just doesn’t know what it is.
And I could totally see this playing out when they tried to shoot the thing. I could see five actors playing five different tones. That’s how poorly constructed this mushy mythology is.
I struggled through this one from the get-go. I’m surprised I was able to make it through the whole thing, to be honest. It was that bad.
Script link: (Future) Cult Classic
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to comedy-horror, the comedy has to be organically built into the story. That’s why yesterday’s comedy-horror film, Deadstream, was so good. The main character was an annoying Youtuber. So that’s where all the comedy came from – him being one of those annoying Youtube personalities. When you’re just trying to add comedy to add it, cause you want to, you get today’s pilot. Everything feels forced.
OFFICER KIPPER
Peyton, the boyfriend. It’s his SnapStream feed.
MOSCOVITZ
Is that like SnapChat?
Kipper stifles a laugh. Moscovitz glares at him.
OFFICER KIPPER
Sorry, just– SnapChat was over ten years ago. This is totally different.
Ooph. This is what passes for humor in this script. Forced humor is the worst humor.
What I learned 2: Unless you have an amazing horror idea that needs to be set in the present, I highly suggest you set you horror script at some point in the past.
