Genre: Horror
Premise: A young teacher who’s recently moved into a small blue collar town tries to help a lonely boy, only to find out that he’s harboring something terrible in his home.
About: Antlers director Scott Cooper is on the verge of becoming the next big mainstream auteur. He’s got a really interesting resume, with movies like Black Mass and Crazy Heart, and most recently, Hostiles. It’s only a matter of time before he’s hired onto one of these mega-projects. And congrats to screenwriter Nick Antosca. His last movie, The Forest (a horror film with Natalie Dormer), wasn’t received well. To jump from that to this is a major coup. It’s the kind of jump that sets you up for those big studio gigs. A lot has been made over the years of how screenwriting is the one profession in Hollywood where people fail upwards. They have a box office bomb or a critically “rotten” film, yet they keep moving up the ladder. I see it the opposite way. How great is it that you can bomb with one movie yet, if you follow that up with a really good script, they don’t hold that previous movie against you? Antosca’s co-writer on this film, Henry Chaisson, is just coming into the business. Up until this point, he’s only written shorts.
Writers: Henry Chaisson & Nick Antosca (based on the short story by Nick Antosca)
Details: 95 pages (3/3/17 draft)
One of the things I’ve been telling you guys is that you can’t think linearly. It doesn’t work like that in this business anymore. Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forward, sideways to go up, and inside to make it back out. It’s why I wrote that article about fiction podcasts last month. And today we have an example of the buzziest version of that philosophy at play – short stories.
This is the 7th or 8th short story being turned into a feature this year. This is a legitimate way in, guys. I’m guessing this trend is rising because short stories are less of a commitment than scripts. In a world where everyone’s looking to cut time out of their day (as long as it isn’t the 2 hours they waste on the internet every morning), spending 20 minutes on a short story is a welcome break from the usual feature script commitment.
And the bar isn’t that high. I STILL can’t believe that terrible Mars short story sold. And it was like 800 words (a screenplay is 20,000). You guys are all capable of writing 800 words. Anyway, let’s check out if today’s short story fares better than that one.
Julia Grey is a 23 year old teacher who’s just moved into a small conservative poor town in the south. Like a lot of young teachers, Julia is full of hope and eager to change the tide of this place. She believes she can make a difference!
But the truth is, the kids who grow up here aren’t interested in learning anything. Kinda like their parents. The principal tells her as much. Your only job, he says, is to make sure they don’t light themselves on fire when they’re at school.
But Julia takes an interest in a young boy in her class named Lucas who is a talented artist. The problem is that he’s a social outcast and any attempt to communicate with him ends with him running out of the room. Julia senses there’s something wrong at home and decides to make a visit.
Lucas’s house is a disaster. It’s all boarded up. It’s rotted. It doesn’t take long to discover that Lucas doesn’t even live in the house. He lives in a tent out back. But if he’s living outside the house then… who’s living in it?
Even Julia’s not naive enough to find out on her own. But when she hears a child crying inside, she rips open the boards and runs in. What she finds are the corpses of two people on the floor, long since dead, a man and a child. It looks like the mystery of Lucas’s weirdness is finally solved. But not the crying child. That’s something Julia will find out about soon enough. You see, Julia just inadvertently released a monster…
This was a really well-written script. A couple of things stuck out to me right away.
In the first scene, we see Julia teaching a class of 4th graders. I want you to think about this scene for a second. Imagine you’re writing it yourself. How do you make a teacher teaching 4th graders interesting? It’s harder than it seems, right? And yet, I was totally into it. I had to stop reading to figure out why. And then it hit me.
Chaisson and Antosca introduced a third party into the scene – the principal. As Julia is teaching, the principal slides into the room and starts observing. She notices him and becomes nervous. What we realize is that he’s judging her. Specifically, he doesn’t believe she has control over her students. And as the kids get more and more out of control, that belief is proven. So the reason we’re into the scene is because we’re rooting for Julia to get this class back under control.
All of this is happening while the writers are slyly setting up the characters, as well as the main myth that will become the story’s centerpiece later on – the Wendigo. That’s good writing, folks.
From there, we cut to Julia sitting across from the principal in his office. This scene teaches us the value of SETTING UP AN INTERACTION with your description. Remember, you have the option not to set up anything before an interaction. We can just cut to these two talking. Or we can prep the situation and use that to add tension to the scene before it even starts. That’s what Chaisson and Antosca do with this brilliant setup paragraph:
He’s staring at her, hard to read. All kinds of distances between them – age, gender, culture. He was born and raised in this town — and it is significant to him that she wasn’t.
I mean WOW. We already know from this paragraph – before a word has been spoken mind you! – that this moment is CHARGED. I can’t wait to read what happens next. That’s good writing!
Yesterday I brought up character development and I want to expand on that because Antlers is an example of a story we’ve seen before, and therefore could potentially be boring. But it’s not because it creates two really great characters.
And it does this by following a simple rule: Establish what you want to establish about the character early, and hit it hard. Don’t tiptoe around what you’re trying to say. This is the time when you want to be blunt.
Right away, with Julia, it’s established that she’s not from here, she doesn’t get the class’s attention despite desperately wanting to, the principal hates her, and she’s an outcast in this town. All of this is conveyed in her first couple of scenes. I can’t tell you how many scripts I’ve read where I don’t know one-tenth this much about a character AFTER READING THE ENTIRE SCRIPT!
Moving onto Lucas, we know he’s a loner. We know he’s a weirdo. We know he’s sad. We know he’s good at drawing. All of this in his first three scenes. To me, both of these characters are 80% developed and we haven’t even made it out of the first act! So if there’s a lesson here, it’s that you can tell us so much about your characters in their first few scenes. And if you do that well, we’re going to care what happens to them regardless of how the plot turns out.
Because the truth is, the plot to this is almost too simple. Once we find out that the Wendigo is out there looking for them, it’s your basic “try to survive” horror film. But it works because of that heavy dose of character development early on.
Really enjoyed this one. A great example of how to write a marketable spec script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In general, bringing in a third party to any stale situation usually spices it up. That opening classroom scene went from a 3 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10 due to that ONE DECISION to bring the principal in and have him watch. So if you have two characters in a scene and it’s boring, you now know what to do!
