Genre: Supernatural Mystery
Premise: An infamous investigator of the unexplained phenomena and a highly skilled audio repair engineer work together to solve a perplexing cold case murder mystery.
About: This UK director has directed four episodes of Doctor Who. More recently, he’s been mastering the podcast mystery space, with series such as The Lovecraft Investigations, Who is Aldrich Kemp, and Temporal. This script ended up on last year’s Black List. Julian Simpson is managed by Kaplan/Perrone.
Writer: Julian Simpson
Details: 110 pages
Ghost story told in a unique way.
CHECK.
If you can do that one thing – come at your genre in a unique way – you are ahead of 99% of other screenwriters. No doubt, that’s the main reason this writer got noticed with this script.
In Bad Memories, sound technician Rachel Weir is tasked with looking into a cold case mystery. An attractive man named Jim comes to her with an old SD card that contains a number of corrupted sound files.
Eight years ago, the Blakes, a family of three, disappeared. Recently, some kids were playing on the now abandoned lot of the Blake house and fell into a basement that, it turns out, was the basement to a much older building that was there before. The Blakes’ dead bodies were found in that basement (and this SD card in the pocket of one of them).
But there are a couple of twists. One, there are two extra unidentified bodies that were also found in this secondary basement. And, also, the decomposition of the bodies is dated back to 1935. Which, of course, doesn’t make sense. So Jim is hoping that Rachel can fix the corrupt sound files on this SD card and figure out what happened.
Rachel doesn’t believe in ghosts or aliens but she can’t deny that the situation is intriguing. She fixes the files and the two start listening to them. They follow an occultist named Phillip Gibson, who’s staying at the Blakes’ home and looking into supernatural activity. The mother, Imogen, believes in this activity. The father, Jonathan, does not.
The issue centers around their child, Matthew, who seems to be able to talk with someone named Mary. But the parents can’t hear Mary. However, Mary does appear on the SD card. She can be heard chatting away with Matthew and saying creepy things. As they dig deeper, they learn that Mary was the daughter of a family that used to live on this land in 1935 and she slaughtered her family while they slept.
The deeper into the files Rachel dives, the harder it is to explain this away. As her worldview begins to collapse, she starts to go a little crazy. She even starts seeing Mary in her own home. Eventually, Jim tells her that Mary is still alive. She’s an old woman now. So they go to visit her to see if they can glean any new information.
Mary also learns, through one of the sound recordings, that Phillip Gibson may have dropped a video file card at the home while being attacked by Mary. So Rachel goes to the Blake home to see if she can find the video card. This puts her, unwittingly, face to face with Mary, where she will finally, once and for all, learn how all of this insanity went down.
Whenever you write a screenplay and give it to other people to read, there is an unavoidable gap between what you know and what the reader knows. You might know that your protagonist lost his best friend to a drug overdose in high school. That history may shape how you understand the character. But if it’s not relevant to the story, it never appears in the script. As a result, you are carrying around more information about the world and the characters than the reader.
This gap will always exist. You will always know more about the people and situations you created than the reader does.
The problem is that this gap is where many writers lose their audience. Because the writer understands so much about the world of the story, the movie playing in their head is rich, layered, and emotionally coherent. But the version that exists on the page often contains only a fraction of that information. What feels full and alive to the writer can feel thin or confusing to the reader.
A major part of being a strong screenwriter is recognizing that disparity and compensating for it. You must supply the reader with the specific pieces of information they need in order to experience the story the way you intended. If you fail to do that, the reader can’t see the movie you’re seeing.
Mastering this skill requires understanding what the audience actually needs to know. Not every detail of a character’s life needs to be on the page. For example, we never needed to see Luke Skywalker bullseye womp rats in his T-16 to understand that he was a capable pilot. Those scenes were written and even filmed for Star Wars, but they were ultimately removed because the story worked without them.
However, there are other kinds of information that absolutely must be shared with the reader. If those pieces are missing, the script collapses. This is especially true in supernatural mysteries, where the rules of the world and the mechanics of the mystery are not optional. They’re the foundation of the entire narrative. If the reader doesn’t understand those rules, they can’t follow the story.
This is one of the most common mistakes I encounter in these scripts. Writers become so afraid of revealing too much that they withold critical information. They worry that if the audience learns something too early, the mystery will disappear. So they hold things back. Then they hold back more. And then even more. Eventually, so much essential information has been withheld that the reader has no idea what’s happening or how the world works. At that point the mystery doesn’t feel intriguing. It simply feels confusing.
This was my experience reading the aptly titled, “Bad Memories.” There are about six layers to this highly intricate mystery so when and how much each piece of information is disseminated is critical. That information seems to come at us either too late, or when it does reach us, without enough detail. This makes it hard to understand what, exactly, is happening.
Cause I thought the setup to Bad Memories was good. Dead bodies from 8 years ago. But the bodies have been decomposing for 90 years. Found in a previously undiscovered basement. And two extra bodies that haven’t been identified? There’s a lot to play with. And the way in which we’re exploring this mystery – through a series of sound files – feels unique and refreshing.
But the script just starts getting soooooo confusing in the third act. It turns out Mary isn’t dead. She’s still alive (as an old woman). No matter how hard the script tried to explain this, it could not convey how Mary could both be alive and a ghost at the same time.
Which brings me back to my original point. The writer has constructed an elaborate mythology in their head that neatly connects all the dots and makes the paradox feel logical. But much of the critical information required for us to understand that logic never makes it onto the page. Without those pieces, the reader is left struggling to keep their head above water in a fast-moving current of mystery.
This brings me to another screenwriting note I end up hammering home hundreds of times a year. The more moving parts you build into your mystery, the harder the script becomes to execute. Every additional element raises the degree of difficulty. It’s not that it can’t be done! It certainly can. But to pull it off, you either have to a) be an advanced screenwriter, b) be willing to write 10-20 more drafts than usual, or c) drop the number of variables in your mystery.
You have the power to lower the degree of difficulty at any point by simply dropping plot elements. If you’re going to keep those elements for pride alone, well then you’re going to pay the price when someone reads your script. They’re going to give you that side-eyed look before asking, “Well, I kinda liked the first part but what was happening with Mary? How did they time travel again? How did the video card transfer Rachel to the past exactly?” That isn’t stuff you can just drop in there and sorta explain and hope for the best. No no no no no. For that to work it needs to be flawlessly set up. And it just wasn’t here. Probably because there was too much going on to begin with.
I only recommend complicated time-jumping concepts to advanced screenwriters who are also willing to do the extra work that these scripts require. Cause they ALWAYS REQUIRE extra work. Always. For an advanced screenwriter, at least 5 more drafts than a normal script would require. For an intermediate, 10-20. And fuggetaboutit if you’re a beginner. You could spend 50 drafts and never figure it out. These screenplays are not for the faint of heart.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I believe that in intricate mysteries like this, you need to know the ending before you write the script. Because if you try to figure the ending out through a bunch of drafts, what often ends up happening is that we just see you trying to figure the story out on the page. We can see you grasping at explanations and surprise reveals and, in doing so, we know you didn’t figure it out. But when you know the ending ahead of time, you end up writing these scripts with so much more confidence, especially in that last lap of the script, where it’s crucial that the writer write with certainty and purpose.
