Genre: Horror/Action
Premise: A lonely bounty hunter trying to improve his life goes around LA killing secret monsters hiding inside human bodies. His job gets a lot more complicated when he’s forced to team up with his first partner.
About: This one sold for a bunch of money in a competitive bidding war that ultimately went to Netflix. David F. Sandberg is directing.
Writers: Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock
Details: 92 pages
I’ll be honest.
All I care about right now is aliens. I’ve been following this story about the U.S. having possession of crashed alien ships for the last 24 hours. If it was up to me, I would spend the next ten Scriptshadow posts talking about it. I actually looked for an alien ship outside my place this morning. So far, one hasn’t stopped by.
But I understand not everybody here is as enlightened as I am and that you don’t care that the aliens are coming (or have they always been here??). So I’m going to restrain myself from turning this into UFO Shadow. FOR NOW.
The cool thing is that we have a script worthy of its own headlines today. “Below” resulted in a serious bidding war and sale. It’s going to be directed by David F. Sandberg. I’ve met Sandberg two times now, once on the set of Lights Out and another time randomly in the aisle of a supermarket. He’s an excessively sweet guy. He just emanates positive energy and we don’t have enough of that in this town.
So I’m really rooting for this script.
“Our Man” is our hero. He lives alone in LA in a tiny apartment, listens to self-help podcasts all day long that preach things like, “You can’t depend on anyone. Only you can move up in the world by your own actions.”
Which is exactly what Our Man is trying to do. He’s a bounty hunter of sorts. He gets text messages every week for a new job. “5% above normal rate” they say, then gives him a location. Off he goes and kills these monsters, tentacled creatures hiding inside human bodies called “dregs.” Afterwards, he takes the dreg skull to a buyer who pays him cash.
Our Man’s dream is to open his own karaoke bar. And he only needs a few more jobs to start that dream. But when he gets a text for his next job, it’s accompanied by, “Now you have a partner.” Our Man tries to ignore it, but after doing the job, his new parter, a woman slightly older than him named “Boxer,” shows up.
Boxer attempts to befriend Our Man, who does everything within his power to stay alone. He doesn’t do the whole “connect with people” thing. But she keeps chipping away at him and soon they’re drinking beers and eating food truck tacos together. To his surprise, Our Man likes Boxer.
As they go over the uptick in jobs lately, Boxer theorizes that something big is about to happen. And when they catch a dreg kidnapping a person instead of killing him, like they usually do, she knows something is up. That’s when they get a shocking text. Their next job is 700%(!!!) above normal rate. Could it be the Queen Bee? Our Man doesn’t want to find out. But they don’t have a choice. And off they go.
There are a couple of big things that come to mind when you read “Below.” The first is that this is the third version of this story that’s been on Netflix. People hunting down supernatural creatures in Los Angeles. You had Bright. You had Day Shift. And now you have Below.
That surprises me. But maybe there’s an executive at Netflix who just loves these types of movies. I get it. If I was an exec, every other movie I greenlit would have aliens. But it did catch my eye because you’re always looking for something fresh. So I was surprised that this was so similar to other stuff on the streamer.
The other big thing going on in this script is the Walter Hill writing style. That’s where you write sentences vertically instead of one after the other. It’s tough to endure if you read a lot of scripts because you’re used to getting that line in between every paragraph. And here, you don’t get that breather. So I’m not a fan of it. But I suppose if you don’t read a lot of scripts, it doesn’t disrupt your reading pattern much.
As for the story, I was on the fence for a while.
I should bring this up because I JUST TALKED ABOUT IT in the newsletter and here it is, being done in all its glory, not once but TWICE WITHIN FIVE MINUTES. I mean, I was shocked.
25 pages in, Our Man gets stopped by a cop. The cop is seconds away from discovering that our man just killed a “human.” And then a kid drives by and throws a bag of urine at the cop, so the cop jumps in his car to chase him. This is the worst thing you can do as a writer – SAVE YOUR HERO FOR HIM. A hero must save himself. That’s when we fall in love with heroes!
Go watch when the T-1000 shows up to take on the Terminator in T2. You get a 20 minute series of attacks. Not once does James Cameron save the Terminator. The Terminator has to earn every single victory over the T-1000.
So then, less than 2 seconds later, Our Man is walking back to his car and gets surprise-jumped by a dreg. They battle. The dreg has the upper hand. It’s easily about to kill Our Man. And then, what do you know, BLUE LIGHTNING appears from the side. It kills the Dreg. It’s Our Man’s new partner, who came in to save the day!
That is twice – TWICE – that the writer saved the hero.
You’re probably asking, well, wait a minute Carson. If this is so bad, why is the script selling for so much money?
I’ll tell you why. Because it’s better than both Bright and Day Shift.
Something happens to this script when Boxer arrives. Because, before Boxer, this was a cold sad depressing world. She then comes in with this enthusiasm that not only gives Our Man hope – it gives US hope! I loved that she was older, which is a different kind of dynamic than we’re used to with these pairings. I loved that all she wanted to do was be friends with Boxer. And she wouldn’t let him off the friend hook.
And of course, once she wins that battle, we’re a HUGE FAN of them. We now want them to succeed together. What this does is that when they get into trouble, we feel a lot more fear due to our strengthened emotional attachment to the team. This is what screenwriting is all about – it’s mining real emotion from fictional characters. It’s the hardest thing to do in the world and it’s always a minor miracle when it happens. These writers make it happen with that relationship.
Plus you have this mystery with these monsters. What are they? Who’s in charge of them? What do they want? Why are they being asked to kill them? With the vampires in Day Shift, it was all straight forward. With Bright, you had some dumb super-fairy that we didn’t care about. The things in this script genuinely have you curious what the bigger mystery is and that keeps you turning the pages.
I even got used to the annoying writing style after a while. Very curious to see what David Sandberg does with this. I hope the directing style feels different from Bright and Day Shift.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Early on in the screenplay is when you make the impression on the audience of your main character’s defining trait – the thing that’s holding him back in the world. If you don’t make that impression loud and clear, the reader isn’t going to ever know your hero. The mistake a lot of writers make is to be too subtle about this defining trait in the fear of being too “on the nose.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given this note and the writer has said, “Yeah but I didn’t want to be on the nose.” When it comes to who your main character is, you want to be clear. And Weidman and Tock take five separate moments in the opening 15 pages to highlight that our hero is ALONE. He’s LONELY. He’s BY HIMSELF. It ingrains in the reader’s head that this it the thing that our hero needs to overcome in this story.
What I learned 2: Give your hero a life goal that’s a little surprising and a little against type. It adds more depth to the character. One of the best creative choices in the script was that this downbeat loner loved karaoke. So much so that his dream was to open a karaoke bar! Something about that choice made Our Man feel real. You could’ve easily done the cliche thing of having his goal be to retire to a small house on a beach in Mexico. But by adding this more unexpected choice, he stands out from all the cliched characters before him.
