Genre: Horror/Religious
Premise: An inexperienced priest and a charismatic possessed woman form a dark and dangerous bond while on the run from sinister forces within the Catholic Church.
About: This writer has been writing for over a decade. He had some scripts on the Blood List all the way back in 2012 if memory serves correctly. And he wrote one of the more underrated horror/thriller films of the last five years, “The Night House.” This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Luke Piotrowski
Details: 110 pages
I’m kinda in a religious horror mood because I’m seriously considering watching the Sydney Sweeney religious horror film, Immaculate, this weekend. That one has an interesting development story behind it. Sweeney read the original script all the way back when she was 15! She tried to set it up to star in it but never had the cache.
Once she hit it big, she phoned the screenwriter and asked him if she could buy the script from him. Of course he said yes and then Sweeney recruited her Voyeurs director to direct it.
From everything I’ve heard, the movie is just okay. But it’s supposed to have the ENDING OF ALL ENDINGS. The question then becomes, do I want to go to a movie just for the last three minutes of a film? Normally, the answer would be no. But this is Sydney Sweeney, which makes the answer more difficult.
We’ll have to see. But in the meantime, I’ve got another religious horror script for you, Blasphemous. Ironically, it has a role that could’ve also worked for Sweeney.
When we meet 50-something priest Alan Villars and 30-something priest Ed Kerrigan, they’re picking up a strange woman in a cult compound. There’s a lot of eeriness surrounding their late-night arrival and the compound members who are eager to get rid of this woman.
Villars and Kerrigan throw her in the back of a U-Haul trailer and drive off. They’re taking her to an arch diocese. Although details are sparse in the early-going, we get the impression that she’s possessed.
They don’t get far before they hit a giant bull that happens to be in the middle of the road, crashing their car and trailer. Both of them are fine but when they come out, they see a man in a pickup approaching. The man stops and tells them he’ll help them get their car set back on its wheels but they keep telling him no thanks.
The man gets suspicious, starts poking around, and that’s when the girl, whose name we learn is Paula Jean, starts calling for help from inside the trailer. The man runs to his truck and pulls out a gun but not before Villars shoots him. During the chaos, Paula Jean escapes the trailer and runs into the forest.
Kerrigan runs after her, following her to a gas station food store. Paula Jean puts her hand up and says she’ll gladly go wherever Kerrigan wants to take her. But just not with that Villars guy. There’s something off about him. Kerrigan reluctantly agrees and the two steal the cashier’s car and head off on the rest of the trip.
Villars later catches up to the gas station, where he proves Paula Jean’s suspicions about him correct. Villars shoots the cashier dead. You see, this thing that’s going on with Paula Jean is so top-secret, nobody can know about it. That’s why anyone who sees her must be eliminated. But what is Paula Jean’s deal? Is she just a woman possessed? Or is she much more?
One of the most challenging lessons I ever learned in screenwriting is the concept of my script “feeling written.” You’re reading the script and it doesn’t feel like what’s happening is really happening. Instead, you can feel the screenwriter working it out and forcing his thoughts into the script in a way that comes off as artificial. That’s how Paula Jean felt in this script.
I wish there was a clearer way to explain it because it’s something that every screenwriter has to learn at some point. But I’ll tell you the moment in this script where it became “written” to me.
Paula Jean has cornered Kerrigan in the gas station store and after making him promise that he won’t team up with Villars again, she wants to “seal” the promise with a kiss. So she goes in for the kiss, moves her mouth to his earlobe instead, then BITES OFF his earlobe. THEN she kisses him, pushing his earlobe into his mouth, and then after the kiss is over, telling him he now has to swallow it.
I don’t know about you. But that just feels highly artificial to me. It doesn’t feel natural to the moment at all. It’s a writer who’s deliberately thinking, “How do I write something SHOCKING here?”
To make these moments work, you have to do a ton of backstory work to figure out exactly who this person is. Those details would then creep into each scene and then when the character needed to do something big and shocking, it would be a payoff to all those little things that were set up earlier. It can’t just be, “EARLOBE BITING TIME CAUSE EARLOBE BITING TIME IS SHOCKING!”
I know this isn’t the best example but even if you had Paula Jean mention her love of Mike Tyson in two earlier scenes, NOW having her bite someone’s earlobe off makes so much more sense.
That’s a microcosm of my bigger issue I had with the screenplay. Which is that I don’t get the sense that the writer truly understands the world he’s writing about. I think he SORT OF understands it. But when you only “sort of” understand your world, the execution of your story only “sort of” works.
I look back to the gold standard of “EFFED UP SH*T” in Silence of the Lambs, and I remember reading the amount of research author Thomas Harris did on serial killers to ensure that both Hannibal and Buffalo Bill came off as authentic. As I read Blasphemous, I felt like the writer had done maybe 1/5th of that work.
With that said, the script has an undeniable momentum to it. It takes place in, virtually, real time. And it’s always propelling forward. That’s the nice thing about a story on wheels, is that it naturally feels like it’s going somewhere.
Never is this more apparent than right after you’ve read a script that stays in place, which I just had. I read a script about a group of people in a small town and it just SAT THERE. It had no momentum whatsoever.
If you can get your story on wheels AND add some urgency to it, which this does, you’re cooking with gas. It’s very easy to keep the reader invested.
I’m just not sure I was ever onboard with these characters. Paula Jean is supposed to be this captivating mystery of a character. Yet I saw her as more of an artificially constructed vessel for the writer to bang out a series of shocking moments, or say a series of shocking things. I suppose that’s what we’re all doing as writers to a certain extent. You’re constructing characters to affect the reader. But you have to do it invisibly. Organically. And Paula Jean was anything but.
Curious what others thought of this one as I get the impression mileage may vary.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I believe that it’s very difficult to make a scary character who TALKS A LOT. It can be done, of course. But most of the characters we fear in horror films don’t say a whole lot, if anything at all. Michael Myers comes to mind. It’s the mystery of what’s going on in their heads, the things we’ll never know, that make them so scary. The longer this movie went on, the more Paula Jean spoke, and the less I became scared of her.
