Genre: Horror
Premise: Investigating the crime scene of a potential homicide in the Appalachian
mountainside, a deputy encounters a strange mountain community that claims to
be haunted by an evil witch that lives in the woods.
About: This script landed pretty high on last year’s Black List. Screenwriter Jonathan Easley has one credit, last year’s Orlando Bloom film, Red Right Hand.
Writer: Jonathan Easley
Details: 101 pages
I like Appalachia as a setting for shit to go down.
The place is creepy. It’s weird. It’s unlike anywhere else in the U.S.
The people are unique.
That was the main reason I was curious about this journey.
Anyone fancy joining me?
Lex Caudill is a deputy sheriff who just lost a good friend to a logging accident. Her boss, Jeremiah, thinks the best way to get over it is to investigate the discovery of a headless body deep within the Appalachian mountains.
For some reason, he thinks it’s a good idea to send a woman, all by herself, to this area. I mean, it’s not like people are getting their heads chopped off or anything. Lex heads out there, not exactly thrilled with the job. But at least it’s a change of pace.
Also, Lex has a secret. She grew up in a trailer park with her addict mother not far from there. So she gets to pay her mom a visit and see how bad her hoarding issue has gotten.
She eventually makes her way into a makeshift town in the woods where a bunch of hicks follow orders from a man named Otis. When Lex asks Otis who might have chopped this man’s head off, Otis warns her about “the witch.” The witch loves to chop off the heads of people who roam the forest alone.
Lex believes Otis is kookoo for Cocoa Puffs. That is until she finds a 7 foot crying miner taking a shower in her hotel bathroom. Technically, it was a nightmare. But it felt so real that Lex knows, subconciously, the guy was real.
During her investigation, Lex learns that one of Otis’s followers is her twin brother. She had been told her twin died at birth. But it was just her mother lying to her. As Lex pulls her brother into the investigation, she becomes more and more wary of what’s going on here in these mountains. Could it be true that a witch really does go around hunting people? And, if so, are she and her brother next?
Bloody Mingo does one thing well and another thing poorly.
What it does well is that the writer writes with a strong attention to detail. Which is important in a horror script because horror scripts need to pull you into their world. You’re not going to be scared if you don’t feel like you’re there, in the room, or in the forest, or in the cave. It’s up to the writer to convince us that we’re really in those places. Once a reader believes that, you can scare the heck out of them.
That’s why attention to detail, and using that detail to create a mood, is a superpower in horror screenwriting. This, Jonathan Easley does well.
You can also see this in places like character description. Writers who prioritize attention to detail are really good at describing characters. And Easley is no different. Here’s his description of a mysterious man early on in the script: “He looks to be somewhere in his 40s, but he’s probably younger than his emaciated, weather-beaten face appears. He’s dirty and his hair is wild. His clothes are threadbare and he carries all his earthly possessions in a rucksack slung about his shoulders.”
On top of that, he’s one of the few detail-oriented screenwriters who understand that it’s still a screenplay and that the eyes need to move down the page. So even though he’s very descriptive, he keeps most of his paragraphs at two lines or less.
Now, what did he do wrong?
He didn’t pack a strong enough plot into the story. Whenever you write a script, you will write a series of moments that impact the plot in a significant way. These moments are called “plot beats.” A classic plot beat is, someone’s gone missing. That impacts the plot and, therefore, forces characters into action.
Another plot beat might be our lead investigator getting a tip from the last guy saw our missing person. That’s a plot beat because it gives our characters another place to go, which, in turn, moves the plot forward.
There are two ways to mess up plot beats. One is that you don’t have enough of them. And two is that they aren’t big enough. They may technically impact the story but not enough that the reader cares.
The issue with Bloody Mingo is that the plot beats just weren’t that interesting. And I don’t think there were enough of them either.
But the more I thought about the script, the more I wondered if that problem was inevitable. Because the story here is that a sheriff is looking for a murderer. But we don’t really know this person who was murdered so we don’t really care. Therefore, any plot beat built around that is going to come off as muted.
More needed to happen in this movie. And when things did happen, they needed to be bigger. That’s advice you can use for pretty much any script. Audiences tend not to complain when you give them more plot beats and bigger plot beats.
This script is a great example of what happens when you send a script out to a producer and they respond like this: “This wasn’t for me but I’d love to read anything else you write.” What it means is you’re still raw but they can see the talent in one major area. And they’re hoping you’re going to improve in those other areas in your subsequent scripts.
Which is why you should all be identifying where you’re weak and work on improving those areas when writing new scripts. Because, if you don’t try and improve – whether it be dialogue, plotting, character development, conflict, suspense – and you send a new draft to that same producer? That’s when they begin to second-guess their assessment of you. They’re expecting you to go forward. Not stay the same.
I don’t think I can recommend this script. But I would recommend the writer. He’s got talent.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you are going to build an investigation around a murder in your movie, the murdered person should almost always be a woman or a child. Audiences become 100 times more invested in justice when someone helpless has been hurt. They just don’t care as much when it’s a guy. You can scream to the rooftops about inequality and how it shouldn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. But this is how it is, folks. And it really rears its head here. I did not care about avenging this homeless guy’s murder at all. That was a pretty big miscalculation.
