Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Blood List) Peter has always been told the voice he hears at night is only in his head, but when he suspects his parents have been lying, he conspires to free the girl within the walls of his house.
About: Today’s script finished at the TIPPY-TOP of the 2018 Blood List!
Writer: Chris Thomas Devlin
Details: 97 pages
One thing that not enough screenwriters care about is writing scripts that are easy to read, scripts that move along quickly. I shouldn’t have to remind you that as a SPEC screenwriter, your scripts are being given a fraction the attention as the other scripts readers encounter. That’s because if you’re working on assignment or dealing with IP, your script is in a much better position to get made. The only way to compete with that, then, is to give readers a life-sized experience in a bite-sized package.
I don’t know if there’s any script that symbolizes that motto better than Cobweb. This script is so determined to be quick that almost every paragraph is one line long. This is a script that so wants your eyes to shoot down the page, it doesn’t use punctuation. This is a story so simplistic in execution, it can be read while multitasking. But all this begs the question… When has minimalism gone too far? We’re going to find out today.
8 year old Peter lives in a spooky house at the top of a spooky hill. Like lots of 8 year olds, Peter hears noises at night. And while most of these noises are your average thumps and creaks, every once in awhile, Peter hears tapping. Specifically tapping within the walls.
We get the sense that any discussion with his parents about this tapping is grounds for punishment. So, for the most part, Peter keeps the noise to himself. Until, that is, he starts hearing a voice on the other end of the tap. A young girl. A girl who wants to help him. When Peter brings this up to his parents, they convince him that he’s imagining things and remind him that if he keeps bringing these nightly noises up, he’s going to be grounded.
But then the tapping girl tells Peter to start standing up for himself at school. The next day, instead of allowing the school bully to, once again, embarrass him, Peter pushes him down the stairs, injuring him badly. This gets Peter expelled, and his creepy parents decide to home-school him.
From there, the noises only get louder and the girl only talks more. We begin to understand that this may be Peter’s sister – that his parents have locked her up for some reason. So when she tells Peter to save her, he concocts a plan to poison his parents and set his sister free. That’s all well and good, until his plan works, and he’s faced with a new possibility. What if his parents locked his sister up, not because they’re evil… but because she is.
I have to admit, it took me awhile to get used to the writing here. It’s so minimalist that it’s almost off-putting. One line for every paragraph. Most of the time, those lines didn’t even make it halfway across the page. And interspersed between this would be lots of NOISE-SOUNDS (TICK TOCK TICK TOCK) which would take up their own lines, resulting in pages you could read in 15 seconds flat.
As I said earlier, readers generally love this. They want their reads to be fast. But there’s a caveat, and it’s a trap that most scripts fall into. There’s so little on the page, that there isn’t any character development. And if there isn’t any character development, it’s hard to care about the characters.
I was a good 40 pages into this and the only character I knew anything about was Peter. The parents are mysteries wrapped in enigmas, and even the teacher, who gets second billing, is about as garden-variety as they come. Her lone character trait is that she’s concerned about Peter. That doesn’t tell me a whole lot about her.
To be honest, I was about to give up on this one half-way through. There simply wasn’t enough going on. But around the halfway point, the script shifts from the repetitive storyline of “somebody’s making noises in the wall” to “Who’s this girl?” And that’s when things got interesting. I can pinpoint the exact moment, even, where my interest shifted. It was when Peter caught his mom grinding up leftovers in the blender. I thought, “Who’s she feeding ground up leftovers to?” Before this, the girl could’ve been a figment of Peter’s imagination. But now we now she’s real and that the parents are involved.
That led to an exciting rescue mission sequence (about 20 pages), only for that plotline to get flipped on its head, and we learn that maybe the girl is being imprisoned for a reason.
Outside of the first half of the script being too minimal, the only other problem I had was, why did it take until now for the girl to start talking to Peter? He’s 8 years old. Wouldn’t he have heard her before this. The script fudges over this part, implying that Peter HAS heard her for awhile, but the details are vague enough that you feel like the writer’s cheating. It’s a sneaky way to not have to answer a tough question.
I also give the script credit for its gradual build into horror. After the first 20 pages, I thought this was going to be a Goosebumps clone. Or that new Jack Black horror movie with the clocks in the walls. That made its gradual descent into something far darker a lot more fun. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is actually some effed up shit here. Okay, I’m in.”
I still think the script is leaving movie on the table, though, especially in its first half, which can best be summed up as “The Tapping and Bullies” Half. There’s only so much tapping and so much bullying the audience can take before they’re like, “Yo, I didn’t sign up for public service announcement. This is a horror film.” Do a little more in that section, try and build more character development into the key characters, and you’ve got yourself a good horror flick.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ve always felt that the scariest situation is the one you’re born into. If your parents are evil, there’s nowhere to run. You’re stuck with that. How is anything more terrifying? And once we got to the midpoint here, I felt that playing out in Cobweb – that sickening feeling that there was nothing this poor boy could do to escape these evil people.
What I learned 2: Sometimes a script won’t allow you to develop characters. Cobweb, for example, can’t develop the parents, because the script only works if they’re mysteries. We have to wonder if they’re bad or good. That limits how much you can be around them (The Sixth Sense had the same problem – it could really develop the wife because she was part of the twist). If you find yourself in this predicament, spend that time developing other characters. Miss Devine, for instance, could’ve had a lot more going on. If all you have is a single three-dimension character, your script is going to feel empty.
