Genre: Horror
Premise: (From Black List) Summer on a secluded campus takes a dark turn for three college girls when a supernaturally sexy mystery man begins haunting their dreams.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 12 votes! The writer, Shea Mayo, has written a couple of short films. But this is her big breakthrough screenplay!
Writer: Shea Mayo
Details: 108 pages
I originally picked this one because I thought it was a comedy and I wanted to analyze some comedy to get us all in the right mindset to write our own comedy. But about 25 pages in, I realized this was more horror than comedy. By that point, it was too late to stop. So what did I think?
All-female college student, Indi, has just been informed by the administration that her sexual assault case by a male staff member at the college isn’t going to move forward. Angry and exhausted, she meets up with her uptight friend Samantha and her cardio-obsessed pal, Gabby, for a little girl support.
That night, Indi has a lucid dream where a dreamboat named Cal emerges from the woods and wants to love up on Indi. Still recovering from the assault, Indi says no thanks. Cal looks confused. You get the sense that no one says no to him.
The next day, the girls decide they’re going to spend the summer here on campus instead of going home. It’s going to be Girl Power for the next three months. Except then it isn’t Girl Power because, all of a sudden, Samantha’s got no time to hang out. She always seems to be… sleeping.
That’s okay because Indi still has Gabby. Maybe they can run a marathon or something. Nope. Gabby – who never has a boyfriend – is all of a sudden talking about a new mysterious secret boyfriend. And then Gabby is asleep all the time, too. What’s going on here??
The answer comes when a fourth girl, Bridget, shows up on top of the local bell tower naked and jumps to her death. Bridget, it turns out, was always sleeping as well! That’s when Indi realizes they’re all connected! It must be that lucid dreamboat Cal sucking her friends into his clutches and controlling them.
So Indi sets off to learn about this dream demon, who, it turns out, makes women become obsessed with him so that he can control their every thought. But that’s not even the most evil thing he does. His existence is designed to not only torture women with how sexy he is, but to make sure that nobody they tell believes them. Since Indi is the only person who knows Cal is real, it will be up to her to somehow infiltrate her friends’ dreams and save them!
It’s pretty clear why this made the Black List.
It’s not just a horror script. It’s a horror script with a social message.
Although I’m not sure that message is as clear as the writer intended it to be. Cal is a stand-in for women not being believed. But what’s weird is that Indi, the one character in the script who’s been assaulted, is also the one person not involved with Cal. It’s the friends, who haven’t had any such experiences, who get stuck with Cal. And they both like him a lot. So while there is a message, it must go through several translation apps before we understand it.
As I’ve stated before, it doesn’t matter how noble your message is if your reader isn’t engaged. And that’s another issue this script had. The first half of the movie is people sitting around talking. You guys all know how much this bothers me. Characters waiting around and sitting around doing nothing outside of talking to each other – that’s narrative death.
You need your characters to be active. And all three of these characters have been constructed to be the opposite of active since the central concept of the movie is about going to sleep. Which means you’re constructing your narrative around putting people in bedrooms so they can sleep. I would’ve recognized that right away as an issue and made sure I had a plan to tackle it.
A critical mistake was setting this during the summer. By setting it in the summer as opposed to the semester, you strip away the only thing that’s keeping your characters active. If it’s the semester, they have to go to class, they have to study for tests, they have to do loads of extracurricular college activities. You need that stuff so that your characters always have something to do.
Which makes your central concept better as well since Cal is sucking away the girls’ energy, which would make them less productive, which would upset their studies, which could potentially make them lose scholarships or drop out of classes. The stakes become much higher.
The stakes aren’t high when the only thing you have to do that day is prepare for that nights’ bonfire party.
Had there been higher stakes and more activity from the characters, I would’ve liked this story more and resonated with the message more. But, as it stands, it felt like people hanging out, talking, sleeping, and then, in the last 40 pages, a mad dash to save the hero’s friends. Wasn’t my cup of tea.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re having to come up with places for your characters to go in your story, there’s a good chance your narrative is broken. Characters should always have goals. If not end-of-movie goals, more immediate goals. These will dictate where your character needs to be and what they need to do. Naomi Watts, in The Ring, is following clues in the haunted video tape because it kills whoever watched it in seven days and her son watched it. So she always has something to do. She always has another lead to follow. If you’re constantly having to come up with locations for characters to meet in their next scene – coffee shops, bonfires, bars – that means your hero isn’t active. They do not have a goal to pursue. And while skilled screenwriters can sometimes get away with this, it tends to be the equivalent of a plane in a full-on nosedive. There’s no way to recover.
