Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Blood List) A rebellious teenage girl is sent to stay with her strict grandmother in the sleepy town of Cedar Falls, a place with many strange traditions, including a curfew banning anyone from going out at night.
About: This script finished #6 on last year’s Blood List, which is an unofficial list of the most liked Thriller, Horror, and Sci-Fi scripts in Hollywood. The writer, Dick Grunert, has a very active resume, working as everything from Assistant Director to Writer’s Assistant. He’s written on the highly popular animation shows Samurai Jack and Adventure Time.
Writer: Dick Grunert
Details: 112 pages
Today’s script, Curfew, attempts to build an entire plot around the simplistic concept of curfew. And you know what? I can see that working. Drop our poor hero in a remote town where nobody’s allowed to go out at night. You’ve got the mystery of curfew. The mystery of “What’s out there?” Sounds fun to me!
But, as always, the thing a reader is worried about when they open a script like this is that there isn’t enough meat on the bone. In fact, I’ll tell you exactly what goes through a seasoned reader’s mind when a script like this lands on his laptop:
Hero gets to town by page 10. Establish curfew rules by page 20. Our hero sees a few weird/scary things by page 30. Hero goes out after curfew at some point by page 45. Monsters chase her.
THEN WHAT??
What happens for those final 60 pages?
Because usually with a script like this, the characters run amok for 60 pages in a structureless free-for-all mess of repetition. The writer who knows how to navigate this problem is the one who gets the movie made. Let’s see if we’ve found that writer.
16 year old Megan O’Connell is doing the sorts of stuff a teenager does after her father dies. Drinking, smoking, and wrecking shit. After her and best friend Bekah total a stolen car, Megan’s mom has had enough. She dooms her daughter with the ultimate punishment – a stay with Grandma, who lives in the middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin.
Actually, the place is called Cedar Falls, and this is the first time Megan’s meeting her grandmother, Dorothy. Dorothy is not keen on having this troublemaker around, but she feels an obligation to do so, seeing as Megan is her son’s daughter. Dorothy instructs Megan that she only has one rule to follow – stay inside after curfew.
You’re talking to a girl who lives for the night, so Megan is immediately looking for ways to break curfew. When she meets a group of kids her age – Derek, Amy, and Brad – she thinks she’s found her partners in crime. The problem is her new friends are the Dork Squad. Especially when it comes to going out after curfew.
However, when a local church has a weekend “Lock-In,” Megan finally sees an opportunity to stir shit up. Once there, she and her gang make the bold choice to sneak into the night. And boy do they regret it. Within minutes, a shadowy creature yanks Derek into the shadows and tosses his head back at the rest of them. That can mean only one thing – RUN!
Eventually, Megan is able to make it to the sheriff’s station, who lays out the town’s deep dark secret. What are these things who come out at night? And why are they so strict about curfew? You’ll have to get your hands on the script to find out. Or just go to the comments section.
So…
Did the script fall victim to my “Simple Premise” fears?
Yes and no.
Grunert uses another method to battle the Simple Premise issue known as the “Delayed Reveal.” Instead of introducing the monsters in the first 15 pages of the second act, he draws things out. We don’t get our first monster until page 64.
This is a perfectly acceptable approach to the problem. If you introduce monsters too soon, it’s easy to run out of gas. How many “run from monsters” scenes can one person write before they start getting repetitive? I’ll give you a hint based on reading hundreds of these scripts – NOT MANY. So Grunert’s solution to delay all that monstering is clever.
However, delaying the candy being advertised in your commercial for that long only works if your character work is impeccable. By that I mean, you need to set up a couple of strong emotionally unresolved relationships. Look at A Quiet Place. It should be noted that they had their first attack way before page 64. Even so, they established a strong unresolved relationship between the father and daughter.
Here, there isn’t a single emotional thread for the script to hang its hat on. The central relationship, Megan and Dorothy, is as empty as this town’s streets after curfew. Dorothy has never met Megan. She doesn’t care about her. Megan doesn’t like Dorothy and there’s no attempt TO like her. The two never have a conversation that doesn’t involve exposition.
What you probably wanted to do here was build an unresolved relationship with the dead father. I have a friend whose father died young and he never forgave him for that. He felt abandoned. What if you did something similar with Megan? Dorothy, then, could be a conduit for Megan to finally find closure with her father’s death.
It’s not ideal. These things work better when the two characters who have a problem with one another are forced to work things out together. Like the son and the mother in The Babadook. But it’s better than nothing, which was what was on display here.
Why is this relevant?
Let me explain it this way. Have you ever gotten notes back on a script where the main critique was, “I didn’t feel anything.” Or have you gone to a movie where you enjoyed the overall experience but you felt like something was missing, like the overall experience was empty?
Lack of an emotional core explored through character relationships is usually the reason. When you don’t have that, it’s hard for us to connect on anything more than a surface level.
And look. If you don’t think that opportunity is there in your story, you can still explore the human experience within your hero. What are they battling inside? What do they need to overcome? If you look at Tully – which just came out on video – here’s a movie that’s all about what’s going on inside. This mother is overworked to the point where she’s lost her sense of self. And she needs to get it back. How much more of an emotional journey can one go through?
As much as writers think this stuff doesn’t matter, it does, if you want to stand above the pack at least. Cause anyone can put a plot together. But there are far fewer screenwriters who can explore the human condition. Which makes those writers a lot more valuable.
Curfew wasn’t bad. It could be a good movie. But it needs a rewrite focusing specifically on the stuff I brought up.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Split up dialogue between characters to make it more naturalistic.
There’s a scene in the script where Megan is talking to Amy, Brad, and Derek. The ritual of “curfew” is brought up. Even amongst the teens who live here, it’s controversial. Not everyone believes in it. Derek, the jokester of the group, isn’t sold, and says so. Amy replies, “Then what about Jeremy Singer?” Megan asks, “Who?” Amy then responds with this line….
“Jeremy was a few years older than us. He was having trouble at home — his father was an alcoholic and beat him.”
Notice how unnatural this sounds. It reads like a written checklist of things that need to be known about Jeremy. The thing is, Grunert had the solution to this clunky line at his fingertips. The very next line is Brad correcting Amy with, “It was his stepfather.” That correction makes the moment feel a bit more like a real conversation. That’s because real conversations have people chiming in, mistakes being made, other opinions being offered, corrections, laughter, finishing each other’s sentences. So when you have multiple people in a scene, you want to take advantage of that. A better exchange might look like this…
AMY: “Then what about Jeremy Singer?”
MEGAN: “Who?”
AMY: “A guy we knew. He was a few years older than us. His dad was an alcoholic.”
BRAD: “You don’t know that.”
DEREK: “I heard his dad beat the shit out of him.”
AMY: “Stepdad.”
DEREK: “Whatever.”
See how much more natural that sounds? Looking back at it, I’d probably eliminate “He was a few years older than us” even. That information doesn’t add anything. And since the line reads cleaner without it, I see no reason not to take it out. The point is, use the other characters in your scene to split the dialogue up and, in the process, make it feel more natural.
