Genre: Horror
Premise: After a pregnant woman and her rich husband head to his remote country house, she has her baby, which turns out to be a spider, who she then uses to wreak havoc on those who have wronged her.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Writer-director Katie Found has one produced credit, a lesbian-romance film titled, My First Summer.
Writer: Katie Found
Details: 92 pages
Carrie Mulligan for Mary?
Today, I would like to discuss something that plagues the movie industry. It usually starts happening around this time of year. Hollywood begins releasing movies not that people WANT TO see. But rather movies they SHOULD see.
It is the only reason anyone outside of the film industry sees these movies. Because the marketing tells you, you SHOULD. Movies like Nomadland, Dallas Buyers Club, and Killers of the Flower Moon. That’s not to say that none of these movies are any good. But very few of them are. Their hit-to-miss ratio is WAY worse than studio movies.
This issue trickles down to screenwriting as well and happens when a writer writes a script not to entertain people. But to IMPRESS people.
Let me make something clear. If you are writing a script to try and impress ANYONE, you’re not writing a good screenplay. You should be writing to entertain the reader. Give them an enjoyable experience. If you focus on that one simple rule, I promise you you’ll give yourself the best chance at writing something good.
With that in mind, let’s get into today’s script…
30 year old Mary is very pregnant yet also quite sickly looking, for reasons that are never explained. Her rich and powerful husband, Charles, thinks it would be a good idea to visit his remote cabin until the baby is born.
So he and Mary drive out to the middle of nowhere and, within a week, she gives birth to the baby. Except the baby is not human. It’s a spider. Or, at least, that’s what Mary thinks it is. She and Charles never explicitly talk about what the baby looks like so it could be that Mary is simply imagining that it’s a spider.
Charles is your typical 2020s evil toxic male character, always looking for sex even though Mary is in no mental state to reciprocate. One day, Mary has had enough and allows her baby spider to kill Charles and wrap him up in its web. She’s finally taking charge in life! Not letting evil dudes dictate her actions.
Mary enjoys the experience so much that she lures another older toxic male from in town, ties him up, and then has her baby spider kill him as well. All of a sudden, that postpartum depression ain’t feeling so bad!
After killing one more dude, her father-in-law, her sister comes to the house to save her. Mary grabs the baby and the three flee in their car, presumably to happier times.
One of the more frustrating things I encounter in screenwriting occurs in scripts like this, which are highly specific in the areas that don’t matter and highly general in the areas that do. For example, we get a lot of passages in Down Came The Rain like this one…
Note how nothing happens in this scene. It’s just mood-based imagery. Yet there’s a lot of effort placed on describing it. Meanwhile, when we met Charles earlier in the script, he’s giving some extremely vague speech about bettering the world to a bunch of rich people. Yet we don’t have any idea what he’s talking about. We don’t have any idea what his actual job is.
THAT’S the stuff that matters. That we understand the man who’s holding our hero captive. Not the way our protagonist feels when she puts on earrings.
You can make the argument that the writer is creating a mood with the above passage, which enhances our understanding of how she feels. But that logic only works if it’s balanced with a story that’s MOVING FORWARD. A story where THINGS ARE HAPPENING. There’s simply not enough happening here where we’re going to give you the luxury of writing an entire uninterrupted page of description.
You need to focus on the right things when you write a script. There’s a reason why one of the first screenwriting lessons you learn is: “Every scene must move the story forward. If it doesn’t, get rid of it.” That’s because readers get bored fast. So if they read three, sometimes as few as two, scenes in a row that don’t move the story forward, they give up on the script.
You need a plan when you write.
You need to structure your story in a way where we’re constantly moving forward, where we’re constantly BUILDING towards something.
There were basic mistakes made here in that department.
Charles, the husband, is the big bad of the film.
Why are we killing him off at the midpoint?
Once Charles died, the story had nowhere to go. You keep luring these other people into your web but they’re all small potatoes compared to the husband. So it feels like we’re going backwards. Oh, we killed the annoying drunk guy from down the street. How is that building from the murder of the husband?
I suppose you could make the argument that she’s now at risk of being discovered for killing her husband. So the suspense comes from these other men potentially figuring out her secret and then her, I don’t know, going to prison for it. But none of these guys are formidable opponents. The second they walk in the house, we are 1000% sure Mary will easily kill them. So there’s zero suspense.
In the end, this script represents one of my least favorite screenwriting combinations: Description and Metaphor. The focus is on the description (let’s spend a page describing this room and the way Mary walks through it) and metaphor (what does the spider represent!?). Neither of those things move the story forward.
Between today and yesterday, we have two scripts, both of which place our characters in a remote rural home where danger enters the equation. Yesterday’s script attempted to entertain you with every scene. Today’s script wants to be discussed in a college English class. For that reason, I could not connect with it on any level.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you asked me what the most underrated mistake in screenwriting was, I might tell you it’s when a writer doesn’t know what his main characters’ professions are. A person’s job takes up 8-10 hours of their day! If you don’t know exactly what that profession is and what they do all day, you have no idea who that character is. And I promise you, that will come across in the writing. I will not understand that character either. I have no idea what Charles does other than that he’s rich and deals with rich people. But what’s his job?? I mean think about it for just a second. You have this high-paying top 1% of top 1% job. Yet you can just jet off to a cabin for two weeks? That’s clearly CLEARLY a result of a writer not knowing what their character does on a day-to-day basis. To extrapolate that, I’m not going to care that Mary kills him if I don’t understand who he is! I need to understand this man in order to have an opinion on his relation to this story.
