Today’s script would’ve easily won Tagline Showdown!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends find their lives disrupted after experimenting with a new drug that first makes them hear something, then see something, then become hunted by something.
About: This script finished pretty high on last year’s Black List and comes from new screenwriter, Sean Harrigan.
Writer: Sean Harrigan
Details: 110 pages
Halle Bailey for Shae?
I would say that if everyone in Hollywood were told that they could only market one genre and their paycheck would depend on those movies doing well, they’d choose Horror. Cause Horror is the most dependable genre in the business.
With that being said, there still seems to be an underlying ignorance to which of these films is going to do well and which will do poorly.
Big marketing campaigns were put together for Immaculate and The First Omen and both of them tanked.
Whereas this nothing little Australian horror film, Talk to Me, comes out of nowhere and becomes a mini-hit.
What gives?
The answer is more complicated than I’d like to admit. I know that the studios test all their horror movies ahead of time and if they get a certain score, they release them theatrically. In essence, they already know if the movie is going to play well. This is why Talk to Me got a wide release. Cause they saw how well audiences were responding to it.
But then you have stuff like The First Omen and Immaculate, which the studios had decided they were going to release wide even before they made them – one because of its rising star and the other because it was a franchise – despite the fact that their test screenings told them they were duds.
Whenever I get confused, I go back to basics. Come up with an original idea and then write a script that exploits that idea as much as possible. That’s why I loved The Ring. That’s why I loved The Others. That’s why I loved The Orphanage. That’s why I loved the original Scream.
Does “First You Hear Them?” achieve this? Let’s find out.
24 year old Shae Howland is so focused on dealing with her mother’s struggles with addiction that she hasn’t been able to begin her post-college career. In the meantime, the African-American aspiring nurse spends her nights with her Filipino roommate, Poppy, and gay Mexcian best friend, Javier (talk about a writer who knows what the Black List wants) spend their nights going out and having fun.
One night, while out at the club, the group tries a new drug – a sort of mangy brown pill. The clan has no idea where the drug came from or what it does but who cares! They’re young and invincible. It turns out it doesn’t do much. They get an average high, dance around, then everyone goes home.
But the next morning, Shae starts hearing a tapping noise, like someone nearby is tapping on a window – this, even when Shae’s nowhere near a window. The others confess to hearing the same thing but when they take another of the mangey pills, the sound goes away.
Soon, Shae’s ex-boyfriend Carson (cool name) comes into the mix. He seems to have a beat on this new drug and tells everyone that they have to keep taking the drug. “Or else what?” Or else they’ll not just hear them, they’ll see them. And if they don’t take the drug again, they won’t just see them, they’ll be hunted by them.
Carson tells the group that they need to secure more pills. Unfortunately, they’re expensive. So everyone’s going to need to get as much money as possible out of their bank accounts ASAP. Cause if they don’t get product soon, they’re going to move into the second phase (“Then you see them.”). From there, they’re only hours away from entering the third phase, which is when these things come after them. Once that happens, it’s game over.
In the upcoming weeks, I’m going to be placing a lot of focus ON DIALOGUE. I just wrote a book about it. It’s fresh in my mind. So I want to explore when writers excel at dialogue and when they falter.
If you’ve read my dialogue book, you know that I say, every single decision you make BEFORE you write your script is going to affect the dialogue. That includes genre. If you remember, I point out that Horror is one of the “non-dialogue-friendly” genres. It’s not known for birthing good dialogue.
So you already have an uphill battle ahead of you.
However, I also point out that if you’ve got a young cast, you can supercede this issue. People between the ages of 14-25 tend to have more colorful creative conversations. They’re using slang more often. They’re more playful with each other. And when you have younger characters, you’re looking to be more creative with the dialogue in general.
So I was disappointed with the lack of memorable dialogue here. It was all standard stuff. Not a single character had any unique identifiable phrases they used (something I talk about in the book). Every conversation was used strictly to push the scene forward and nothing more. Which is exactly what I told you not to do. You have to add some flair! You have to entertain, not just exposit.
Here’s an example on page 20.
Note that the only purpose of this dialogue is to get to the next scene. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. It is a scene fragment. Not a scene. It’s almost impossible to create good dialogue from scene fragments. The dialogue doesn’t have a chance to grow.
The only scene in the entire script where the dialogue is actually built to entertain is in the scene I’ll use for today’s “What I Learned.” But even that scene didn’t milk the dialogue for everything it could’ve been.
To be fair, as I said in the book, Horror is not built for dialogue. Every genre has the thing that it’s best at. Horror is best at scaring. So all that really matters is, does the script scare us?
It does. Just not enough.
The script leans almost too heavily into its premise in that the first rule (“First you hear them”) of the three doesn’t allow for a whole lot of scariness. We don’t even get our first “SEE THEM” moment until more than halfway into the screenplay. That’s a looooong time to wait to be scared.
That leaves the first 60 pages as basically “sound scares.” Are you scared by sounds? I suppose if I thought those sounds could turn into a killer monster, I might be. But here, I just felt that the sounds were annoying. It’s annoying that I want to brush my teeth but I have to hear tapping while I’m doing it. My preference is a non-tapping teeth-brushing evening.
Of course, once we get to the SEE THEM part, it gets scarier. And there is this naturalistic suspenseful arc to the game. Sort of like how, in The Ring, we knew that in 7 days, we were screwed. Here, we know that, after we hear them, after we see them, they come for us. So that suspense somewhat makes up for the inactivity.
I just wanted more to happen.
And it goes back to the dialogue. If your characters would’ve had more interesting conversations and weren’t muttering perfunctory things to get through the scenes, I would’ve been more entertained in the meantime. But if you’re giving me weak dialogue and no big scares for 60+ pages in a horror script, I’m going to complain.
I’m not saying this movie won’t be good. It’s got a great tagline (“First you hear them. Then you see them. Then they come for you.”). In fact, it would easily win Tagline Showdown this month. It even has a little depth to it. There’s a message here about how, when you become addicted to drugs, the high is your “normal.” So you have to keep doing drugs just to feel “normal.” If you stop, you descend into misery.
But I still gotta be entertained, man. And this script was only entertaining in spurts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In my dialogue book, I talk about the importance of situational writing. Situational writing is when you build your scene around a familiar situation that has rules, which, in turn, gives the scene structure. In one of the better scenes in the script, we see situational writing in practice. Our group, who is moving into the second phase of the rule (“Then you see them”), gets stopped by a couple of cops. Here’s how the scene plays out.
If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
