Genre: Vampire
Premise: After the United States survives a vampire war, a young human girl going through puberty learns that she may be turning into a vampire.
About: Bill Kennedy is best known for writing a number of episodes for House of Cards. With this spec, he got onto last year’s Black List, garnering a respectable 10 votes.
Writer: Bill Kennedy
Details: 95 pages
One of the tricks that savvy screenwriters use to gain traction in this industry is to take a big idea and execute in a small way. The way it works is that you get the conceptual residue of the big idea, but you do it in an affordable manner. The backstory for this script revolves around a giant war with vampires. Yet we never see that war. We’re just living in a small town 25 years after it’s ended.
If you do it right, the reader is imagining this big expansive world all by themselves. You don’t have to show any of it. And because there are no big production expenses, the number of potential buyers for your screenplay skyrockets. This is similar to what they did with the movie Maggie. Although I would argue that Kennedy does it better in Just a Girl.
In addition to introducing this trick, Kennedy incorporates another time-tested narrative, which is to use a flashy gimmick as a metaphor for puberty/adolescence. In this script, our 16 year old hero is turning into a vampire. But what she’s really turning into is an adult. You savvy Scriptshadow readers probably remember a few similar scripts I’ve reviewed here. In one of them, a 16 year old girl is turning into an insect. And, in another, one is turning into a superhero.
The great thing about these two “tricks” is that not many writers know about them. So you can use them and, assuming you execute them well, look like a genius. So how did Just A Girl turn out? Let me down this Big Gulp cup full of blood first and I’ll tell you.
We meet 16 year old Samantha in her small town during a parade. But this parade’s a little different from the ones you’ve been to. It’s celebrating the anniversary of the end of the Human-Vampire war. 25 years ago, humanity finally figured out how to defeat the vampires, and since then, the planet has been a vampire free zone.
Samantha’s best friend is Annabeth. The two are somewhat outsiders at high school. They’re pining over the popular boys who already have their popular girlfriends. But the cool kids start taking a liking to Annabeth, who eventually pulls away from Samatha to join the popular clique.
Samantha is devastated by the loss of her best friend, but it turns out she’s got bigger fish to fry. She’s starting to crave blood for some reason. Finally, one day, she can’t take it anymore, so she kills a squirrel and drinks its blood. The experience is euphoric so it isn’t long before she’s killing bigger animals. Meanwhile, she’s getting stronger, and more importantly, stops giving a sh*&.
This “whatever” attitude ironically gets the boys’ attention. And Samantha isn’t shy about letting those boys know she wants to lose her virginity. Soon, her and Annabeth are hanging out again and it isn’t long before Samatha is pressuring Annabeth to do naughtier things. Let’s get drunk. Let’s go to parties. Let’s have sex with boys. There’s a recklessness to Samantha. She needs constant chaos.
Unfortunately, Samantha’s parents become suspicious and when she least suspects it, the cops show up and take her to the hospital for tests. They find out she’s a vampire, which is impossible. There hasn’t been a vampire on earth for over two decades. It’s clear what they have to do but Samantha is able to escape before they do it. She finds Annabeth and prepares to make a run for it. Will they make it into the wilderness in time? Or will they both be hunted down and killed?
This was quite good. Not only is the premise clever. But the execution is sound.
And this is where most new writers falter. They’ll come up with a premise like this and not have a plan for what to do next. They’ll have 4-5 scenes in mind. They know Samantha’s going to be at school a lot and get into some dustups with the popular girls. They know she’s going to have sex at some point. But that takes up 30 pages of the script. What’s the rest of the story? You could argue that this is the crux of the screenwriting struggle. Who can only fill up 30 pages of material and who can fill up 90. I know a lot of people who can fill up 30. Very few who can give us another 60.
So what’s the trick to it? Besides the basics, one of the tricks is escalation. And what escalation is, is that every 12-15 pages, the story needs to make a jump. Let’s say you write a version of this movie where Samantha and Annabeth go to school and deal with the typical issues that teenage girls deal with. Okay. Go ahead and do that for 15 pages. But then you have to escalate. You have to give us something new that makes these next 15 pages feel a little bigger and a little different from the previous 15.
So Bill has Samantha being shy and introverted at first. And then 15 pages later, she starts killing and drinking animal blood, resulting in a bolder more reckless Samantha. And then 15 pages later, she’s gone full-goth and needs to have sex at all costs. And then 15 pages later, she’s getting in a fight with the entire LaCrosse team, using her vampire strength to beat all of them down. In other words, the story keep escalating. Each 15 pages feels bigger than the last.
And to some of you, this might sound obvious. But I can promise you, based on all the amateur scripts I read, it is anything but obvious. For some new writers, it’s just that they don’t know that the story has to keep advancing. But the bigger fault lies with writers who DO know this rule, and yet they love their writing so much that they feel they’re exempt it. They see this as a “gimmick” that their script is somehow above. They believe that they can write 45 pages of Samantha and Annabeth chilling out at school with no major plot advances. But the reality is, you’re boring us. You need to keep your story going. You need to keep escalating it to the next level. Especially a story like this that’s stationary. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of writing a passive story when your characters aren’t physically moving anywhere.
Ironically, that leads to the script’s one fault, which its ending. In the desire to keep upping the stakes, the ending of this script becomes… I don’t want to say like a superhero film. But, tonally, it felt like the wrong ending. Going on the run and having police chase you doesn’t quite work. We needed to finish this in the town. But to be clear. Escalating the stakes to make the climax bigger than the rest of the script was the right move. I just didn’t like the creative choice of going on the run and making it Dark Phoenix 2.
Still, I’m very happy that I reviewed this script. It’s yet another in a string of scripts I’ve reviewed these past two weeks which are all great examples of spec scripts you should be writing. From Don’t Worry Darling to Pyros to Cop Cam and now Just A Girl. Each of them have components that make them spec sale friendly. Check this script out if you get a chance.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’ve ever received the note that your script is “repetitive” or that “not much happens?” these are indicators that you don’t escalate your script every 12-15 pages. After 12-15 pages of story, try to imagine that there’s a ladder that you have to climb your script up to get to the next level. Cause if it stays down here on the street it’s been on for the last 15 minutes? Chances are people are getting bored.
