Genre: Horror
Premise: When a dangerous stranger shows up at her front door, a depressed widow must confront her own past in order to protect her two children.
About: This one finished in the middle of the pack on last year’s Black List. The writer, Samuel Stefanak, was a writer on Bill Burr’s Netflix animated show, “F Is For Family.” He was also a staff writer on the Mario Lopez Netflix show, “The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia.” This project is being developed by Blumhouse.
Writer: Samuel Stefanak
Details: 98 pages
The best horror is simple.
Come up with a scary situation and let it play out.
Halloween. It Follows. A Quiet Place. Freaky. Dawn of the Dead. Lights Out.
These horror stories are so simple, it hurts.
So the question has to be asked: When is a horror idea TOO SIMPLE? When do you not have enough meat on the bone?
Today’s script definitely tests that question. Scary dude in the back yard. That’s it. That’s all we’re looking at here. Is it enough? I don’t know. Let’s find out.
30-something Ramona is still recovering from a bad car accident that took her husband’s life. Every night’s sleep produces another nightmare. And every day she has to look at her wounds (a bad arm, a bad leg) that remind her what happened. Since life if cruel, she has to put all that pain aside and raise her two children, 13 year old Ben and 6 year old Annie.
The family lives on the end of a dirt road in the middle of Nowhere, America. So they’re left to deal with this loss all by themselves. Well, except for today, that is. That’s because when Ramona begins making breakfast for her children this morning, she looks out the kitchen window and sees, 100 yards away, an old man in a black suit sitting on a chair.
It’s too far away to see who this man is or get a sense of what he may be here for. So all the family can do is speculate. The kids are scared. And so is Ramona. But Ramona’s trying to be an adult about this. If someone’s here to hurt them, why would he be chilling out in a chair a hundred yards from the house where they can clearly see him?
Against the children’s wishes, Ramona heads out to confront the old man, who greets her with a smile. He’s very kind. Asks her how her day is going. Apologizes for scaring her like this. But he just needed to sit down and rest for a minute. We don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize this guy’s lying through his teeth and it doesn’t take long for him to fess up. He wants to come inside. And if she invites him in, he’ll spare her children. If she doesn’t, all bets are off.
Ramona immediately turns around and marches back in the house, where she lies to her children, saying it’s just some old man who’s tired and needed a place to sit. Let’s go play board games. Ben doesn’t believe his mom and keeps pressing her for details. Oh, and in case you were curious, all lines of safety have been eliminated from the equation (power is out, phone is dead, car is kaput). So the trio don’t have many options other than to wait this out.
After a lot of squabbling, which gives us some additional backstory on Ramona’s car crash, Ben leans into the idea that he’s the “man of the house” now and has to protect the family. So he locks his mother in the bathroom, grabs his father’s old rifle, and marches out to confront the old man.
The old man is just as friendly to Ben as he was with Ramona, though. Even locates Ben’s missing dog that Ben suspected the man had killed. There’s no reason to pull that trigger, the man says, smiling. Frustrated that he didn’t have the guts to shoot him, Ben marches back inside. And that’s when the old man decides he’s had enough. He’s going to come into the house and finish what he came here for. He’s going to kill Ramona. And her children too.
To address my earlier question, I don’t think any horror idea is too simple. But the simpler an idea is, the more you have to nail these two things: First, you have to understand that coming up with your plot is going to be a lot harder than usual. Simple stories don’t offer as many plot opportunities. Which means you’re stuck rehashing a lot of the same stuff from other horror movies.
For example, if you have some psycho holding a character hostage in their basement the whole movie, you’re probably going to have to write the scene where they check every crevice to see if there’s a way out or something that can be used as a weapon. And since so many writers have written that scene before, it’s harder to come up with a version of it that feels fresh.
Second, you have to think a lot more about characters and character development. When situations are simple, the bulk of the story’s focus will be on the character (as opposed to the plot). So you have to ask yourself, “Is my character deep enough to withstand all of that focus?” “Is my character compelling enough?” “Is my character interesting enough?” “Is my character flawed enough?” Where these movies fail is when both the setup and the characters are too simple. Cause then there’s no depth anywhere.
Also, you want to add depth to ALL THE CHARACTERS. Not just the hero. Again, your story setup is too thin to only have one deep character to explore. It’s been done before but it’s really really hard. And, most of the time, the scripts don’t deliver if you’ve got an extremely simple setup and only one deep character.
In the case of “Man in the Yard,” we have a mother and two children. You can’t do much with a six year old character. They’re not old enough to instill any depth in. They don’t have enough life experience. So Annie’s off the table. You have Ben, who’s still pretty young. The writer gives him this story of “becoming the man of the house.” And while it’s okay, I never cared enough about it to feel any emotion around this character.
That left us with Ramona. And this is where the writer tried to install 98% of the story’s depth. She just lost her husband and she was in the car when he crashed. So there’s something there to work with. However, I see dead car backstories so often that it didn’t resonate enough with me. It just felt too familiar. And, for that reason, I never cared enough about this family that I was desperate for their survival.
Which basically leaves us with the man in the yard. There’s no doubt that a man sitting calmly in your back yard in the morning is a scary image. It sure as hell scared me. For the first 20 pages of the script at least. After that, I grew too comfortable. The element of surprise was gone. And while there was some suspense as to what he was going to do next, it all moved a little too slow for my taste.
Which brings us back to the initial question. Can a horror idea be too simple? No. But the simpler it is, the more work you have to do on the plot and character end to make up for it. And I don’t think Man In The Yard got there.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Stay away from low-hanging fruit plot options. Car crash backstory deaths are fairly common in writing. And the inevitable reveal about the crash always plays out the same way (the person who was supposedly driving wasn’t). I always encourage readers to go with something fresh and different. So if you want to include a backstory death, come up with something besides car crashes or cancer. Those options are low-hanging fruit and rarely yield exciting new plot opportunities.
