You know what they say. Mole people, mole problems.
Genre: Horror-Thriller
Premise: When his homeless brother is violently slaughtered by a mysterious killer, a plumber looks into his murder and learns that it’s connected to a group of people who live deep underground.
About: Today we have a writer with very few credits. But the credits he does have are of high quality. He has written five episodes of titan TV series, Succession. This script got him onto the bottom end of the Black List.
Writer: Nathan Elston
Details: 111 pages
Hey!
It’s Halloween Month.
You know what that means, right?
Horror scripts and CANDY.
I went to Salt & Straw today. For those who don’t know, this is a bougie ice cream spot here in LA. They let you sample all of the flavors. So I asked them for their best Halloween flavor. They gave me something called The Great Candycopia.
There have only been seven times in my experience here on earth where I transcended this plane and existed inside another higher one – a place so heavenly, the air tasted like In and Out double-doubles. The Great Candycopia brought me there for an eighth time. And I will always remember that experience for what it taught me: The meaning of life.
Now that that’s taken care of, it’s time for me to bring you to another plane – that being a review of Molepeoplemoleproblems.
28 year old Jack lives in New York. He’s barely making ends meet as an assistant plumber. We see Jack look the other way when his boss extorts a client by price-gouging her at the end of the job. His boss reminds him afterwards that if he even thinks about complaining, he’s got a hundred guys ready to take his place in a heartbeat.
That night when Jack is home to take care of his dementia-ridden father, he gets a call from NYPD who tells him that his brother, Patrick, is dead. Not only dead. But his eyes have been chopped out! What’s up with that!
Jack goes downtown to take a look. His brother was homeless and the two had a difficult relationship to say the least. But he still wants to know what happened so he heads off to find some friends of Patrick’s. Soon he’s following a guy named Edwin down an operational subway tunnel. The two go down several holes until they’re in some deep deep DEEP unused NY tunnel and Edwin shows Jack Patrick’s bedroom.
No sooner does that happen than Edwin is attacked by some crazy subway-dwelling psychopaths who rip his eyes out. They then chase Jack through the depths of these tunnels and Jack stumbles upon some enclosed room where a woman is being held hostage. He tells her he’ll come back for her and manages to escape back to the surface.
But when he tells Edwin’s friend, Jimmy – who’s strangely neutral about his buddy’s demise – about the ordeal, Jimmy says to forget the girl. In fact, get the heck out of New York. These mole people are serious dudes and now that Jack knows where they live, they’re going to come after him. Even up here! Torn by the threat and his promise to the woman, Jack must decide whether he’s going to see this to the end or not.
Here’s the reality about missing people in fiction.
You want to lean into the missing people main traits that create more investment from the reader. Those traits are: WOMEN or CHILDREN.
Most readers (and viewers) aren’t going to care if a man has gone missing or murdered.
There are sub-traits you can utilize that result in more investment. However, there are sub-traits you can utilize that result in less investment as well.
One negative sub-trait, for example, would be homelessness. The average viewer does not care about homeless people. The media pretends they do. But they don’t.
This script is built around a murdered MAN who was HOMELESS.
That’s a negative main trait and a negative sub-trait when it comes to investment. So, already, you’re starting below ground level, no pun intended.
This isn’t a game, guys. The creative choices you make when building your story have benefits and they have consequences. The more weak creative choices you make, the less invested the reader will be. The more strong creative choices you make, the more invested they’ll be.
We saw this at the beginning of the week with Joker 2. A few key creative choices that weren’t good (a so-so love story, a court case with unclear stakes, several subplots that should’ve been cut) doomed the movie.
But when you’re talking about investigative storylines that are built around murder or missing persons, the data is clear. You want women or children to be the ones murdered or missing. And the more positive sub-traits you can pile onto those victims, the better.
To the writer’s credit, after the brother’s body is discovered, he introduces an imprisoned female character. Which happens fairly early in the script – 38 pages in. This makes us much more likely to care. However, we know nothing about this woman character. She’s just a random person. So she has no sub-traits that are going to increase our investment.
Luckily, the script also has this mystery at its center. Who are these mole people and why do they want to rip peoples’ eyes out and murder them? That did make me kind of curious, which helped keep those pages turning.
But, at the same time, I never fully cared about what was going on and part of that was because I’ve been reading scripts about scary people living in the abandoned New York subway system for over a decade. Not a ton of them. But probably between 7-10 scripts. And every one struggles to feel big enough. They all feel like “almost movies.” The stakes never seem high enough. The threats never seem scary enough. The plots never have satisfying enough reveals.
I’ve thought a lot about why that is and I’m still not sure. But part of it is that these people are underground and so, as long as you stay above ground… YOU’RE FINE! Even when one of these guys come up to Jack’s apartment to attack him, it doesn’t feel scary because it’s just a normal guy attacking him. There’s nothing special about him. I don’t know. I wasn’t scared for Jack.
It’s not like, say, It Follows, where you genuinely felt overmatched. Everywhere you went, that evil following entity could be there. I was scared for those people.
By the way, that leads to another horror trope that helps in a movie like this – making the protagonist female. If she’s female, we feel more fear for her. Had that attacker broken into the apartment of Hero Jill as opposed to Hero Jack, I would’ve definitely been more on the edge of my seat.
But Jack?? Jack is 28. He’s strong. Why would I feel fear for this guy? This is why most horror protagonists are female.
To the writer’s credit, the script makes a bold choice at the end. I didn’t see it coming. But it couldn’t erase the issues I detailed above. This script needed MORE. It’s another FINE script. But to be a script that affects people, it needed to be a lot bigger.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I think a lot of this could’ve been solved by making the initial missing person Jack’s girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend) who is an addict. She went using again. That’s why she was hanging out with the wrong people. That’s how she ended up getting taken to these underground tunnels. Now you’ve got an emotional connection between the protagonist and the missing girl. I still don’t know if we care enough about mole people but it certainly would’ve added more investment to the story.
What I learned 2: If you want to improve the chances of an idea like this selling by as much as 10-fold, make it supernatural. If the things underground were supernatural, this could be a 3000 theater wide release. Keeping it realistic makes it feel too tame. It just never shook the Richter scale.
