Genre: Horror
Premise: When a deadly virus infects mothers and turns them against their offspring, a father must do whatever it takes to protect his daughter from her mom.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. It was picked up by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes in the hopes of becoming the next breakout horror hit, a la A Quiet Place. Screenwriter Marc Bloom, who hails from Cape Town, South Africa, was also on last year’s Black List, with Ferocious. He also has a script, Cauldron, set up at 21 Laps. Most importantly, he’s an OG reader of the greatest screenwriting site on the internet, Scriptshadow. 10 out of 10 highly recommend.
Writer: Marc Bloom
Details: 94 pages
Maggie G. for the mom?
One of the hardest balances to strike in spec screenwriting is writing a script that reads like lightning but still contains depth, particularly on the character front.
It’s hard to write one and two sentence paragraphs and still get into the heart of your characters. It can be done. I’ve seen Brian Duffield do it in Vivien Hasn’t Been Herself Lately.
But, usually, nailing one of these means sacrificing the other. And, with Mom? I think the wonderfully speedy read prevented the script from diving into that section of the story ocean that needed it most – the relationship between the members of this family.
Let’s take a look.
40-something John Slater is a doctor at an Urgent Care Clinic in a small town in Ohio. He’s used to seeing people throwing up, being in pain, and being generally uncomfortable. On this particular day, nothing that exciting happens at work.
But then he gets home where his wife Tess, and 12 year old daughter, Izzy, are waiting. The family seems to be normal and loving – no clear problems from what we can tell. When John heads off on an errand, his next door neighbor, an annoying man in his 60s, pleads for John to help him. His mother has disappeared.
John reluctantly goes inside the dark creepy house only to eventually find the mother walking around for the first time in years. The woman then picks up a rake and viciously attacks her son with it until he’s dead, then uses the instrument to bludgeon herself to death.
John hurries back to his own home where he finds Tess acting bizarre towards Izzy. There’s something sinister about the way she’s speaking. John senses that there’s more going on here and grabs Izzy to leave. That’s when Tess comes after them and things get real. Once outside, John and Izzy see that all across the neighborhood, mothers are killing their offspring. It’s time to get the hell out of here.
The two steal a car (Tess sabotaged theirs so they couldn’t leave) and hear some details on the news about what’s going on. It seems to be some sort of virus connected to trace tissues that every child leaves within their mother. These tissues have gone bad, for lack of a better word. And now mommies wanna slaughter their children.
The National Guard comes in to quarantine the town, which basically makes every person with a living mother a sitting duck, including our duo. So John and Izzy bounce around town, watching as various insane things happen (mothers swan-diving off their roofs once they’ve killed their offspring, mothers coming out of the woods in droves to attack the people stuck on the highway). Eventually, Tess catches up to them and she’s not leaving until her daughter’s ticker is no longer ticking.
I kind of liked this script but the thinness of the story definitely got in the way. It seems only natural that a script about mothers trying to kill their children is trying to say something. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what that message was. Which means this is just a movie about mothers trying to kill their kids.
Does a script like this have to say something?
I loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, and that wasn’t trying to sell any message. But that was a horror-comedy. “Mom?” feels more serious. The concept wants you to look deeper. But every time I dipped my head below the water, I just saw black.
The answer is somewhere in this family. All screenplays come down to broken relationships that need to be resolved. Whatever the issue is that broke the relationship is typically the message of the movie.
For example, if you watched that Netflix show, Four Seasons, Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) have this relationship where they’ve become roommates rather than a couple. He wants to change that but she doesn’t want to put in any effort. That’s what they have to figure out. And it’s part of a broader message in the show about how relationships are hard and if you don’t nurture them, they will fall apart.
That’s very clear when you watch the show.
It’s telling when you write a script where the message ISN’T CLEAR. Because the reader is looking for a message. If they don’t find it, they start getting frustrated.
What a lot of writers do is they freak out when they realize their story doesn’t have a message so they kind of pepper it with several messages, unofficially telling the reader to, “Go ahead and choose whichever one you like best.” But that never works. Multiple messages just confused the overall point of the story.
I know this: If you want to write a more thoughtful powerful story, you need more words. You need more sentences and paragraphs. Which is scary for a screenwriter because they’ve been told from day one to keep it lean and tight.
But, remember, there are tools available that allow you to lengthen your descriptions and scenes and character moments without it FEELING like it’s longer. Which basically comes down to dangling carrots. If you’re dangling juicy carrots in front of the reader, that manipulates time. A continuous series of rewards (carrots) helps us forget about time.
This is why every Final Destination set piece moved so fast. Cause the big fat juicy carrot of death was dangling at the end of each scene.
I think Mom? needed more character development so that we understood what this family was going through and, therefore, what needed to be fixed. I don’t have the answer by the way. I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to construct a satisfying family drama in this scenario. It’s tricky. Cause there isn’t anything very relatable in life to your mother trying to kill you.
You can use metaphor (maybe mom has never understood you – so her killing you is a metaphor for your inability to connect) but even as I wrote that out, it didn’t sound quite right. In Vivien Hasn’t Been Herself Lately, Duffield uses possession as a metaphor for the difficulties of marriage. And he pulls it off perfectly.
Like I said at the outset, I kinda liked this script. And I think, depending on who directs it, it’s going to be full of some very freaky compelling imagery. Which I assume will get butts in seats. But I was looking for more here. I don’t think the script is where it needs to be to deliver on the promise of its premise. Yet!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your heroes should never feel safe in a horror movie. The safer they feel, they safer we feel. And if we feel safe for too long, we check out. Here, the moms are violent killers, but only towards their offspring. In other words, if you run into somebody else’s mom, she’ll walk right past you. Therefore, there were a lot of times in this script where I felt safe. Cause only Tess could hurt them and Tess was nowhere to be found. It’s kind of like a zombie movie where only one zombie is coming after you. I needed to be in fear a lot more here.
