Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: After an introverted college kid gets together with a pessimistic strange young woman, the two visit her father’s old home, where many secrets lie below the surface.
About: One of the most prolific writers in the screenwriting business, Zahler, wrote this one in 2005. He would eventually turn it into an audio-story, in the hopes of improving his chances of getting a film adaptation. The audio story got some pretty big-time actors in Vincent D’Onofrio, Will Patton, and Kurt Russell’s son, Wyatt, playing the lead. But, as of today, it still hasn’t been turned into a film.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 95 pages
Lili Simmons played the role of Ruby in the Narrow Caves audio book
The man still has one of my favorite scripts of all time in my Top 25 list (Brigands!). So I’m always excited to read one of his screenplays.
Plus, this is probably the shortest script he’s ever written! So how could I resist?
It’s 1981. 21 year old Walter finds himself at a party he doesn’t want to be at. That’s where he meets Ruby, a girl who doesn’t want to be there either. But in her case, she lives at the house. So she parks herself in the backyard, away from everyone, and reads a book all night.
Walter sees her and makes a move but she stiff-arms him. Determined to try again, Walter shows up the next day, pretending he left something there and gets rejected a second time! But later Ruby has second thoughts and calls him to go on a date.
Cut to six months later and they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. Ruby finally wants Walter to meet her father, who lives in the middle of nowhere. So off they go, and right away, Walter’s kind of put off by this guy. He seems a little weird.
During their stay, Ruby tells Walter about some strange experiences she had growing up in the area, including occasionally seeing mysterious naked men running around. After Walter finds an old diary of Ruby’s dad’s, he becomes really creeped out by this place and wants to leave.
However, that night, both of them are knocked out and kidnapped by a group of albinos. When they wake up, they’re in some cave. The albinos bring a strange disgusting fruit and make Ruby eat it. Over the course of the next two weeks, Ruby loses all of her teeth and hair, likely because of this death cave fruit.
On the brink of death himself, Walter gets a final reprieve when Ruby’s dad shows up and cuts him loose. He’s too late to save his daughter, though, who killed herself. The dad then inexplicably abandons Walter, forcing him to find a way out of this hellhole himself.
You’ve never read anything like this before.
I mean, you sort of have.
You’ve read about people going to a remote location and encountering danger. But the danger introduced into this story isn’t quite like any you’ve seen before. That ends up being the script’s biggest strength and biggest weakness.
One of the things I take for granted these days is how well I understand structure. Cause I just assume everyone else understands it as well as I do.
To me, structure is obvious.
The first 25% of a script is your beginning, aka your setup. The next 50% of your script is your middle, aka where all the conflict happens, and the last 25% is your ending, aka your resolution.
There are smaller markers to meet within those sections, but that’s pretty much it.
The reason structure is important is because it’s the most satisfying way to hear a story. When someone tells you a story, even if it’s just about their day, it works best if that person sets up the scenario, then tells you all the crazy stuff that happened to them, and then wraps things up with a big satisfying conclusion.
It doesn’t work nearly as well if someone sets up their day in a quick 5 seconds, then spends the next 20 minutes telling you what happened, then rushes through the resolution, spitting it out in 15 seconds.
The story feels off somehow, even for those unfamiliar with storytelling.
So these story beats are important because they exist within a framework that the receiver is familiar with.
My big issue with this script is that the first act is basically the first 60% of the screenplay (meet everyone, from Ruby to her father to her brothers to the home they stay at). Then we get our second act, which is the next 30% of the screenplay (kidnapped by the cave people), and then the final act is the last 5% of the screenplay (his escape).
When you read it, it feels lopsided.
Now, does this mean you should be a slave to structure? No. Of course not. Good writers should play with structure. But there has to be a good reason for it. Any altering of traditional structure has to feel like an organic extension of the story. 500 Days of Summer played with structure in that it jumped into different random days of the relationship. However, the chaos of that structure was baked into the concept.
Here, it feels like this should’ve been a traditionally told story. That’s why the extreme structural issues feel so off. This isn’t the kind of movie you do that with.
I’m assuming a few of you will have the following question: Why wouldn’t the moment Walter and Ruby head to her house, on page 27, be the beginning of the second act? Why am I saying that the second act doesn’t start until they’re stuck in the cave, on page 60?
Because whatever the big hook of your movie is, that needs to be the beginning of the second act. If you write Jurassic World, you better brace for a riot from ticket buyers if you don’t get to Jurassic World until minute 60. You gotta get there at the end of your first act, if not sooner.
The hook here are these cave people who kidnap them. So that’s gotta happen much earlier in the story.
Now, of course, all of this is debatable. There are no official rules when it comes to storytelling. But read this script and tell me its pacing doesn’t feel lopsided. It does. And that’s directly because of the structural issues.
Which is too bad because I think this script had a lot of potential. Zahler has come up with some really weird creepy creatures and he’s got an elaborate mythology backing up their history.
On top of that, Zahler continues to kick butt in the specificity department of script description. He’s one of the best at bringing you into scenes, scenarios, situations, and entire screenplays.
He paints really vivid worlds that make us feel like we’re there.
And he started off great with Walter and Ruby. Ruby was tough in an organic way (and not how female characters are written these days – tough because the climate demands it) and I really enjoyed how Walter and Ruby got together. It was romantic yet truthful. It felt like Zahler really knew these characters.
But after that, Ruby loses her gusto. I don’t know what happened but she becomes a passenger throughout the rest of the script and I was baffled by it because I liked her so much when I met her. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. Don’t just give your characters snazzy memorable opening scenes. Keep that personality blazing for the rest of the movie.
Characters who are passive and neutral are rarely interesting. Movie characters need to be polarized somehow. They should be either really intense negative or really intense positive. Because those extremes are where personalities shine. Nobody knows anyone who has a great middle-of-the-road personality. I wanted Zahler to take both of these characters up a notch.
Narrow Caves is a mixed bag. I would say if you’re a Zahler fan like me, definitely check it out. If you’re a horror fan, you might like it cause of the unique nature of its creepiness. But as a screenplay, the structural issues were too much to overcome.
Screenplay link: Narrow Caves
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes when we’re describing a situation, we can get caught up in trying to be “Writers” with a capital “W.” So, for example, let’s say we’re writing a heavy dinner scene with four characters. We might write, “Joe has an intense look of consternation in his deep-set eyes while Fran is fraught with anxiety yet doing her best to hide it. Nick shares a glance with Sara, the two of them plagued with the residue of a long week of too much work and not enough sleep.” Granted, Zahler is susceptible to this over-describing. But there was one line he wrote in a scene similar to this that I thought was perfect. He sets up that the people are sitting at the table then he writes: “Nobody looks happy.” Those three words did more for me understanding this scene than the 40 words I wrote above. Just remember with screenwriting, less is usually more. And a clear succinct description is usually more effective than a long lumbering one.
