Genre: Horror
Premise: A young couple who perform rituals to raise people from the dead get more than they bargained for when they attempt to re-animate a young girl who doesn’t remember how she died.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is brand new!
Writer: Mike George
Details: 98 pages
Rising star Dominic Sessa for Ryan?
As I’ve pointed out before, you can really up your chances of breaking into the business if you come up with either a HIGH or MARKETABLE concept that can be shot in a single location.
Here’s the difference between the two. A high concept is something that has that all-important ‘strange attractor.’ The upcoming The Watchers is an example of this. A group of people get stuck in a looped forest that’s impossible to get out of, forcing them to live together in an isolated cabin in the woods.
Absent a high concept, you can still break through with a MARKETABLE concept. That just means you’re writing an idea in a genre that’s marketable and the idea itself lives in the same marketable space as other movies studios have released.
And yes, you can achieve both of these with the same idea. I’m just saying that if you don’t achieve the high concept, you can still write a script that people want to buy as long as it’s marketable.
Today’s script lands in that high concept space, albeit right at entry level: A couple attempts to raise the dead at an isolated AirBnB to disastrous consequences.
27 year old Shay and 25 year old Ryan are trucking it out to a remote house. We’re not sure why yet. We just know that Ryan is a little more smitten with Shay than Shay is with him. In fact, early on, Ryan attempts to propose to Shay, who steadfastly refuses. She’s not where he is yet.
The two get to a remote AirBnB farmhouse and start unloading their stuff. And that’s when we see a body bag. With a body in it! The couple lugs the dead body into the home. From there, we start to get hints about what’s going to happen. They’re going to perform a seance to bring this dead girl back to life.
The reason we’re bringing her back to life is explained soon after. They’re working for a client. This is his daughter. What they do is bring people back to life for clients so that they can have one last conversation with their loved ones before they move on.
However, the process for bringing people back to life is complicated. It requires writing out detailed pentagrams on the ground, writing in ancient languages on the walls in blood. Oh, and there’s a lot of sacrificing. One of them always has to sit within the pentagram and give a lot of blood in order to bring the dead person back to life.
Once they prep everything, the client, 40-something Mark, shows up. But the second he walks through the door (spoiler) Shay looks at him in shock. Shay knows this man. And he knows her. If this is the client, she knows, then chances are their dead girl is not his daughter. And that begs the question: Who the hell is she?
The first half of this script was awesome.
I was on the edge of my seat.
Two things I absolutely love in a screenplay are 1) Show me something I haven’t seen before. And 2) Give me a deep compelling mythology that I know you know intimately.
This script nailed both.
I’ve read ideas sort of like this before. But nothing quite like this. A couple who work as spiritual necromancers rent a home to perform a resurrection.
And then you have the mythology… this writer went all in on this mythology! I got the sense that he must’ve dabbled in witchcraft at some point in his life. He knows way too many details about the practice not to have been a part of it somehow.
Those two things powered the first act of the screenplay.
I’ll tell you something else that powered it. The word “No.” In my dialogue book, one of my big dialogue tips is utilizing the power of “no” in conversation. “Yes” rarely leads you anywhere interesting in a conversation. But the word “no” almost always leads you there.
Early in the script, Ryan, who clearly likes Shay more than she likes him, proposes to her. And what does she say? She says, “No.” The reason that answer is so important is because it lays a thick claptrap of conflict over the rest of the story. Every conversation they now have is affected by this new jilted dynamic.
Think about what their conversations would be like if she had said yes. I’ll give you a hint. They rhyme with ‘boring.’ With Ryan now wondering what he’s done wrong, why she doesn’t like him as much as he likes her, there’s subtext in every conversation that’s had.
So we’ve got an [x] impressive here, right?
Well, let me say this. I admire whenever a writer takes a big creative swing. Whenever they make a daring choice, there’s value in that. Unfortunately, I think George made the wrong choice and it kind of destroyed the rest of the screenplay. Spoilers ahead.
This Mark guy comes in and he’s supposed to be the dead girl’s father. He wants to reunite with her one last time. But then we see him and Shay giving each other eyes. We’re wondering what’s going on. What we find out is that he and Shay used to work together as “con men” bilking people out of money, pretending to raise the dead.
Mark then heard that Shay was doing her business with someone new. And she still owed him money or something. So he pretended to be a client in order to find her and get that money back.
The reason the choice doesn’t work is because it took a small intimate story with a really fun idea and made it both too silly and too complex. Once you introduce con men into other genres, it never feels right. It’s the kind of thing that only works when you establish it at the outset: This is going to be a con man movie.
But the bigger issue is that if George would’ve stuck with what got him here, he was on the verge of writing a great script. Because you’ve got this really cool mystery. When they’re slowly bringing this girl back to life, they’re realizing that she’s different. There’s some sort of mystery to her. That had me turning the pages.
But, also, you destroy your most emotionally impactful storyline before it ever had a chance to breathe, no pun intended. A father getting an opportunity to say goodbye to his daughter one last time… I wanted to see that. Especially after all the effort Ryan and Shay put into bringing her back alive. I felt that George really robbed the story of a great moment there.
Also, we should’ve left Mark in the ‘former or current lover’ category. We’ve already established that Shay doesn’t want to marry Ryan. You’ve built a compelling conflict between them via that storyline. Her sleeping with Mark would’ve been a natural extension of that storyline and now you’ve got this other layer of b.s. the three of them have to deal with as they bring this daughter back to life.
This happens sometimes. We get overzealous as writers. We get bored with our stories. We feel like we have to do more than we actually do. So we come up with big wild plotlines when a smarter smaller more emotional plotline would’ve been better.
I’m going to give this script a [x] worth the read because its first half is so good. But it’s one of those ‘hanging on for dear life’ worth the reads. Cause the second half was way too messy.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Build your relationship backstories from elements organic to your concept. In other words, sure, you could’ve had Ryan and Shay begin their relationship at a coffee shop. But a coffee shop is generic. Instead, use the organic elements of your story to explain how they met. Which is what George does. Ryan and Shay met because Shay was originally working alone, Ryan hired her after his mom died, and they started dating after that. Not only does it make more sense but it feels genuine because it’s original. It stems from the core of your idea as opposed to some generic place that anybody in any movie could’ve met.
