Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) After strange deaths and suicides skyrocket in a dying Appalachian coal town, Maggie – a first responder – wages a personal war against the local coal mine, unearthing a disturbing past that the company has kept secret within the waters of the local lake.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 10 votes (ranking it just outside the top 20). It is the writer’s, Ezra Herz’s, breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Ezra Herz
Details: 105 pages
Reader RT posted a great quote after yesterday’s script from writer David Koepp: “This is my 30th movie/script and storytelling is a mystery every single time. Things that you think will work, don’t. Things that you didn’t expect to work, do. Things go together that you didn’t imagine. You’re uncovering stuff as you go. Every single one of them is HARD.”
Never have words rung so true.
Every screenplay is a leap of faith. You know what you’re trying to do. But you won’t know if it works until you finish. Because scripts look different on 110 pieces of paper than they do as an abstract idea in your head.
Which is why you want to start with the best concept possible. The weaker the concept, the more it’s going to break down over 110 pages. A strong concept gives you the best chance at mitigating those things Koepp was talking about.
What’s a strong concept, Carson? Isn’t that subjective? Yes, it is. But all I’m saying is, you’re better off starting with an idea like Knives Out than Portrait of a Lady On Fire. You’re better off starting with an idea like Yesterday than Manchester by the Sea.
Today’s script has some mad potential for scariness. But when it’s all said and done, the fear factor is diluted – a scare fest in search of a focused story.
Maggie Dawson is a first responder in a small Appalachian town that’s participating in an upgraded coal delivery system called mountain shaving, a recently developed technology whereby you blow off the tops of mountains so you can pluck the coal from them right out the top.
Maggie’s town has been dealing with mining issues for decades. Many of the people here worked in the mines and developed black lung, including her father, who she has to steal morphine for from the hospital every day.
When Maggie starts to notice that many of the people she treats have a black rash on them (and commit suicide later), she suspects that something more sinister is going on, especially because every time anyone walks past an open mine, they hear creepy whispers coming from inside.
Maggie already had it bad seeing as her mom went crazy and died which led to Maggie’s husband leaving her and him restricting access to their 12 year old son (as far what happened with mother, that remains a mystery for the majority of the script).
Convinced that the mining company is behind all of this mayhem, Maggie goes digging, which leads her to a river by the local dam, where an entire town has been buried beneath the water. She scuba dives down to the ruins, sees a bunch of dead people in the houses (despite nobody else seeing them) and that’s when she knows it’s time to take this evil mining corporation down for good!
My experience has been that if a horror script not associated with Nightmare on Elm Street is using nightmares excessively, the script isn’t working.
If your scares are coming from random nightmare scenes as opposed to emerging organically from your concept, you probably have a weak concept. Or, at least, an unfocused one.
This is two horror scripts in a row (along with yesterday’s “You Should Have Left”) where we’re getting nightmare after nightmare scene. And, to be frank, it feels lazy. Even when it works it feels lazy because you’re cheating. You’re slapping together an easy scare sequence because nightmare scenes don’t need to connect with anything. For example, you can have a dead character come alive in a nightmare scene and then not have to explain it.
So whenever I see that, I know a script is in trouble. It’s not that it never works. But it’s one of those works 1% of the time deals. Take The Exorcist, for example, considered to be the best horror movie of all time. There’s no dream sequence in that movie. Good horror doesn’t need cheap nightmare scares.
Ripple is a frustrating script.
There’s something here. You have elements that could lead to a good horror film. But there’s way too much going on. We have a mother who went crazy backstory. We’ve got a father who’s dying from black lung. We have eerie orbs that pop up at night. We have a mysterious black rash showing up on everyone. We have people losing their minds and committing suicide. We have an evil mining corporation. We have strange whispers that come from the caves. And to top it all off, we have an underwater town that was flooded when the damn was built.
It’s idea overload.
I know you’re sick of hearing this but screenplays need FOCUS. Make your characters as complex as you want. But the plot needs to be reasonably simple. And today’s script is anything but simple. At one point a girl who was saved from a fire starts showing up behind our heroine when she’s at the hospital, then disappearing when our protagonist turns around and all I’m thinking is, “What does this have to do with anything?” It feels like a scare always took precedence over logic.
This week is a reminder of just how hard writing a script is. Because yesterday we had what I’m arguing for today, which is a simple story. But yesterday’s script was weak too. And that was written by one of the top screenwriters in Hollywood! I guess it’s a reminder that you’re always striving for balance. You don’t want things to be too sprawling. But a script that’s so simple there aren’t any toys to play with isn’t fun either.
There is one consistent thread between these two scripts, though. When you write a horror script, the horror element needs be clearly defined. Both of these scripts fail in that department. Yesterday’s script was about a haunted house that was brand new which sometimes had time displacement and disappearing doors?? Today’s script is about a mining operation that gives people black rashes and forces some to commit suicide which is tied back to strange orbs and a town underneath the water??
Contrast that to movies like A Quiet Place: If you make a noise you’re dead. The Exorcist: A demon has possessed your daughter. It: An evil clown kills children in a small town. Midsommar: Four friends visit a remote strange cult that starts killing them. The horror element in all these movies is very clearly defined.
I suppose if you’re making an argument against this line of thinking, you would use a movie like, “The Ring.” You’ve got a video tape that kills anyone who watches it after seven days. You’ve got a scary wet dead girl who comes out of a TV?? People die in frozen screams (but are also somehow aged into a mummy state when they die??). You’ve got dead horses. A bizarre 8mm film. A little boy with psychic powers. An island with a lighthouse. It’s a weird combination of elements, for sure.
But to be clear, I didn’t say it was *impossible* to make these sorts of horror scripts work. Only that it’s harder. A lot harder. As weird as The Ring was, the story connected together well. The setups and payoffs were strong. Everything that happens in that weird 8mm VHS tape film is a setup for things they encounter later in the movie.
I didn’t get that same sense after reading “Ripple.” The elements felt too raw and too disconnected. Then again, this is screenwriting. You can always write another draft and keep connecting those dots. That’s actually what rewriting is all about. Using each draft to make everything feel a little more connected than it was before.
I wanted to get into this script because I like the setting. I like the idea of putting a horror film in this environment. But it was too messy for my taste.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m all for creating conflict and strife in your main character’s life. But it feels manufactured if EVERYBODY in their life has some form of conflict. Here we have the mom who went crazy and died. We have a dad who’s dying of cancer. We have a husband who left our hero and doesn’t trust her. We have our protagonist’s kid who she’s not allowed to see. It’s too much. There has to be some normality SOMEWHERE in your character’s life or their life won’t feel real.
