Genre: Horror
Premise: An immature teenage girl must protect her younger brother when their babysitter becomes infected by something in the woods.
About: This script finished on last year’s Blood List. Zachary Donohue and Lauren Thompson are best known for their 2013 low-budget horror film, The Den. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It’s not bad! That film got Donohue a writing job on one of the more high profile new shows, Outcast, Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman possession show.
Writers: Lauren Thompson & Zachary Donohue
Details: 116 pages – 7/29/14 draft
One thing I like to do when I can’t choose a script to review is pick a ONE PAGE SHOWDOWN between two scripts. Read the first page of each. Whoever’s better? That’s who I pick, baby.
Since readers are hyper-critical in the early-going, and since most seasoned producers will give up on you after a single page if they think it sucks, page-battles are a nice way to see if you offer more than your competition. Go ahead and grab a recent sale spec that’s in the same genre as yours, and compare the first pages. See how you stack up!
I’ll explain to you why The Becoming won today’s battle, and maybe it’ll help you understand what you’re up against when a reader starts picking apart your page 1. But first, let’s break down the plot of Becoming.
13 year-old Madi Chapman has spent the majority of her life taking care of her 7 year-old deaf brother, Tuck. But Madi’s finally reached that age that all of humanity dreads: 13. Which means she’s now interested in… DUH DUH DUHHHHHH-HHHH……. BOYS!
When Madi’s mischievous friend, Hannah, tells Madi she’s got the hot and older Brandt brothers lined up for them, Jeff, 16, and Adam, 15, taking care of Tuck all of a sudden doesn’t seem so important.
Things take a provocative turn when they learn Madi’s parents are going out for their anniversary dinner tonight. If Madi’s going to pass the Cool Test, she has to hold a mini-party at her place as soon as the P’s leave. Just as Madi warms up to the idea, her parents inform her that they’re bringing in a babysitter, 17 year old geeky Kimberly, to make sure that Tuck’s taken care of.
Later on, Kimberly’s none-too-pleased when she catches Madi sneaking her friends in, and threatens to call her parents. But then the power goes out, Kimberly goes checking outside to see what’s up, and gets attacked by a giant white ball of goo.
Afterwards, Kimberly gets really sick, as you would assume someone who’s encountered a giant white ball of goo would, and starts puking white bile everywhere. It’s bad enough that the kids decide to drive her to the hospital. But that plan gets ruined when Kimberly eats Adam.
Next comes a game of, OMG, Kimberly is so not cool, let’s run the fuck away from her. But they have to find the hiding Tuck before they can go anywhere. What follows is a lot of screaming and a lot bile-dodging (also known as a typical day at Carson’s house). And the occasional teenage munchable. You know, just another average night with the babysitter.
One of the most important focuses of your first scene should be MAKING SURE SOMETHING’S GOING ON. There are three versions of this. A scene where nothing’s going on. It’s just characters talking or some boring event with no context. Bad! A scene where something’s going on. This involves a well-thought out scene that creates suspense and/or mystery and motivates us to keep reading to figure out how it ends. Good! Then there’s the scene not a lot of screenwriters talk about – the “something’s sort of going on” scene. “Something’s sort of going on” is a scene where the writer technically has something happening, but it’s either uninspired or cliche. Writer thinks this good but it’s actually bad!
The Becoming starts out with a boy who’s fallen from the monkey bars on the playground. Other kids are looking at him funny, some laughing. But we don’t hear anything. In fact, this entire scene plays out in silence. The kid stumbles away and we follow him into the school as he looks into each class he passes, students and teachers staring back at him, saying and doing nothing. It’s a weird and unpredictable scene and I was curious to see where it would end up.
Day 2 begins with something going on as well. A college girl walks into a library, sees a couple of friends, and briefly, the writers mention that someone is standing up on the balcony in a mask who no one seems to notice. Is this person dangerous? We don’t know. So again, we need to keep reading to find out what that’s all about.
Here’s why I picked The Becoming over Day 2, though. How many scenes have we seen with people in masks staring at other people? A lot. So this felt like a lazy choice that anybody could’ve come up with. And I hold writers to a higher standard than the average person. They’re supposed to come up with the thing that NOBODY could’ve come up with. I mean if you can’t outthink the average person, what are you bringing to the table?
The Becoming scene wasn’t revolutionary. But the silence mixed with the fact that everybody just stared at this kid but nobody said or did anything for him – that made me curious. And it’s why Becoming got the nod.
We’ve talked a lot about micro-managing your first page. Everything from avoiding spelling errors to giving your hero a strong introduction. But really the only thing that matters is that the reader wants to find out what happens next. As long as you’re dangling a carrot in front of them, and that carrot isn’t cliche or obvious, there’s a good chance they’ll want to turn the page.
So what about the rest of The Becoming!? Was it as intriguing as that first page?
Unfortunately not. If I’m ahead of your script for the first 70 pages? You’re not working hard enough. Especially when it comes to such a familiar setup like this – teenagers in a house with a monster chasing them.
A lot of writers will say to me, “Since these movies are so popular, there aren’t any fresh ideas left. So this script will always seem cliche.” That’s bullshit. And actually, the fact that the genre is so cliche is an opportunity! If the audience is familiar with all of the beats of a genre, it means you get to play those expectations against them.
Why do you think Psycho is one of the best horror movies of all time? It used your expectations against you and killed off its main character early in the 2nd act.
The only thing that was unique about The Becoming was this bile that Kimberly spat out. The bile would spread, taking over the floors, the walls, the ceilings, and it would harden. So I was somewhat curious how that would evolve.
But The Great Bile Mystery of 2016 isn’t big enough on its own to make a movie. There needed to be more. The deaf brother may have been an opportunity but his deafness didn’t play into the script enough. An easy way to check if a character’s limitation is relevant is to ask what the script would be without it. This movie doesn’t change much if Tuck can hear.
If you watch the recent horror film, Hush, for example. That movie is about a crazy killer fucking with this woman home alone in a cabin who’s deaf. The movie wouldn’t be the same movie if she could hear. So her limitation was relevant.
And deaf characters are tricky to pull off anyway. It’s not that they can’t work, but you need to be on point in your research so their condition feels authentic. And like anything, you need to find a new angle into the deaf character to avoid the classic “not another deaf character” eye roll that’s so popular amongst the Reader Cabal.
The only way to see if my first page experiment worked would be to read and review Day 2 tomorrow. I might do that, but then again, I might not. I don’t like to read the same genre two days in a row. You see what I did there? I dangled the carrot. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Why Wouldn’t They Do This?” moments. An easy way to identify a good writer is how they handle “Why Wouldn’t They Do This?” moments. These are moments where it makes sense for your character to perform an action, but you don’t want them to perform that action because it doesn’t work for your story. The classic example is a group of friends are hanging out, there’s an accident, and one of them dies. What’s the obvious next course of action? To call the cops! But you don’t want the cops because then you don’t get to explore these friends freaking out and turning on each other, which is the heart of your story. In this case, the beginner will come up with a half-ass reason for why the cops aren’t called while the skilled writer will think long and hard about how the situation would play out in the real world and construct a solid believable excuse for not including the cops. For example, maybe the friend who died is the sheriff’s son and he’s the cop who would answer the call. I could believe that those friends would hesitate if that were the case.
In The Becoming, we have a scene early on where Kimberly sees Madi sneak her friends into the house. Kimberly asks the friends to leave and Madi says no. Of course Kimberly has to call the parents now, right? That’s what any babysitter would do. But if the parents come home, we don’t have a movie. So the writers have Madi say to Kimberly, “Fine, ruin their anniversary dinner.” It’s enough to get Kimberly to back off for awhile. Was it a 100% convincing solution? No. But it was okay. And okay is better than no effort at all, which is what I usually run into.
