16 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A hacker tasked with looking into a strange suicide begins to find herself followed by random crowds of people who she suspects may want to kill her.
About: There are a lot of Jack Hellers. I think this is the producer Jack Heller, who’s produced all of S. Craig Zahler’s movies. This script of his finished on last year’s Black List and was one of the only scripts on the list to get a coveted “must read” rating from me.
Writer: Jack Heller
Details: 97 pages
In the comment section yesterday, we were talking about Eddie Murphy and how he went from the biggest comedic actor in the world to 35 years of missteps.
Here are some of the concepts he signed up for…
The Adventures of Pluto Nash – In the future, a man struggles to keep his lunar nightclub out of the hands of the Mafia.
Vampire in Brooklyn – A Caribbean vampire seduces a Brooklyn police officer who has no idea that she is half-vampire.
Metro – A hostage negotiator teams up with a sharpshooter to bring down a dangerous jewel thief.
Holy Man – An over-the-top television evangelist finds a way to turn television home shopping into a religious experience, and takes America by storm.
Norbit – A mild-mannered guy, who is married to a monstrous woman, meets the woman of his dreams, and schemes to find a way to be with her.
Meet Dave – A crew of miniature aliens operates a spaceship that has a human form. Their plans get messed up when the human form falls in love.
Some of these concepts are misguided (why is the vampire, oddly, Caribbean?), some bland (hostage negotiator tries to take down a jewel thief??), some forced (aliens piloting a person), some lacking a clear comedic angle (Pluto Nash).
The reason I bring these up today, of all days, is to remind everyone HOW IMPORTANT CONCEPTS ARE. When you have a great concept, the majority of the script writes itself. When you don’t, you spend 90% of your time forcing things to work. And they never quite work because the concept itself never worked.
This is why, when you stumble upon a good idea, you must cherish it, like a rare Pokemon. It is worth more than you could possibly imagine. I mean that. A good idea could conceivably last CENTURIES.
I would place today’s concept in that category. Well, it’s maybe not centuries-lasting good but it’s one of the first concepts I noticed when last year’s Black List came out. I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s not exactly raining out but I’m in the mood to read something awesome.
Let’s check it out.
We start off by seeing a girl, Tabitha, hurry into a subway with a giant crowd slowly following her. The crowd of people eventually surrounds her and positions her head in the path of an oncoming train and she’s beheaded.
Cut to several days later, where we meet Lou. Lou is one of those “Girl with the dragon tattoo” types. She’s a hacker who does occasional jobs for an insurance company. The company is trying to prove that a girl (Tabitha) killed herself so it doesn’t have to pay out her life insurance.
Lou, who’s at the tail end of a long journey to end her conservatorship for, presumably, mental instability, starts looking into the video of Tabitha’s death, which shows… NO CROWD. Only Tabitha. But Lou curiously finds a strange blur moving towards Tabitha that warrants more investigation.
So she goes to the last person who saw Tabitha before she died, the subway ticket guy. That guy doesn’t want anything to do with Lou’s questions and goes home. Lou follows him and oddly sees the guy screaming to random nothingness, “Get away from me!” 20 minutes later, back at his home, he kills himself.
Lou then begins having dreams of a crowd of people in her bedroom watching her while she sleeps. It creeps her out enough that she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Wes, who assures her she’ll be fine.
But as Lou starts to move around the city, she notices crowds starting to form, sometimes following her, sometimes just looking at her. It becomes apparent that she is in some sort of chain of people who are killed by a crowd. She must figure out how to stop this crowd before it makes her its latest victim.
The first question that pops into a reader’s head after a script is, “Is this script good enough to recommend?” If the answer is yes, the writer is in a very good place. Because it’s hard as hell to get people to recommend a script.
The section question that enters a reader’s mind is: “Could this be a movie?” A screenplay is a proposed blueprint for a movie. So readers want to know if the blueprint could be successful.
Now here’s the part that drives aspiring writers crazy. You can get a “no” on the first question, a “yes” to the second question, and people will still want to buy your script. That’s because “Can it be a movie?” is the only question that really matters.
The Crowd is a movie. Potentially a very successful one. It’s as if someone combined It Follows and Smile and injected the offspring with several performance-enhancing drugs.
Crowds are scary. The fact that nobody has thought to make a horror movie about one is shocking. And the writer knows exactly how to milk fear from a crowd.
I love how the crowd kills. It keeps following you and following you until it’s surrounding you. Then, it keeps moving in, moving in, and soon, it’s crushing you. And it doesn’t let up. It keeps crushing and crushing til bones start snapping, til eyeballs start popping. The crowd is ruthless.
And I love how the writer didn’t stop there. In addition to the crowd, there’s an individual within the crowd – a sort of alpha demon of sorts – and as the crowd holds you in place, the demon weaves through the crowd, getting closer and closer. It’s another scary element within an already terrifying element.
The crowd can also appear momentarily. You can be walking somewhere in the city and then, all of a sudden, everybody stops and turns to you. In this iteration, the crowd only wants to watch. Or to warn.
It’s genuinely spooky stuff.
And I liked what the writer did with the main character as well. We meet Lou at the end of a long journey where she’s been trying to get herself out of a protective conservatorship (think what Britney Spears parents were doing to her), which gives her a personal goal that works, concurrently, with the plot goal (find out what this crowd is before it kills you).
As someone who’s read a million and one characters, I don’t remember a single script where a character was trying to get out of a conservatorship. I love writers who go the extra mile and come up with unique angles like that.
But I do have one beef with The Crowd.
There isn’t enough crowd!
When you have an idea this original, you want to take advantage of it! So much of this script is about the investigation into how the crowd came to be and how it ended up with her. I don’t go to a movie about scary crowds to spend 75% of the time watching characters look at computer screens and say stuff like, “Yeah, that person in that video clip DOES look strange.”
I want my character in CROWD SITUATIONS!
I actually thought this script was going to be one long real-time story where the main character must make it through the city with crowds moving in on her wherever she goes.
I’m fine that that’s not the case but, at least give me 25% of that!
I’m guessing the writer thought that if there was too much crowd stuff, it would lose its impact. I suppose that’s an okay argument. But not if you get inventive. I already liked this rule he created where sometimes the crowd just watches. It doesn’t move in on you. So I know the writer has the creative ability to come up with different variations of the crowd. I would like to see more of that variety.
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million more times: GIVE US WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR MOVIE. That’s the one thing of value you possess – that unique asset.
Any time you are not focusing on that asset, you are focusing on things MOVIEGOERS HAVE SEEN BILLIONS OF TIMES ALREADY. You know how many investigations I’ve seen in movies? 11 billion.
That’s my only issue here. More crowd. Cause crowds are scary and the writer did a great job showing that. So show it more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t overthink verbs – “Tabitha strolls her eyes to a confusing sight.” If the reader has to stop to try and figure out what “strolling” one’s eyes means, you’ve written a clunky sentence. Just use normal words! “Tabitha notices something confusing.”
What I learned 2: Horror writers. Yeah, I’m speaking to you. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO WRITE SCENES IN BATHROOMS ANYMORE! STAY. AWAY. FROM BATHROOMS. No bloody sink scenes. No mirrors with monsters behind you in the reflection scenes. No foggy messages in the mirrors. Stop! Stop stop stop! You are writing things that a reader has read in 4 other horror scripts JUST THAT WEEK. If you’re going to write something in a bathroom, it must be something truly original.
