Genre: Horror
Premise: A family must fend off a relentless vampire attack during one of the most famous storms in American history, Hurricane Katrina.
About: You may not be a fan of Lionsgate’s recent output, but if you’re a screenwriter, you should be a fan of their studio. That’s because these guys still buy scripts. And they purchased Jaswinski’s latest last year. Kenya Barris (who’s looking to expand beyond his sit-com roots) will produce the film.
Writer: Anthony Jaswinski
Details: 86 pages
Is there a screenwriter who knows how to craft a simple high concept idea better than Anthony Jaswinski? If so, Jaswinski isn’t far from the top. In a business full of superheroes, live action Disney characters, and IP, Jaswinski continues to steadily belt out original specs that always get bought up and turned into movies. The box office for those movies has been spotty. But The Shallows showed what kind of damage his specs can do. Today, however, he’s really going out there. We’re talking floods and vampires. I don’t know how those two things go together. But I’m eager to find out.
It’s 2005. We start on a fire crew walking into a French Quarter townhouse bedroom where a woman has been burned to death on a bed. We then cut to three days earlier, where we meet Adam, Shannon, and their 10 year old daughter, Sadie, who arrive in downtown New Orleans from Florida.
Shannon’s mother died recently and they’re going to stay in her townhouse for the time being because they’re having all sorts of money problems. Shannon was a star dancer but recently had an injury that cut her career short. And then Adam recently lost his job. So yeah, things aren’t going well, you could say. They pull up their “new” house which, oh yeah, happens to be the same house we saw the fire crew walk into in the teaser.
Shannon, who’s a recovering drug addict, quickly hooks up with some bad people who she knew growing up. And even though there’s a huge storm on the way and the city is recommending evacuation, the family stays, and Shannon slips out to get her fix. She comes back looking sickly and pale. Assuming she’s on some drug, Adam wants to take her to the hospital. The problem is, with the storm worsening, hospitals and police aren’t an option.
And that’s when things get really bad. Three druggies in rain coats and hoods, one tall man, one woman covered in tattoos, and a third guy, come to their door and demand to see Shannon. Adam tells them to get lost but they say if you don’t let us see her, we’re going to see her our own way. Adam screams at them to leave, and they do, for awhile. But then they come back. And this time, they’re getting in.
Shannon mentally deteriorates until she commits suicide by burning herself to death. From there, Adam does everything in his power to protect his daughter. They fend off the vampires in the townhouse for a bit, and then they run to a neighbor’s house and hide out there. However, one thing remains clear – these vampires aren’t stopping until they take out all of Shannon’s family.
One of the first things that struck me about this script was just how much character development there was. If I’ve had a beef with Jaswinski’s writing, it’s that his characters all seem so thin. But here we get tons of backstory about this family and their problems with each other and their connection to this city and issues with jobs and addiction and money — I mean, I felt like I really knew this family by the time the s&*% hit the fan.
But when you think about it, this is how every contained horror slash home invasion movie should start. The challenge with contained horror is that it’s such a limiting narrative. Once the bad guys are in the house, there’s only about 20 pages of attacking you can do. The rest of the time you have to figure out something else to keep the audience entertained.
For that reason, you should utilize your entire first act to set up your characters. This helps push back the entry point of the invaders which means you don’t have as much time to fill up. And the nice thing about it is that we’ll care more because we know the characters better. And that’s what happened here.
Jaswinski was also aware of the trappings of this genre and made a couple of clever choices to combat them. First, he had Shannon get sick (bitten) first. This meant that even though the home invaders hadn’t technically gotten in yet, they were effectively in, since Shannon was turning into a vampire. This allowed for a 8-10 page sequence where Shannon turns and ultimately needs to be killed.
That was followed by yet another sequence where police come to the door but they’re acting suspicious and we eventually learn that they’re the vampires. It’s little sequences like this that eat up pages before you get to the actual home invasion. And even with this stuff, Jaswinski recognizes that there’s not enough house to spend 30 pages creeping from floor to floor in while avoiding the bad guys. So he has the characters flee the house, and go to another character’s house across the street, George, who was set up earlier.
Another strange thing about these movies is that your best scenes aren’t necessarily going to be the brute physical battles that take place when the characters confront each other. The most tense scene in “French Quarter” for me was when they got to George’s house and Adam’s covered in blood, and the “police” show up outside George’s door and they yell inside to open up, that the man George is harboring “just brutally murdered his wife!” Adam makes his case that they’re lying and that they’re not really police, but George isn’t sure. That moment of: “What is George going to do?” is the single most suspenseful moment in the script.
My main issue with the script is that it was so freaking dark and depressing. Right from the start, nothing is going right for this couple. They’ve about given up on life. Then they get caught in one of the worst storms in the country’s history. Then Shannon goes and basically commits suicide by giving herself to the vampires. Then it’s 60 minutes of hardcore unimaginable horror. That’s the trick with horror films is that you want to stay true to the horror element. But you also want people leaving the theater feeling a rush. I left this feeling mega-depressed. It just wasn’t a happy story.
I remember Jordan Peele bring up this very topic when he talked about the challenges of writing Get Out. On the one hand, he wanted to make this very serious movie about race. But he also wanted it to be fun. And he was constantly struggling to marry those two extremes. I suppose this is something that can be debated either way. I’m not sure anybody leaves The Exorcist feeling a rush. But personally, for me, I need that in my horror films.
Still, this was a well-written script that’s a good template for those of you looking to sell one yourself.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I just consulted on a horror script recently and I was telling the writer that one of the biggest mistakes newbie horror writers make is they come up with a HORROR SITUATION and then pepper in some real life around it. But you want to look at it the opposite way. Once you have your idea, you need to come up with a LIFE SITUATION and then build the horror around that. This is a really good example of that. Clearly, Jaswinski thought long and hard about this family and then built the scary stuff around them.
