Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Blood List) When a pregnant social worker is called upon to investigate a murder involving a teenage mother, she uncovers an insidious plot with possible ties to the occult that has her questioning her sanity and the very nature of her unborn child.
About: Today’s screenplay landed on the 2017 Blood List, a list of the best horror, sci-fi, and thriller scripts of the year! This writing team made last year’s Blood List as well with “Summer of 84,” which went on to get produced.
Writers: Matthew Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
Details: 106 pages
I’m a sucker for pregnancies in horror films. It dates back to how well it was done in Rosemary’s Baby but I also think it’s a naturally horrifying plot element to inject into the genre. When it isn’t just your hero who’s in danger, but their unborn baby, it’s like getting double the meat on your Subway sandwich. Everything is twice as tasty.
Not only that, but a late-stage pregnancy works as an invisible ticking time bomb for your story. Whereas everyone else is forcing these artificial, “You have 72 hours to find your wife or I blow up Manhattan” time constraints, we know in any pregnancy horror flick that the movie is ending when that baby is born. So you don’t even have to think about the “Urgency” component of your GSU.
Needless to say, I’m excited for this one. Let’s check it out!
A bloodied 16 year-old Alexis Rose stumbles out of a field holding her newborn baby. She walks up to a highway, blankly stares forward, then HURLS her child into traffic.
Cut to social worker Lauren Madden, who’s 8 months pregnant. Lauren’s finally moving past the death of her husband, Ben, using the age-old coping mechanism of throwing herself into her work. And boy did that work get interesting. She’s been assigned to Alexis Rose’s case.
Lauren tries to find out why Alexis would do such a thing to her child, but Alexis doesn’t remember what happened other than hearing voices that said she had to kill her baby.
The case is so bizarre that Lauren starts sniffing around, only to find out that there have been two other recent cases of young women killing their newborns. All three women are tied to a Doctor Bellamy. So Lauren finds Bellamy and asks him what’s up. Bellamy has no idea why this is happening, but something about the guy screams “sketchy,” so Lauren puts a pin in him while she keeps looking around.
Eventually, Lauren finds that these women may have inadvertently been tied to the occult. And when she starts looking into that, she finds that more and more people are interested in her own unborn child. At one point, a random man corners Lauren in her car, says, “They’re wrong about you,” pulls out a gun to shoot Lauren, only to have a truck whip by and turn the man into fender meat.
But the real clincher is when her doctor tells her that due to the timing of her husband’s death, it would be impossible for him to have gotten Lauren pregnant. Since Lauren hasn’t slept with anyone else, how could she possibly be pregnant? As Lauren becomes more confused and more afraid, she risks repeating exactly what the rest of these women did – killing her newborn child the moment it’s born…
This was a solid script.
The decision to make the main character pregnant paid many dividends. I’ve read plenty of screenplays where the writer wouldn’t have thought of this. They would’ve made the main character a normal woman. Or even a man. By making her pregnant, our heroine becomes directly connected to the story.
Leslie and Smith also do a good job of BUILDING their story. You guys hear me talk about this a lot – the importance of “building.” Every ten pages needs to feel slightly bigger than the previous ten pages. You do this by upping the stakes, adding new storylines, throwing bigger obstacles at your characters, unveiling revelations. This script is a very good example of that. Unlike yesterday, there were no dead spots. Things were always escalating.
This is also a textbook case of how to pull a reader in immediately. There’s no genre where a teaser is more important than the horror genre. You really have to grab us with that opening scene, preferably with something we’ve never seen before. I’ve definitely never seen a young mother stumble out of a field with her newborn baby then hurl it onto the highway. If I was in any way blase about the read, that changed it.
But the big thing I want to talk about with today’s script is the notion of enriching your character’s existence. One of your goals as a screenwriter is to make your hero (and, really, your core group of characters) feel as realistic as possible. The more we see your hero as a real person, the more invested we’re going to be in their journey.
The best way to do this is by showing us meaningful parts of your hero’s life, usually through relationships. So, for example, here, Lauren’s mother is in hospice care. Lauren visits her a few times over the course of the story, usually to decompress from all the craziness that’s going on in her investigation. In addition to this, we meet Lauren’s sister, who has some issues with Lauren’s level of commitment to seeing her mom, causing conflict between the two.
Now you don’t NEED to include any of this in the screenplay. In fact, if you take this subplot out of the story, nothing changes. The plot is exactly the same and nothing needs to be moved around. However, what you do lose is a piece of your hero that makes them more human to the reader. Without this personal struggle, Lauren loses a dimension, and becomes closer to that dreaded “2-D” character readers hate.
The trick to getting this enrichment right is not to linger in these side stories. You want to get in and out of the scenes quickly so that they add depth to your character but don’t interfere with the pace.
And keep in mind, this changes from genre to genre. If you’re writing a drama, then these scenes will be longer, maybe even centerpieces of the story. But this is a horror film with a tight plot where the mother is an ancillary character. Hence, she’s there to enrich your hero, not take over the plot.
If I had a beef with the script, it’s that it was too predictable. I could’ve used more surprises. For example, once it’s established that all the girls who were pregnant hadn’t had sex with anyone, I was waiting for the obligatory scene where Lauren found out that Ben didn’t get her pregnant. And it came 60 pages later. I think this writing team would do better if they threw more unexpected moments into their screenplays (I felt the same thing about Summer of 84).
With that said, The Harrowing does have a nifty last second twist that I DID NOT see coming. If they could bring some of that surprise and shock earlier into the script, this would’ve gotten a higher score from me. As it stands, it’s still a solid horror entry.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: CANCER AND CAR CRASHES – As someone who’s read a countless number of screenplays, I can tell you that 90% of backstory deaths (death of a spouse or death of parents) are written as cancer or car crashes. In The Harrowing, for example, Lauren’s husband, Ben, died in a car crash. I know why writers do this. Both options read as “tragic.” But if you want to stand out, work harder. Come up with something not as obvious. I just read a script where the main character’s mother died from complications from Huntington’s Disease. It was so specific that it made everything feel more believable. Keep that in mind the next time you’re killing off a spouse! :)
