Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) A mother and her young son fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland are forced to take shelter from a blizzard in an isolated manor, where they discover the Nazis may be the least of their worries.
About: Screenwriter Ian Shorr has made the Black List many times. He’s also sold a few spec scripts. One of those became the 2021 Mark Wahlberg film, Infinite. In an interview with Go Into the Story, Shorr said this about why he chooses to keep writing spec scripts instead of chasing assignments: “Specs are still one of the most reliable ways to break in – having a calling card script that showcases your voice, where you just put all your chips down and bet on yourself. Once you’re already in, the question is: why keep gambling with your time? And for me, it comes down to this: if I’m doing nothing but chasing assignments, I’m just servicing other people’s visions. I don’t have something that I can call 100 percent my own thing. When I’m writing a spec, it’s one of the few times in my life that I have total creative control over something.”
Writer: Ian Shorr
Details: 110 pages
Rachel Brosnahan for Rivka?
Ahhh, horror.
We all love it.
So why is it so darn hard to write?
You’d think it would be one of the easiest genres to master. Introduce a crazy dude in a mask. Put your hero in a scary house with a lot of unexplained noises. Possess someone.
I think the key to horror is the pact you make with the reader: Something bad is coming. You do this in, both, a macro sense, and a micro sense. The very promise of a horror screenplay is that something bad is going to be delivered. And you’re going to want to read the script to find out what.
And then, once you’re in the script and the concept is established, the reader makes a new promise that a series of “bad somethings” is coming. Something scary is waiting in the other room. The first reveal of the monster. Someone just called from inside the house.
As long as it’s coming and it’s bad, there’s hope for your horror script.
But the rest of the script has to work as well – I’m talking about the things that need to work in every script. We have to root for the main characters. There has to be a reasonably compelling plot. The story has to keep us on edge. There has to be some development inside the main relationships in the story that we care about. Let’s see if Crooked Forest meets all this criteria.
It’s 1942 in occupied Poland. With the war heating up, Nazi soldiers are becoming reckless, storming into Polish homes and gunning down people. During one of these exterminations, 30-something Rivka and her 9 year old son, Hugo, barely escape.
They make a deal with the underground resistance to get transferred to a Polish military base about 15 miles away. However, in the car ride there, they’re attacked by Germans and must flee into the nearby forest. It’s freezing outside and Hugo is getting frostbite but they luck out and find a large unattended mansion in the forest, Vormelker Manor.
The giant house with weird aristocratic paintings is a needed refuge. But then Rivka and Hugo start seeing things in the shadows. There’s a man with no legs. There’s a naked skinny man with a body full of tattoos long before it was cool. There’s a freaky elongated woman. Rivka figures out very quickly that they need to get out of here.
Unfortunately, the Nazis catch up with them. With no other houses in the area, they know Rivka and Hugo have to be here. So, as the night kicks in, the Germans start looking around. Rivka comes up with a plan. They’ll hide, waiting the Nazis out. When the Nazis go to sleep for the night, Rivka will steal their Jeep keys and they’ll make a run for that elusive base. But, as you’d expect, the plan doesn’t work. And the real terror, which includes a dark history for this home, is just beginning.
There are some things in a script that it’s hard for me to get past. If I see them, I immediately turn on the screenplay. One of those things is asthma inhalers. I don’t know what it is, but I get triggered when I see an asthma inhaler. Triggered in a “come on, seriously???” kind of way.
You have to understand, anybody who reads a lot of screenplays reads certain scenarios over and over again. So, when we see these things, you’re bummed out. You’re bummed out because it gives you the sense that you’re not going to be getting anything new today. It’s going to be another cookie-cutter experience.
Isn’t that every movie, though, Carson? To an extent, yes. But every creative choice is a representation of your script. If you make a cliched creative choice, my history of reading scripts tells me there will be a lot more where that came from. It’s never an isolated incident.
To tie this into yesterday’s review, Kazuo Ishiguro would never EVER write an asthma inhaler scene. He knows that’s something any writer could come up with. As a writer, you want to be the guy who comes up with new stuff. Or, take old stuff and repackage it in some way we haven’t seen before. So that asthma inhaler moment deflated me.
To Shorr’s credit, the script rebounds once we get to the house. The choice to add TWO VILLAINS (Nazis AND scary ghost-demons) gave this a little more pop than I was expecting. If it was just Nazis or just scary demon things, I probably would’ve mentally checked out.
And I liked the “false midpoint” in this script, which had Rivka and Hugo making it to the jeep to escape, only to see the car’s engine, disassembled and wrapped together in a giant hunk of mismatched metal, hanging from one of the nearby trees. This forces Rivka and Hugo to go right back into the house — once again at the mercy of the dual-threat.
You know what this script reminded me of? Barbarian. It’s like a 1942 World War 2 version of Barbarian, with its horror waiting in the innards of the house and its weird monsters waiting to make mincemeat out of the home’s guests. I could totally see Craig Zegger directing this.
But the whole mixing of Nazis and horror DEFINITELY has a ceiling to it. I come across this combo all the time. In fact, I just got a consultation script a couple of weeks ago that was a Nazi-horror crossover. I want writers to be aware of this because we all think that we’re super-oringinal. And I’m here to remind you that whatever you think is original, you probably need to dig several layers deeper to get to the real original.
Either that or just be the world’s greatest writer, like Kazuo Ishiguro. Then you can write about anything you want, no matter how mundane it is, and it will still be awesome.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful when writing analogies, which can go from clever to forced in a heartbeat. This script starts off with the analogy, “Blacker than the inside of your fist.” The reason I don’t like this analogy is because it doesn’t invite the proper image of darkness into your head. If you said, “blacker than the inside of a coffin,” that analogy makes me think of darkness in a more relevant way than “blacker than the inside of your fist,” which sets me off for a good minute trying to imagine what the inside of a fist even looks like. Always imagine what your reader is going to think when you make an analogy. If it’s effortless, good. But if there’s any chance they might be confused by the analogy, come up with another one (or don’t use an analogy at all).
