Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) With one last chance at a promotion, a down-on-her-luck real estate agent returns to her rural hometown to sell the impossible – a haunted house where countless couples have been murdered. As the bodies of new residents continue to pile up, our real estate agent will stop at nothing to rid the house of evil – no matter what the cost.
About: This script finished number 17 on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Roy Parker
Details: 115 pages
I’m going to keep this simple. This concept sounded fun! And it was Top 20 on the Black List. Let’s see how it turned out.
29 year old junior real estate agent Annette is prepping for her agency’s once-a-year contest whereby all the junior agents compete to sell a tough listing. Whoever sells a house first becomes a senior agent. Annette does a solid job, selling a place with a giant glob of dirt in the middle of the floor, but finds out she lost to Douchebag Don.
Not to worry, her boss tells her. They’ve got a sister agency two hours from here with a really difficult-to-sell property – the “Kaufman House.” If she can sell that house, he’ll give her that promotion. Annette grabs an Uber to get there, only to realize her driver, Roxxy, is an old high school acquaintance.
When Annette tells Roxxy about the house, Roxxy knows of it and informs her that it’s haunted. Annette doesn’t believe her until she gets a couple to bite during an early open house and the couple comes running out of the house screaming a few minutes later. This is followed by four college kids buying the house, who, on their first night, kill each other with a shotgun. This is followed by several other people buying the house and getting killed in gruesome ways.
Determined to sell the house, Annette asks Roxxy if she has any out-of-the-box ideas, and Roxxy comes up with a promotion for people who love haunted houses. Bring them in from all over the country and drive up a bidding war. The problem is, whatever they do, people keep dying. So if Annette is going to pull this off and get that promotion before she turns 30, she’ll need to come up with a way to un-haunt this house.
I’ve had some problems with entries on this year’s Black List. The number one script was not number 1 quality. And there were a few others that weren’t necessarily bad, but didn’t possess qualities you would associate with a Top 20 Black List script. “The House is Not For Sale” is the first time I’m shocked a script made the list.
You know how I talk to you guys about red flags? These are things I’ve seen a bunch of times as a reader that indicate we’re in for a rocky read. And the more red flags that pile up early in a script, the rockier the road is going to be. I came across a lot of red flags in “House.”
For starters, the opening teaser has a real estate agent showing a couple the Kaufman house. At the end of the showing, the couple says, “We’ll take it,” and the agent hands them the keys and leaves.
Um… that’s not how selling houses works, lol. You don’t get the keys right after you say you want the house. At the very least, there’s a little thing known as payment that needs to happen.
Why is this a red flag? Well, I’m about to read a script about real estate from a writer who doesn’t know one of the most basic things about real estate.
In the opening teaser, the couple who bought the house dies that first night. Then we cut to the next day with the real estate agent in her car facing a lake. She then slowly, as if in a trance, drives her car into the lake until it is fully submerged in the water. I went back and read the scene three times and I still couldn’t figure out if she was possessed by a ghost from the house who was killing her or if she was committing suicide because she couldn’t sell the house. A lack of clarity in the first five pages of a script is one of the most reliable measurements of script quality.
Later, Annette is talking but her dialogue is in italics. I was confused why this was happening so I circled back to look for clues as to why the italics and eventually realized it was her talking to herself in her head. Why the writer would assume we’d know that, I’m not sure. I just read a script two days ago where italicized dialogue represented another language. Never assume we know what something is. You have to tell us. We can’t read your mind.
Once we get to the Kaufman House, things get sloppier. Everyone who buys the house is able to move in that day. Maybe there’s an “IOU” form of payment in real estate that I’m unaware of. But I’m almost positive this is not how it works.
And then, when the people in the house are killed, it’s never mentioned what happens to them. Is Annette burying them in the backyard? Are they being given funerals? Wouldn’t 20 people being killed in a house in the span of 2 weeks be cause for a police investigation? Some media scrutiny? None of this is ever explained. We’re expected to go with it.
I’m guessing the writer would chalk the answers up to “this is a comedy.” And this is something that’s worth discussing because lots of comedy writers have this approach. They don’t think logic is relevant when it comes to funny. In some cases, that’s true. If you write a really broad comedy, you can get away with a lot of illogical things. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd and Harry kill a guy in the middle of a busy restaurant and are back on the highway five minutes later.
But the writers still went through the process of creating a logical progression as to why they got away with it. Lloyd didn’t know that all the extremely hot sauce they snuck on the ailing hitman’s burger would give him a heart attack. It looked like an accident. Conversely, there’s no attempt at logic in “House.” Four frat boys blow each other’s heads off and Annette chalks it up to a bad day at the office and preps the house for the next showing.
I’ll give the writer this. He put some real effort into the character of Annette. He gave her this whole backstory with a family that put a lot of pressure on her and was so ashamed at her lack of accomplishments that they made up a success story about her so that the rest of the town didn’t pity their family. That feeds into the pressure Annette feels to sell this house.
But the lack of research and logic was so overwhelming, it was all I could think about. I can’t focus on what’s happening in the current scene when I don’t know what happened to the three people in the previous scene who were brutally killed. To have the reader go with that as if it’s not a big deal is asking a lot. The overall approach to this story felt lazy so, unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Sweeping under the rug.” We all do it even though we know we shouldn’t. When you encounter a fallacy in your script, something without an easy solution, you simply… sweep it under the rug. We hope that if we don’t pay it any mind, the reader won’t either. In “House,” it’s not explained what happens to the people who are killed in the house. The writer knew that if these people had public deaths, he’d have to write that into the storyline (media and police would need to be called in). On the flip side, Annette burying the bodies created its own set of problems. You’ve got this giant body count and no friends or family are coming around to check on what happened to the victims? Since neither option is ideal, the writer just sweeps the problem under the rug. I can tell you from experience and from reading thousands of screenplays, sweeping stuff under the rug never works. Just like real life, when there’s an issue in your script, deal with it.
