Genre: Horror
Premise: A troubled young surgeon travels to a desolate peak to climb the mountain where her father suffered a mental breakdown years earlier, only to realize halfway up the rock wall that she might be subject to the same fate.
About: This one was on last year’s Black List. Another brand new writer!
Writer: Arthur Hills
Details: 104 pages
Readability: Fast
You guys know how much I love Free Solo. So it’s time to Free Solo ourselves a mountain climbing script review! Join me! Oh, and if you think you can write a better horror script than today’s, make sure you enter the Halloween Horror Showdown!
28 year old Sloane is just about ready to become a surgeon. In fact, we see her operate on one of her first patients, under the watchful eye of a veteran surgeon, only to accidentally let the blade slip and paralyze the guy she’s cutting open. Oops!
Sloane goes home to her boyfriend, Stephen, and laments about paralyzing this guy. We also learn, during this time, that the anniversary of Sloane’s father’s death is coming up. Her father used to be a great climber until one day when he climbed a mountain called Lytta’s Peak and went crazy on it.
Sloane thinks it’d be a good idea to climb the peak herself and finally face the trauma of her father’s death. Sort of like what Reese Witherspoon did in that movie about the girl who walked a 500 mile trail. But unlike Reese, Sloane isn’t going by herself. She’ll be joined by her boyfriend, Stephen, Stephen’s attractive friend, Mia, and the youngster of the group, 24 year old sexual dynamo, Luna.
Off they go to Lytta’s Peak, where Sloane immediately starts seeing things. She sees people in white clothes walking through the forest (but not appearing on her iPhone screen). She sees Mia and Stephen kiss, even though a second later they’re not there. She keeps finding these circles everywhere with a bunch of random designs carved inside.
But things really get nuts when they’re on the side of the cliff and Mia goes plunging to the forest floor. Hashtag Mia’s dead. Around this time, we learn that both Sloane’s dad AND Sloane have SHADOWS that are on the mountain with them. And their plan is to kill everyone climbing the mountain. Including Sloane herself! The only way to defeat them is to get to the top.
“Peak” started out strong and is a good example of how to set up character while keeping things entertaining. The script begins with a teaser. We see a person falling from a mountain. But we don’t know who they are. We’re not close enough to identify them. This creates an immediate mystery that we want answered (and that keeps us reading!).
This is followed by Sloane visiting her father at the psychiatric hospital. One of the best ways to set up characters is through SHOWING. You show us he’s at a psychiatric hospital. You show us that he’s emaciated and worn down. We immediately know where this character is at. Ditto Sloane who’s developing as a character by the writer simply showing us what her family situation is. She has a dad who’s in a psychiatric hospital. That takes a huge toll on someone which creates a richer deeper character in the eyes of the reader. On top of that, the scene is filled with the conflict of the dad not quite being “all there,” despite Sloane desperately wishing he was. It’s heartbreaking.
The next scene happens four years later where Sloane is getting her first chance to operate under the eye of an experienced surgeon. We see how exhausted she is beforehand. So she crushes and snorts some adderall to get her adrenaline pumping for the surgery. Again, another SHOWING moment.
We then watch her operate on this guy and the surgery is the best scene in the script, easily, because she starts bleeding from her nose because of the adderall, which is dripping into her mask, all while she’s making an incision right next to the guy’s spine. Any sudden move could paralyze him for life. It’s an intense scene that really draws you in. Again, this is the goal with writing. You want to set up WHILE entertaining. You don’t just want to set things up and that’s it.
A couple of scenes later we’re driving to the mountain. This section is entertaining as well because the writer sets up that Stephen and Mia are really close. To the point where Sloane is suspicious of their relationship. This creates a ‘dramatic irony’ situation within the car where Mia playfully chats away with Stephen with Sloane watching on, trying to pick up cues if there’s more there than friendship.
In that case, it’s the CONFLICT – Sloane disliking and being suspicious of Mia – that keeps the reader entertained. If you don’t think that’s worthy of mentioning, let me just say that I read tons of scenes like this where the writer doesn’t make any attempt to create conflict within the ride, so all the characters are doing is babbling on, setting up exposition, trying to be funny. These are always less entertaining than scenes where the writer is actively looking to inject conflict into the conversation.
So I was encouraged after those first 20 pages.
And then the writer made the same mistake so many writers writing “Is my protagonist going crazy” storylines make. Which is to start injecting that classic repeated beat of something weird happening (sees someone dressed in white walking through the forest, sees Mia and Stephen kiss) only for it to be in her head. And it just ruined the story for me.
I don’t know why writers think this is interesting. Once you establish the character is seeing things that aren’t there, we know every weird thing that happens from now on is going to be another hallucination. Where’s the suspense in that? The mystery? We, the reader, are now ahead of you, since we can predict these things. And the second the reader gets ahead of the writer, the script is cooked.
I don’t want to completely undersell the story because this idea of peoples’ shadows orchestrating death and mayhem is kind of cool. And it does get rid of some of the story’s predictability. But it wasn’t cool enough to win me over.
There’s a broader topic to explore here about first and second acts. There are writers who are good at first acts and bad at second acts. There are writers who are good at second acts and bad at first acts. But there aren’t a lot of writers who are good at both. And that’s because the requirements for each are so different.
The first act is about setting up the plot and characters then sending your hero off on their journey. The second act is double the length and about pushing your hero towards their goal, throwing obstacles at them, giving us compelling twists and turns, and, of course, exploring all of the relationships in a compelling way, including the main character’s relationship with himself.
To nail that second act, you have to stay away from repeated beats as much as possible. Once you establish a pattern, you risk boring the reader. That happened here with all the, “What’s that! Did you see that!???” fakeouts.
Look, I’m not saying that any script about going crazy is going to suck. I loved Black Swan. I liked Taxi Driver. I like The Shining. But it’s a pretty short list from there on out of ‘going crazy’ movies that are good. And I think that’s because, ironically, ‘going crazy’ movies need a higher level of SOPHISTICATION to be convincing compared to other genres. And all three of those movies showed a lot of sophistication in the way the craziness was built into the story.
Mileage may vary here if you’re into ‘going crazy’ narratives. You might like this because it’s kinda fun. But once I figured out the story’s pattern, I got bored. So it wasn’t for me. P.S. I feel VERY confident that we can find a better horror script than this for Halloween Horror Showdown. Which would mean we’d find ourselves a Black List script. So get writing!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I would strongly suggest that you never end your movie with your character waking up strapped to a bed in a psychiatric hospital. It’s just so obscenely cliche at this point. I’ve read that ending more times than I can count.
