Genre: Comedy/Horror
Premise: (from Black List) Twenty years after a failed exorcism, a meek young woman becomes unlikely friends with the foul-mouthed demon that possessed her as a child.
About: This one’s got a couple of big pillars holding it up. Buzzy indie production house A24 and none other than JJ’s Bad Robot. Megan Amran, who broke into the business a decade ago writing material for the Academy Awards, has written on The Simpsons, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place. This is her first feature script to break through.
Writer: Megan Amram
Details: 100 pages
Just a reminder for those who don’t read Scriptshadow often.
The possession genre is the biggest bang-for-your-buck genre out there. Possession movies are obscenely cheap to make. Since you don’t traditionally need special effects, you can shoot them on the same budget you’d shoot a drama. Keep the locations limited and you can even keep it under a million. Even if the thing only has a five million dollar opening weekend, you’ve made a profitable movie.
BUT!
But you have to find a fresh angle. If you’re the 3824th writer to conceive of “The Exorcism of [Insert Female Name Here],” don’t expect your script to garner much attention.
Megan Amram takes that advice as far as someone can take it. Today we have a gross-out vulgar exorcism comedy. The 40 Year Old Virgin as an exorcism flick? Mixed with some Seth Rogen humor? Is that a thing? I guess we’re about to find out.
When she’s 10 years old, Kennedy gets possessed by a real mean demon named Lamashtu, who is one of the worst demons you can get possessed by. Think The Exorcism times ten. She’s really bad.
Kennedy’s mom, Karen, does everything in her power to exorcise Lamashtu, calling on all the best priests in the area. But they’re all terrified of Lamashtu and run away. Finally, Karen realizes that good old steady yoga breathing and positive thoughts can keep Lamashtu at bay. As long as you don’t get angry, she tells her daughter, you’ll be fine.
Cut to twenty years later. The reclusive nerdy Kennedy works as a coder at a Google wannabe company. Everyone overlooks Kennedy because she’s just so… well… NICE. And nice people get stepped on. Nice people get taken advantage of.
But after Kennedy gets passed over for a promotion, Lamashtu has had enough and reemerges! Lamashtu (as Kennedy) starts screaming at everyone at work, and all of a sudden, people don’t just respect Kennedy. They like her! This girl has spunk.
Kennedy realizes that she’s made a mistake by repressing Lamashtu all these years. It’s time to fully embrace her demon instead! Even her sexist office crush, David, asks her out, leading to Kennedy’s first ever sexual experience. The event is so overwhelming that Lamashtu takes over, giving David the best sex of his life, leading to him being obsessed with Kennedy.
But when Kennedy’s evil side starts affecting her one genuine friendship with her fellow reclusive coder, she begins to wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze. Will Kennedy say F-it and become Lamashtu forever? Or is there a way to be nice again and still enjoy her life?
Man.
This was a wild one.
I’ll give Amram props on a couple of fronts. This is a fun idea. What if you stopped holding in all those things you really wanted to say and just let go? Embrace that anger you’ve always repressed. It’s one of the more fun comedic premises I’ve come across.
And Amram doesn’t neuter Kennedy’s inner demon. This is not the safe cute version of this concept. Lamasthtu regularly unloads lines like, “You want dirty talk? I’m gonna rip your big fat cock through your stomach up through your mouth til you choke on it.” Full steam ahead on the vulgarity.
The script also does one of the most important things a script must do – IT DELIVERS ON THE PROMISE OF ITS PREMISE. You get exactly what the logline tells you you’re going to get. I can’t endorse this enough. I read a lot of scripts that promise a great premise but then the script becomes something else in its second half. Or it changes genres in the final act.
No! Whatever your unique element, whatever the “strange attractor” is in your story, that’s what you want to exploit. Milk that thing until there’s no more milk left in it.
The script did have some weaknesses though. Kennedy’s job felt totally made up. It was a tech company but it was never clear what the company did (or what she did). She was just a generic “coder” and we were supposed to go with it.
I’ve said this once, I’ll say it a million times. As human beings, half our lives are dedicated to our jobs. We spend 8-10 hours a day doing them. They are often the most influential part of our lives. So if you don’t know what a character does? If you don’t know where they work, what their position is, what their everyday tasks are? You don’t truly know that character. And, believe me, we the audience can feel it.
Even if you pick a generic job, like accounting or middle management, LEARN what that company does and why your character ended up doing that job. Cause if you don’t know that, you’re not giving us the full dimension of your character. You’re only giving us the part that you care about. And it’s making the character one-dimensional.
Speaking of one-dimensional, today’s script continues a recent trend of writers treating all their male characters as moronic sexist a-holes. I don’t know when this started or why writers do it. Isn’t the male species more varied than every single one of them being moronic and sexist and an a-hole? I would hope there are some who are nice. That are cool. That are complex and interesting. And yet in 2020, finding a cool masculine male character who’s intelligent and respectful is like looking for Bigfoot.
The crazy thing is it wasn’t that long ago when I was telling male writers who used to write one-dimensional female characters, “You know that women are going to read this script, right? Do you think it’s a good idea that all your male characters are complex and well thought out and all your female characters are one-dimensional and sex objects? Do you think that’s going to go over well?”
And now it’s the exact opposite problem. Female writers are writing all their male characters as simplistic sexist idiots. You know that men are going to read your script right? Do you think that’s going to go over well?
I’m not sure where I come out on Repossession. Sometimes I thought it was funny. But other times it got too vulgar or too off-track (it didn’t make any sense for the hero to be a virgin – that felt like a whole different movie).
I think if the script stripped away the stuff that wasn’t directly related to the concept of a young woman finally allowing her anger to come out, this could be that rare comedy movie that gets released in theaters. Because the concept itself is so marketable. But it hasn’t found its legs yet. And for that reason, it wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here is the opening slugline for Repossession:
EXT. WEEKS FOOTBRIDGE – CRISP AUTUMN DAY
Is this okay? Traditionally, in a slugline, you only want to tell us if we’re inside or outside (INT. or EXT.), the location that we’re at (the Weeks Footbridge) and then whether it’s day or night. Amram has added “Crisp Autumn” to the slugline, which would drive purists crazy. But I think it’s perfectly fine. I like anything that gives me a clearer visual for what I’m looking at. Sure, Amram could’ve told us it was a crisp autumn day in the description underneath the slugline. But doing it here frees up the description for her to give us other information. I wouldn’t go crazy with this hack. If your additional text stretches the slugline to two lines, that’s a no-no. But if you can quickly get some relevant description in there without it feeling too imposing, there’s no harm in that.
