Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) After being haunted by a terrifying entity, a twelve-year-old boy teams up with his eccentric uncle and three other misfits to form their own ghost club, investigating all the paranormal sites in town so that he can find and confront the ghost that’s tormenting him.
About: Today’s script finished Top 10 on the 2020 Black List. It is adapted from the novel by Craig Davidson, who’s been compared to Chuck Palahniuk. Davidson isn’t afraid to get dirty when promoting his work. After releasing a novel in 2007 called The Fighter, Davidson participated in a fully sanctioned Canadian boxing match against Toronto poet Michael Knox (he lost) and then did the same for the novel’s US release, boxing against Jonathan Ames. He lost again. Talk about doing everything you can to get your work out there!
Writers: Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman (based on the 2019 novel by Craig Davidson)
Details: 110 pages
Back to the Future is about as perfect a movie as I’ve ever seen. But when I look back at it, not with the fondness of nostalgia, but with the critical eye of a screenwriting enthusiast, it has its fair share of odd choices. For starters, a 17 year old boy is best friends with a weird 65 year old outcast scientist. That may not seem strange at first glance. But picture yourself reading that script for the first time before the movie was made. Wouldn’t we be asking, in what reality would a cool high school rocker kid be friends with a weird old scientist? If I was giving notes on that script, I would tell the writer, “This relationship isn’t believable.” And yet we all accepted it without question.
On top of that, the core of the story involves a woman trying to sex up her son. Granted, she doesn’t know it’s her son. But we do. Why do we accept this? Why do we laugh instead of cringe? It speaks to the randomness of creativity. Sometimes, as artists, we must go with our gut even if we know what we’re writing isn’t supposed to work. I bring this up because, today, we have a script that reminds me a lot of Back to the Future. It’s about kids befriending much older adults and going on haunted excursions together. Will it work? Only one way to find out.
Jake is 12 years old when something big, dark and scary appears above his bed. It is this experience that sends Jake to get help from his Uncle Calvin, an expert in the occult. In fact, Calvin even owns an occult store (called the Occultorium). When Jake tells Calvin about what he witnessed, Calvin becomes convinced that Jake is being visited by a wandering ghost.
Meanwhile, a Native American family moves into town and Jake befriends the boy in the family, 12 year old Billy, and Billy’s skater girl sister, 14 year old Dove. The two join up with Calvin’s co-worker, Lexington, and start investigating haunted places around town where Jake’s evil bedside ghost may be hiding.
First is an old train tunnel. Calvin, who’s way too into these ghost spots for a 40-something man, tells the story of a kid who went into the tunnel at the urging of some mean kids only to get clocked and killed by a train. It is said that the spirt of the kid still lingers here. And when Jake goes into the tunnel to check, he momentarily sees the boy, and runs for his life. Afterwards, however, Jake isn’t sure if he really saw something or it was just his imagination.
Next, they go to a sunken car in a lake. In one of the more blatant examples of child endangerment, Calvin sends Jake underwater to see if the ghost is in the car. This after Calvin explains that a young couple’s car crashed into the lake and the girl died. It is said that the driver still haunts the lake, looking for her. But alas, they don’t find Jake’s bedside ghost here either.
Finally, they head to an old house that’s halfway burned down. Calvin explains that a couple lived here and let a man in who wanted to use their phone, only to have him take the wife at knife-point and slice her neck. She would later die and the husband ended up going insane, which ended in him burning the house down with him in it.
But this time, Jake doesn’t get a chance to go inside. That’s because something happens to Calvin after he tells the story. He goes into a deep haze and starts knocking on the front door. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. Freaked out, the kids all run away. And it is only when Jake tells his mother what happened, that she explains the true story behind her brother, a story that will make everyone reevaluate the three haunted sights they visited.
Saturday Night Ghost Club is one of those scripts that’s hard to get a handle on initially, like a UFC fighter who you’re still trying to gauge. Is he a boxer? A martial-artist? A grappler? For the first 60 pages of Saturday Night Ghost Club, I thought I was reading a cheesy kids movie about ghost-hunting.
But as the script hits its second half, something changes. It starts with Dove, who we realize is way more complex than initially presented. It turns out she’s highly bi-polar, capable of going on manic rants, and making a routine of taking the bus out of town as far as it will take her before her mom retrieves her for the 20th time.
One of the primary differences between amateur and pro work is character depth. Character depth can be explored in many different ways. It can be as simple as a character flaw. It can be someone fighting their past. It can be an internal battle where someone is fighting depression or addiction. But character depth is really anything that goes below the surface. That was my issue with the first half of this script. The kids were all surface-level. Calvin was surface-level. The mom was surface-level.
Which is why it was so strange that, all of a sudden, Saturday Night Ghost Club became an intense character piece, to the point where I was getting really emotional at the end. (Spoilers) As it turns out, these haunted places they’ve been visiting were not the locations of random acts of haunting, but rather connected to Calvin himself, who, it turns out, lost his wife in the home that was burned. Who crashed their car into the lake as he rushed her to the hospital. Who had his first kiss with her in the train tunnel.
Which makes Calvin one of the most tragic figures on this year’s Black List. The poor guy is so traumatized by his loss that he’s simply blocked it out. Replaced it with this goofy endeavor of “hunting” for “ghosts.” As long as he’s coming up with potions to defeat slime-gobblers, he doesn’t have to face the truth. And that was damn heartbreaking!
Ahh, but all is not perfect. I’m not fond of the late twist that requires your hero to forget everything about his life. I’ve encountered that more times than you’d think. And while they do a pretty good job of it here, it’s still a tough sell. Even if you say Calvin was in a coma and the doctors decided not to tell him the truth cause they were afraid it would be too much to handle, it still comes off as convenient for the movie that this major character happens to forget everything that resulted in the script’s cool last second twist.
Not to mention, if this guy is as mentally unstable as they’re saying, why are you allowing your 12 year old kid to hang out with them 18 hours a day? There’s no one who knows how mentally deranged Calvin is more than Jake’s mom. Yet she’s got no problem letting the two hang together.
Then again, one of the greatest horror-thrillers of all time, Psycho, uses this conceit, as Norman Bates has such an extreme mental break that he occasionally thinks he’s his dead mother. I’m just not sure you can pull that off in 2021 the way you could back then. People know so much more about mental health these days that you have to treat the subject matter with an additional amount of care. But who knows? Even as I was questioning the logic of it, I was experiencing an emotional reaction. So that means it worked on some level.
It took me a while to get into this one. I thought for sure I was going to give it a “wasn’t for me.” But it rounded that last corner like a bat out of hell and sped its way to a solid “worth the read.”
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of my fears going into this turned out to be a valid. It didn’t feel right that the club consisted of kids AND adults. Why? Because when you have adults around, YOU FEEL SAFE. That was a big reason the first half of the script wasn’t working for me. We’d go to these haunted places, put our kids into scary situations, but always with adults a few feet away. Now that I’ve read the whole thing and know that the story is about Calvin, I realize he has to be there. But if you’re making a scary movie, you need your big scares to actually be scary. And if you’re using an element that reassures rather than frightens, you might want to think about if that’s a good idea. The scariest movie of the last five years, “It,” is terrifying for that very reason – the kids are all alone when they encounter the scares.
