Today’s review asks the question, “When it comes to Horror, is slow the way to go?”
Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of twenty-somethings go camping in the forest for the weekend only to find themselves trapped by a growing form of man-eating sludge.
About: This script made last year’s Blood List. Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer are writer-directors who made Starry Eyes, Holidays, and who just recently completed shooting the new Pet Cemetery.
Writers: Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer
Details: 89 pages – 3/8/17 draft
You would think, when it comes to horror, that the scariest things would be the things that strike the fastest. And while in real life, that may be true, the opposite seems to be the case in film. Zombies move at one-fifth the speed of the average man. Yet there’s nothing more terrifying than a group of zombies stumbling towards someone when there’s nowhere to hide. A ghost who appears on the opposite end of the room is equally terrifying. And it doesn’t have to move at all.
Why is this the case? Well, it’s because horror works best in the LEAD-UP to the attack as opposed to the attack itself. The slower the monster moves, the more you get to milk the suspense. And the suspense is where our fear resides. This isn’t always the case, of course. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 was pretty damn fast. But it serves as a reminder that when you’re picking your horror concept, not to overlook slow.
Twenty-somethings Rich, his girlfriend Katie, Fitz, and his girlfriend Ziggy, are taking the weekend to explore a cool isolated waterfall Rich knows about deep in the woods. Katie’s convinced her younger resistant sister, Kimberly, to join them. Millennial mindsets lead to a lot of bickering about how far they have to walk, until they come across a large fence, which Rich doesn’t remember being there. Eh, no worries. They cut through the fence and finally find the spot.
After Kimberly refuses to join the crew in a skinny dip, bitch Ziggy starts heckling her. The two get into a scuffle and Kimberly storms back to the car. Unfortunately, she doesn’t make it. While crossing a seemingly normal pathway, she begins to sink into the ground. She screams for help, but no one hears, and she slowly disappears below the surface.
Back by the water, Katie starts to worry about her sister, and recruits the others to look for her. Rich branches off, finds a large mud patch, and sees the outline of Kimberly inside of it. Rich runs over to pull her out, but quickly finds himself sinking as well. The rest of the group arrives, and Rich explains to them that they have to stay away. He’s in some kind of quicksand, but it’s not like normal quicksand. It burns.
As the group tries to figure out a way to save Rich, Rich decides to get the car keys out of his pocket so the rest of them can go for help. He gets the keys, but when he lifts his hands, the skin and flesh fall away like hot oatmeal. Definitely not your average quicksand. Rich dies soonafter, sinking into the muck, but his hand and the keys remain lifted in the air. “Why hasn’t he sunk all the way?” they ask. “It’s taunting you,” Katie says. It’s then that they realize, this death-quicksand is alive. And it’s going to eat each and every one of them before they can escape this place.
As you can see, our antagonist is about as slow as can be. Sludge. It needs you to walk into it, as opposed to it coming to you. And once you’re in it, you don’t die right away. You die a slow agonizing death. This allows you to create long drawn-out suspenseful scenes where characters get caught, and all you can do is watch from the sidelines as they dip deeper and deeper into their grave.
As a writer, this is a dream scenario, because you can belt out large sequences that are inherently nail-biting. One of the primary scenes in the script – Rich getting stuck in the mud and needing to get keys out of his pocket so the rest of them can escape – is 17 pages!! That’s one-sixth of your screenplay right there! That’s what you call your premise doing your work for you.
Unfortunately, the writers make a classic horror mistake. They don’t put enough work into the characters. The audience only cares about a character in peril if they care about the character. So it doesn’t matter how suspenseful a scene is if we don’t care about the people participating in that suspense. Everyone in The Swallow is a cardboard cutout. You want to know how the first character in the script is described? “RICH (23, rugged, handsome).”
That’s it. That’s an actual description. Do you want to know how many characters I’ve seen described as “rugged and handsome” in the 7500 scripts I’ve read? At least 500. Probably more. If you’re going to describe someone generically, how can I not see them as anything other than generic?
There are some writers who will argue that you want to keep your descriptions generic because, that way, you keep the casting as wide open as possible. I can go along with that IF the characters then take action or make choices that define them. You don’t need to give Han Solo some Pulitzer-winning description as long as you have him kill Greedo a couple minutes later. That ACTION just told me everything I need to know about Han Solo, regardless of what his introduction was.
Likewise, I’ll forgive a sparse description if the characters reveal themselves through dialogue. Go watch The Breakfast Club. Those characters are the defining examples of characters we know due to what they say. I’m looking for originality, specificity, and creativity in dialogue, particularly from characters this young. 22 year olds are going to be on the cutting edge of slang. Here, the dialogue is extremely basic. There’s no personality to it at all.
So if you’re going to get a horror script right, guys, you have to get the characters right. I mean look at Monday’s film, Halloween. It wasn’t perfect. However, there was a LOT of character work stuffed in there. Laurie Strode had a super-extensive backstory. The granddaughter is dealing with the complexity of wanting her grandmother back in the family despite the fact that her own mom has disowned her. In The Swallow, the only backstory is the car ride it took to get here. Without depth, without originality, without personality, how can we connect to your characters.
Honestly, I blame 80s horror for this. A lot of people see that decade as the Golden Age of horror and it basically amounted to a cool killer and a bunch of nameless victims. Not to say some of those movies aren’t fun. But filmgoers are more discerning today. They need to connect, if only a little, in order to stay invested. Remember, they’ve always got their phones and their computers next to them if you don’t do your job.
The Swallow is a pretty fun idea. And I could see this being made. But you need someone to come in and rewrite these characters. Right now, they’re not enough.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t describe a character in a way that you can SHOW the character. One of the characters here is described as “quick-witted.” Why would you tell us that? Just show us. The very first time somebody says something to that character, have that character come back with something quick-witted. Boom, you’ve done your job. We now know they’re quick-witted.
