Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends get together in a remote cabin but their weekend of partying comes to an abrupt halt when a crazed woman wearing a broken ankle chain shows up at their door.
About: Today’s script comes from a new writer who made last year’s Black List with this script. The Unbound finished with 7 votes. For those of you wondering where the script would finish on my 2021 Black List re-ranking, I’d probably say around 48th, right behind Carriage Hill. So at about the same place where it was officially ranked.
Writer: Sam West
Details: 125 pages
The horror madness continues!
And when I say madness, I mean madness!
Today’s script started off like Friday the 13th and ended like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it possible for a script like that to work? Read on to find out, my hombres!
20-something Philly resident, Rachel, has had an unfortunate year. She’s lost both her parents. Therefore, she’s reconnecting with some old friends in the Catskills to get back into the world.
Her former best friend, Margot, is waiting for her at the bus station with Jay, Margot’s brother and an almost-once-flame of Rachel’s. The two have some sexual chemistry but Rachel’s still mad at Jay for ditching her when her mom got sick.
Margot and Jay drive Rachel up to a cabin in the mountains. This is where we meet financial bros Jimmy (fat) and Hunter (country club). We also meet Margot’s sorority sisters, Nicki and Brooke. Everyone’s drinking and getting ready for a meteor shower.
Finally, we meet Greg, Margot’s current boyfriend and the man she’s probably going to marry. Unofficially, Margot is looking for Rachel’s approval on Greg. Which she’s probably not going to get. Let me explain.
Late that first night, a decrepit woman in a broken ankle chain shows up at their door looking for help. Greg tells everyone he’ll deal with it. But then after he takes the woman into a private room, she ends up dying.
Rachel is veryyyyyyyy suspicious of this and lets everyone know it. After taking a quick walk to cool down, Rachel comes back to see that the house is on fire! She rushes upstairs to save Margot but Margot’s throat is slit. Huh?
Once back outside, everyone huddles together, trying to figure out what happened until, FWIT, an arrow pierces through Hunter’s face. And then also Brooke. Everybody runs into the forest, which, by the way, is freezing.
Once they get far enough away, Jay takes charge, convinced he can get them to a fire tower about a day’s walk away. But will they make it there before Crazy Greg catches up to them and arrows them all to death? Oh, and is Greg even their biggest problem out here? Might there be something bigger they must worry about??
When you read a lot of scripts, you start to see patterns.
Those patterns almost always result in certain outcomes. Sometimes they don’t. But usually they do. So when you see these red flags, an internal groan echoes within you because you know that the next 100 pages probably aren’t going to be very good.
What are these flags?
126 pages for a horror script? That’s a gigantic red flag.
A protagonist who melodramatically lost BOTH her parents, one to cancer and one to suicide? Huge red flag.
A meteor shower as your blanket “reason things start going crazy” device? That’s become one of the most cliched provocations for “crazy things start happening” I’ve come across over the last five years. I’m always seeing meteor showers in scripts.
Horror pages with this much text on them? Another big red flag.
Horror needs to be one of the easiest genres to read. There should be virtually zero effort on the reader’s part to make it through pages.
This was the opposite. It felt like you had to work to get through the pages. And that’s a screenwriting sin. As soon as if feels like work to the reader, you’re a crashed meteor.
Does that mean The Unbound is bad?
“Bad” would be an unfair adjective to describe the script.
Let me try to explain my frustrations with it, though. There are typically two types of horror movies. There’s the horror movie where a clear rule-set is introduced that the audience understands and, therefore, they can participate in and enjoy.
For example, zombies. We know the rules of zombies. You get bit, you turn into a zombie. It’s one of the reasons the genre is so successful. The rules are so easy to understand. Same thing with vampires. You get bit you turn into a vampire, you live forever, you crave blood. A little more complex but still easy to understand.
The second type of horror setup is when the writer comes up with a blanket provocation for horror that has no rules, and therefore anything and everything is allowed.
Writers, especially younger writers, love this because it allows them to basically introduce any horror scare they can think of. It’s like an endless playground of options to choose from. But, as a reader, or an audience member, these scripts feel like one gigantic slop-fest. Because without a rule-set, there is no logic to the horror. As a result, it always feels messy.
Here we have a meteor shower, a guy who hunts people down with arrows in the woods, we have our heroine being transported to another plane of existence, we have our characters running into mirror versions of themselves, but the mirror versions are dead.
I suppose if I was 16, I wouldn’t care as much about the shaky logic. But even when I was younger, I could tell the difference between a movie where the writer understood his mythology and crafted a really thoughtful story and the writer who just kind of made things up as they went along.
That’s what The Unbound felt like.
I think writers believe this wacky crazy approach makes their script unique. But it doesn’t. Because wacky crazy rule-less stories have their own cliches. I would’ve bet one my legs that they were going to end up walking in circles and appearing right back where they started. And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.
Because when writers don’t take the time to come up with rules and to really think about how the horror in their story operates, they lean on crutches. They lean on cliches. So if we’re in a forest, of course we’re going to end up where we started and everyone’s going to have a discussion about how “THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” – “There’s no way we could’ve ended up back here.”
I tell you, I read this stuff ALLLLL THE TIIIIIIME.
You need to do better.
You can’t trick screenwriting. There are no shortcuts. There are no backdoors.
Writing a story where you yourself don’t really understand what’s going on, and sort of hoping that the reader makes sense of your lack of effort. That is the surest way to a lousy script.
What’s interesting is that the writer does attempt to put together a character group we care about. After yesterday’s film (Friday the 13th), it was like walking into Bizarro World in how extensively we were getting to know these characters and their backstories. The first 40 pages is all character set up.
But that’s still a lesson to be learned. You can’t just take care of one area of your script. Scripts need every area to be solid. The concept, the characters, the plot, the mythology, all of it. If any section is neglected, the script feels weak.
Now, I admit that there are people out there who like these sort of vague mythology canvases, I guess because they like doing the work and filling in the logic gaps themselves. It’s why people like 2001. But I’ve always considered that film to be an outlier. When you don’t have a logical narrative and the movie works, that’s literally one of the hardest things to accomplish in storytelling. It can’t be replicated. Just ask Richard Kelly post Donnie Darko. I suppose, however, if you liked 2001, this is exploring similar territory, albeit through horror instead of sci-fi. If you like that sort of thing, you might like this script.
For me, I need logic. And I need to feel like the screenwriter understands every single part of his screenplay. I did not feel that here.
Screenplay link: The Unbound
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Horror scripts do need atmospheric writing. But don’t let the atmosphere take priority over the pacing. Even horror scripts that have slow builds need to move. There is no reason for your first big plot point – the girl with the ankle chain showing up – to happen 43 pages into the story. That needs to happen by page 30 at the latest. But I’d argue it should probably come at page 15. And there’s no reason that a horror script should be 125 pages. Absolutely none. Learn to shave your prose, get rid of scenes that aren’t pushing the story forward. And just, overall, it’s a screenplay, so lean into the philosophy: “less is more.”
