Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Premise: A father and daughter living in remote isolation must fight for survival after aliens arrive seeking revenge for killing one of their own.
About: This one is based on a graphic novel. Jason Fuchs, who co-wrote Wonder Woman, joined up with Endeavor Content to secure the rights. The pitch here was “Another Quiet Place.” Goes to show that mentioning recent breakout movies as a comp goes a long way towards selling something. This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. Writer Gabe Hobson has not yet secured any writing credits, although he’s working on an HBO project with Alec Berg, who produces the great, “Barry,” for HBO. When is Barry coming back????
Writer: Gabe Hobson
Details: 107 pages
It’s a double dip of sci-fi ice cream this week.
The Gorge was fun. Can Trespasser surpass it???
We’re out in the middle of rural Alaska. I guess that’s a redundant sentence. All of Alaska is rural. But anyway, 40 year old Hector Ramos is teaching his 10 year old daughter, Maria, how to hunt. Quick aside here. I have read somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 “fathers teaching their offspring how to hunt” scenes in screenplays. I strongly advise against them for that reason.
Although I wasn’t thrilled about the hunty-teachy scene, it’s followed up with a pretty cool chase scene. Hector and Maria load the caribou they killed onto a basket trailing their snowmobile and a bunch of hungry wolves begin pursuing them to steal their kill. That was cool.
Once at home, Maria expresses interest in what’s “beyond the river” that she’s never able to cross and Hector is super sketchy with his answer. We get the feeling that he’s keeping a big secret from her. That night, after her dog goes missing, Maria heads out to look for him and finds a little 4 foot humanoid black creature caught in one of their bear traps.
She calls her dad out and he’s freaked out by the thing. Says to leave it there. But Maria is so intrigued, she comes back later and feeds the alien. It seems nice. The next day, when Hector learns his daughter went back out, he’s furious and kills the thing! That very same day, Maria spots another alien. And then another!
She runs back to the house and, by that time, five aliens are in pursuit! Lucky for her, these aliens are not up to date on breaking and entering procedure for Alaskan cabins as they get all confused by the walls and windows and such. That gives Maria enough time to stall for Hector to come back. The two will then have to defeat the creatures who are dead set on getting revenge for the murder of their alien brother!
For those who don’t know, there was a screenplay written forever ago that was Steven Spielberg’s original idea for E.T. It was based on a real story where a redneck family was [supposedly] terrorized by a group of little aliens who were trying to break into their house. I’m guessing this, at least, partly inspired Trespasser?
Hey, I don’t blame ya. You can do worse than Steven Spielberg’s scraps.
I was so underwhelmed by this script, though.
As I read it, I was trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. More specifically, I was trying to figure out why the movie, Alien, works but this doesn’t.
Both of them have nefarious aliens in them. Trespasser actually has more than one. In both cases, the characters are contained to a certain location and are being stalked by the alien. And yet, I wasn’t once invested in or worried about these characters. I bounced a number of ideas around in my head as to why, never coming up with a satisfactory answer.
I would argue that you should be even more invested in Trespasser’s protagonist than Alien because Trespasser’s protagonist is a 10 year old girl. Who isn’t rooting for a 10 year old girl to not get killed by evil aliens? If you’re one of the few, keep it to yourself you heartless bastards.
In the end, I think it comes down to something simple.
The creature itself.
The creature in Alien started off as this mysterious football-sized thing that attached itself to your face. There’s something scarier about an alien whose makeup we don’t yet understand. You’re not even sure what you’re looking at.
Then, of course, the alien grows inside the body, bursts out of the chest, and becomes an even more horrifying creature the larger it grows.
In Trespasser, you basically have five 4-foot tall black humanoids. I’m sure if I was the target of one of these things, I might be less brave than I’m claiming to be now. But something that’s small – in this case as small as a ten year old – I’m just not sure how fearful I can be in a movie setting. Especially because they’re humanoid and familiar. There’s no mystery to them.
This is something I tell writers quite a bit. When you’re creating a villain – whether that villain is a killer or a monster or an alien – you need to describe something to us that feels unfamiliar in some sense. Because the unknown is what’s scary. The more we know about something, the less scary it is. That’s why when I watched Alien for the first time and that face-hugger attached itself to one of the crew-members, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. That’s what was so scary about it.
Ditto The Thing. You didn’t know what you were dealing with there on that base. That’s a big reason why it was so terrifying.
It just seems kind of silly to have a bunch of little men chasing your hero around. I’m struggling to find the fear-factor in that. Especially when they don’t even know what to do when they encounter walls. How scary can something be when it sees a house and goes, “Un oh. Now we’re screwed.”
The one good thing this script had going for it was the mystery of why the father had dragged his daughter into the middle of nowhere to live. We kept getting these hints that he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. Maybe even lying completely about the reason they lived in the wild. That mystery was the only reason I wanted to turn the pages.
If there’s something to learn from this script, I’d tie it into my contemplative weekend I referred to in the Monday post. Go and scroll through the thumbnails of four streaming services for fifteen minutes. Look at the sheer number of options people have. Understand what you’re competing with. That way, when you think five little humanoids are a good idea for scary alien monsters, you might check yourself and consider another, more menacing, option.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Is your villain/monster/alien/demon actually MENACING. If they’re not menacing, we’re not going to be afraid of them. I didn’t know whether to run from these humanoid trespassers or pick them up and pet them.
What I learned 2: Add the 1,249,081st script to the “Dead Kid Backstory” pile. Just in case you were thinking it was a good idea to add a dead kid backstory to your next script.
