Genre: Horror
Premise: Three teens rent a cursed VHS video tape and are pulled into an ’80s slasher movie that threatens to trap them there forever.
About: Lionsgate just picked this one up last week. Seth Rogen is producing with Greg Silverman’s Stampede Ventures. The script was written by Chris Thomas Devlin, whose sparse (some might say, too sparse) horror script, Cobweb, finished high on the Black List a few years ago. He also penned the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.
Writer: Chris Thomas Devlin
Details: 100 pages
I’m going to start today with a public reminder that these “fun” slasher-horror scripts do well on the market. First, they’re easy to read. More so than traditional horror scripts. That’s because there’s more dialogue (so eyes fly down the page faster) and the subject matter has a breezy easy-to-digest quality to it (as opposed to, say, Dune). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that fellow “fun” slasher-horror script “Scream” is one of the most famous spec sales in Hollywood history. So if you’re good with dialogue and you like fun bloody horror scenarios, this is a lucrative genre to write in. Let us now find out if this is one of the good ones.
15 year old Lena and 14 year old Shawn are sister and brother. The two are total horror nerds, spending a big portion of their lives making little slasher horror movies based on all their favorite horror films. But the two are dealing with a huge shift in their lives as their father just died and they’re forced to move out of the city to a small town where living is cheaper.
A few months after moving, Shawn’s biggest nightmare comes true. Lena has found a significant other – Izzy, a cool girl at school that Lena is absolutely smitten with. So much for Team Horror! One weekend, however, when their mom goes out of town, Lena agrees to watch a horror movie with Shawn, like the good old days. So Shawn goes into town and finds a mysterious old VHS video store. The owner, a freaky woman with white hair, takes him to the back and gives him a special movie called, “How They Bleed.”
Thrilled that he has something new to watch with his sister, Shawn gets home only to find out… Lena is hanging out with Izzy! Boooo! Shawn goes upstairs to angrily watch the movie by himself and, while doing so, notices that the young actress in the movie looks exactly like a picture of a missing girl he saw back in town. Then he sees her, in the movie, running towards a house. Wait, that isn’t just any house. That’s THEIR HOUSE!
Yup, we got ourselves a Jumanji situation here. The movie has come to them! Once Lena and Izzy realize what’s going on, they have to run for their lives from a killer wielding a giant scythe. Long story short, there’s been a lot of missing children in this town over the years, and that’s because they’ve all gotten caught in this movie! When one of those children steals the movie video tape, Shawn, Lena, and Izzy will have to chase him around town all night to get it back, all with a persistent Scythe Guy chasing them.
Video Nasty does some good things and some not so good things.
For starters, I liked that Devlin focused the story on this broken relationship between a brother and sister. I advocate for this all the time on the site. Instead of only focusing on a character, what’s broken about them, and their battle to fix that brokenness, do the same with a relationship.
In Video Nasty, Shawn’s sister is growing up. She’s not making movies with him anymore. And he’s trying to resolve that in his head. The script even goes so far as to give Shawn a choice at the end. The creepy video store lady says he can stay in this movie forever and she’ll make it so that Lena would never like Lizzy, and therefore Shawn and Lena will have their old relationship back, which they can live every day, over and over again. Or he can continue down this path of destroying the movie to get back to the real world, where the chasm between him and his sister will only grow larger over the years. Which would he rather have?
But here’s the frustrating thing about screenwriting. Just because you’ve got this noble idea of how you’re going to do something, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to execute it effectively. The reality with this relationship is that you have a 14 year old boy acting 8 years old the whole movie. Shawn follows Lena around like a little puppy. We are to believe she is the only thing in his life worth living for. I could MAYBE see that if Shawn was 8 years old and looked up to his big sister. But 14 years old? I’ve never seen a relationship like that before.
And I know why Devlin chose those ages. It’s so that the two could have this horror filmmaking past together. This happens all the time in screenwriting where you have these ideas of how you want something to work that’s not believable, however if you change them to the believable version, they take away something that you like. And most writers don’t like to give up the things that they really like, even when they’re not essential to the story.
The filmmaking backstory is a nice touch and creates a unique relationship between these two siblings, but it is not necessary for the story to work. You can just as easily make them horror aficionados who enjoy watching horror movies. That way you could change Shawn’s age to the one makes more sense here – 8, 9, or 10.
Can it still work the way it is? Yeah, it’s a fun slasher horror movie. This genre is very forgiving. But it’s just weird that the emotional core of this script is built on a 14 year old crying himself to sleep every night cause his 15 year old sister doesn’t hang out with him anymore.
There’s also something chunky salsa about the script’s mythology. The missing kids from the town who become locked in the movie – some of them are aware they’re still themselves, while others have forgotten who they are completely? But they always remember right as they’re about to get killed?? After you kill the Monster, he’s able to reanimate into any other character in the movie, a la Agent Smith from The Matrix? And, at a certain point, everyone in the movie starts to realize you’re trying to change the film so they all start attacking you?
I’m not sure I’d call any of these things script-killers. But you don’t want audience members leaving any movie that you’ve written asking, “So wait a minute… how did that work exactly?” “Why are they able to do that?” “Why could they only do that later in the movie but not earlier?” You gotta get that mythology as airtight as possible. Not just to appease annoying critics like myself. But because it genuinely makes your movie better when everything is tied up nicely.
This is a tough script to pick on a final verdict on. It’s definitely not bad. But it’s a bit too messy for my taste. From the brother-sister relationship to the 65%-of-the-way-there mythology, I’m not feeling it. With that said, Rogen and Co. are supposed to develop it. So hopefully it’ll get better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I like whenever somebody can come up with stakes WORSE THAN DEATH. Not that death is bad stakes. But it’s kind of… obvious? Here, in Video Nasty, the stakes are that if they get killed by the killer, they’re stuck in this movie forever, having to relive this day over and over and over again, getting killed by this monster every night. Now that is a scenario I do not want to get caught in.
