Genre: Horror
Premise: A yuppie couple and their daughter move into a long-standing Portland neighborhood that doesn’t like how gentrification is changing their city.
About: Very little is known about this co-writing team that snuck onto last year’s Black List with this script, which tallied 8 votes.
Writers: Ross Lazar and Sebastian Shepard
Details: 111 pages
Before we get started, I want to talk about populating. Populating, as it pertains to screenwriting, is the act of creating the world around the world that we see on the page. So, for example, let’s say your script takes place in a house. It’s your job to populate that house with as much detail as you can. You should know what every room looks like, what’s in it, why it’s in there, if there’s any history behind that room, etc, etc.
Populating is not limited to physical spaces either. You’re going to populate your character’s job, for example. You need to know what your hero does, what his daily routine is like, who he works with, what the dynamic is with those people, where his office is, how he gets there, and as many other details as you can.
Now I’m going to throw a curveball at you. 90% of populating occurs in the background. It’s stuff that the writer never writes about, that the reader never sees. But why would you write down a bunch of stuff that the reader is never going to see? Isn’t that a big fat waste of time? Let me answer that with an analogy. Let’s say a friend is lying to you. They say they were at the movies but you suspect they weren’t, so you start asking them questions. What was the movie? What time was the showing? What were the previews? What actors were in it? The more vague the answers are, the more you get the feeling that something is off. You can’t definitively prove that they’re lying. But you know something doesn’t feel right.
That’s the same feeling a reader gets when a writer hasn’t properly populated their script. They can’t help but feel like something is off. And the reason something is off is because the writer doesn’t know much about their world. And the longer this goes on, the less engaged the reader becomes. Because without the detail that populating brings, the story has more of a “made up” feel to it. Which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve with storytelling. Your goal is to make the person forget they’re reading a story.
I’m bringing this up because on page 84, one of the major plot points is Marissa, our wife character, saying they can’t leave this haunted house of theirs because of Peter’s, the husband’s, job. Yet I have no idea what Peter’s job even is. I haven’t seen him do any job. I haven’t heard him talk about any job. And now you’re going to use that as a major plot point? In these moments, I’m convinced that the writers don’t know anything about Peter’s job. All it is to them is a chess piece to be moved to achieve a plot point that they need. And this is a HUGE amateur screenwriting tell. The big dogs – the professional writers with half a million dollar quotes – they don’t make this mistake.
I’m getting ahead of myself, of course, but I had to bring this up because it’s so frustrating to see. Especially with a Black List script. These are supposed to be the scripts that the community looks up to as to what we should aspire to. I guess I’m confused on that front for several reasons, since I’m not even clear what the unique hook is with this movie.
In it, we follow San Franciscoans’ Peter and his new wife, Marissa. They drive a Tesla. Peter has a 12 year old daughter named Lyla who hates Marissa. Her real mom, Peter’s wife, died four years ago from cancer. And now she’s stuck with this woman who doesn’t have a clue how motherhood works.
The family move to Portland for reasons that aren’t really clear to me other than it gets the movie started. In the script’s best scene – its teaser, which takes place before the family arrives – we see a woman flee the house that they’re about to own, screaming at the neighbors for help. But the neighbors all just stand around and do nothing while men in Hazmat suits emerge from the same house, grab her, and drag her back in.
So at least we know the house has some naughty plans for our family. Anyway, once they move in, Peter desperately tries to get Lyla and Marissa to like each other. But Lyla just stays in her room all day playing Fortnite. After a few days of this, Marissa forces Lyla to befriend the neighborhood boy across the street, Desi.
Lyla’s not a huge Desi fan but when a scary old woman ghost that looks like every scary old woman ghost in every horror movie ever starts haunting Lyla, she goes to Desi for help. The two do some research and find out that the woman is a special type of ghost that is summoned specifically to scare people. It appears that our family is being scared in the hopes that they’ll leave.
But in a shocking twist, we learn that the real reason the family is being targeted is to be sacrificed to some female God creature, and that Desi’s own father is leading the charge! By the time the family figures this out, it’s too late, as they’re knocked unconscious and tied up. Will they be able to get free in time? Or will they fall victim to Portland’s version of The Wicker Man?
I talk about red flags a lot. So I’ll tell you what the first red flag in this script was for me.
In an early scene, after we meet Peter, Marissa, and Lyla, the characters indicate that something tragic happened four years ago. And the writers follow that with this line, “We’ll learn more about “four years ago” later.”
I’ll cover the “We’ll learn more about that” thing in the “What I learned” section. But in this specific instance, there is no reason to use this. It kills me when writers think readers are dumb. Readers and audience members are ALWAYS smarter than you think they are. They pick up on things like *that.* You’ve just conveyed that Lyla used to have friends and now she’s an introvert. Marissa and Peter are newly married. This means Lyla’s real mom is no longer in the picture. I can say with certainty that 99.9% of the readers are going to be able to figure out that Lyla’s mom died four years ago. To treat that like some sort of major suspenseful hook – oh, we have to keep reading to find out what happened four years ago! – indicates that you think the reader is an idiot. So as soon as I saw that, I knew the script was in trouble.
Also, as I continued reading, I kept thinking to myself, “This isn’t bad. It’s got a scary situation. It had that fun hazmat teaser. There’s conflict with the neighbors. And yet I’m bored. Why?”
Plug and play characters is why. Instead of the writers having something to say about these people and their experience of moving into a new home, it felt like the template of “husband, daughter, evil new stepmother” was chosen first, and the characters were plugged into those roles.
While plug and play can work in plotting situations (the common plot point of your hero charging off on their adventure at the beginning of the second act, for example), character creation is something that needs to be more organic. Which is why character creation is so much harder than plotting. Since I never felt like these were real people, none of the drama worked. I couldn’t get past the fact that everybody felt fake.
When conceiving of characters, you should try to anchor those characters in something from your own life. When you do that, the characters and the situations they’re in have an extra spark because the level of truth that you’ve added has made their situations more genuine. I know, for example, Steven Spielberg’s parents’ divorce had a huge impact on him. So you see him exploring divorce in many different ways throughout his movies. And that authenticity gives his movies an extra kick.
There might be a movie in here somewhere but I can’t see it, at least not in this draft. There isn’t an original hook. There are no original characters. There’s no original monster. It never felt like the writers were trying to do anything new. So this was “been here, done that” Portland style.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “We’ll learn more about that later.” The old “We’ll learn more about that later” thing is something writers do to offset something that’s happened which is currently unclear. Since I see this device being used more and more, I want to share my thoughts on it. It’s basically a gimmick. The writer is speaking directly to the reader, which you’re not supposed to do in a screenplay. And whenever you’re using the same gimmick more than once in a script, it’s an indication that the writer lacks confidence in their story. They have to hoodwink you via a series of gimmicks to get you to keep reading. The only time I’d use, “We’ll learn more about that later” is if there’s something genuinely confusing that’s occurred which, for story reasons, you can’t explain right now. And you feel that if you don’t let the reader know that this will make sense later, they’ll think it’s some kind of mistake or screw-up. In that instance, “Don’t worry. This will make sense later,” actually has an important purpose.
