Genre: Holiday/Horror
Premise: A family’s Christmas dinner goes awry when a xenomorphic demon starts to duplicate and imitate each member of the family. What does it want? To show them their greatest fears.
About: This script made it onto last year’s Black List. The writer wrote ten episodes of the Black-ish spinoff, Grown-ish.
Writer: Kyle Dew
Details: 105 pages
Marcus Scribner from Grown’ish for Bryan?
Confession time!
I’m not a holiday-horror mash-up guy.
I know, I know.
LAAAAAAME!
Lame, Carson.
Everyone who’s anyone loves holiday-horror mash-ups cause they’re geek-chic, dude. Who doesn’t want to see Santa’s chief elf slaughter a dozen coeds in Dustin Coyle’s, “Psychotic Elf Sorority Massacre 5?” I’ve already got the first murder scene: A half-naked sorority chick with 37 candy canes plunged into her. The elf even left a post-it note on her desk: “Ho ho ho.”
Contrary to popular belief, I’m a softie. I’m more pillow than anvil. When Christmas comes around, I want to feel the warm loving embrace of George Bailey running down the street and screaming, “Merrrry Christmas everybody!” I don’t want to get stabbed by 37 candy canes.
BUT…
I love this title.
And I have never wavered from my belief that a good writer can make any concept work. Actually, I think that’s the first time I’ve said that. Therefore it might be a lie. Regardless, it’s a million times more fun to read a good script than a bad one so let’s hold hands before we take part in this script feast and say a Christmas prayer – Thout shall giveth us a great reading experience…
20-something Bryan and his girlfriend, Michaela, are flying back from LA to Chicago for Christmas. Michaela seems unsatisfied in the relationship and forces Bryan into a ton of therapy to fix it.
They get to the house where matriarch, and lawyer, Ida, is cooking up Christmas dinner. She’s with her brother, Bryan’s crazy Uncle James (who Bryan got into a physical fight with the year before). Bryan’s sister Ciarra has brought with her her very white boyfriend, Alex. Also at the dinner is Bryan’s childhood best friend, Dame.
We cut away to meet a cop named Brooklyn who gets called to their house later that night. When he gets there, we find out that Bryan has hanged himself. He’s dead. After Brooklyn asks everyone how this happened, Bryan shows up in the doorway, alive again. Naturally, everybody freaks out. Some are happy. Some are mad, cause they think he played a trick on them. But Bryan has no memory of any of this. So he thinks they’re all crazy.
This provokes a second investigation into whether Bryan is lying or not. And during this investigation, a second Brooklyn appears. When the two Brooklyns confront each other, the family tries to figure out who the imposter is. Once they do, Imposter Brooklyn cuts open his insides and starts eating his own guts until he perishes. This confirms that we have a demon in the house.
But if the demon is no longer inside Fake Brooklyn, then where is he? And what does he want? Due to an intense snowstorm, the family can’t go anywhere. So they’ll be forced to figure out where (as well as who) the demon is, and then eliminate him.
Back in Chicago, we had this theme park called, “Six Flags Great America.” It had all these great rollercoasters. But the one I liked best was “The Demon.” The thing looked like a giant spider that had been twisted and contorted into an unrecognizable maze of metal. The Demon roller coaster is apropos for today because we’re dealing with a literal demon AND this script read like I was riding on a roller coaster. It starts out sloooooow, but then it gets fun, the next second it coasted, then it was fun again, then we’d get to the corkscrews, which are never as dramatic as the loops.
I was ready to tap out after the first act. There were a lot of character introductions. A lot of dialogue that, because there was so much setup, was boring to read. I was worried this was going to be one of those scripts where we sit at a table the whole time and engage in endless dialogue.
But then Bryan commits suicide. Which is followed by him coming back to life. And, all of a sudden, I found myself turning the pages with more energy. I wanted to know exactly what the family wanted to know, which was: How is Bryan alive again? Solving that mystery was compelling enough to grab my attention.
And then when there were two Brooklyn’s, I distinctly remember thinking, “Okay, this might actually be a movie now.” Cause I didn’t think it was a movie before.
Look, I think a lot of screenwriters, deep down, want to be John Hughes or Richard Linklater or Martin McDonagh, where we craft an entire screenplay around dialogue and dialogue alone. It’s the sexiest component of screenwriting and, therefore, if you can master that part of the craft, you are seen as a screenwriting god.
But today’s script reminds us that, as lovely as that would be, you need plot. You need stuff to hook us. Cause the second we had a dead body here, my interest tripled. And then when he came back to life, it went up again. These are plot developments and we can bring them into our story at any moment to juice things up.
With that said, you still have to judge this story on its comedic dialogue since that’s such a big part of the script. On that end, the writer could’ve done better.
One of the things I’ve always found frustrating about comedy is that sometimes being cliché hurts you but other times it helps. We’ve all seen the swearing grandma archetype. That’s such a cliche low-hanging fruit character that it rarely works. At the same time, comedic archetypes can help you!
The character I laughed the most at was Uncle James. Uncle James leaned heavily into the “Crazy opinionated Uncle at holiday gatherings” archetype. Because I understood exactly who he was, his jokes always made me giggle.
Whereas with the rest of these characters, I didn’t know what their archetype was so I struggled to figure out where their jokes were supposed to come from. Because when you don’t have clear archetypes, you don’t know whose mouths to place the jokes in. As a result, you end up randomizing them. Except a line that would typically come from Roman (Succession) doesn’t work if it comes out of Tom’s mouth.
The script doesn’t stick the landing. It was more corkscrew than giant loop. But it kind of won me over by that point. It’s like a holiday horror version of The Thing. I know that will intrigue a few of you. And it’s enough for me to recommend the script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Some of these characters get capitalized intros and some don’t. That’s a big problem in a screenplay, even though it feels like a small one. Because if you introduce a character un-capitalized, that’s an indication to the reader that they’ve already been introduced. This isn’t a huge problem if the introductions are happening on page 3. But if they happen on page 15 or later, the reader’s going to question why they don’t remember this character who’s “already been introduced.” When they take the time to look the introduction up and find out the character hasn’t been introduced but, rather, the writer made a mistake, you’ve lost a ton of screenwriting credit with the reader. Since you’re an unknown, you don’t get that much credit to begin with. So losing that credit could be the difference between the reader continuing to read with focus or going into skim-mode. Their attitude becomes: “If the writer isn’t going to try, then why should I?”
