(TOP 25!!!) – One of the cooler crossovers I’ve read in a long time. A History of Violence meets An American Werewolf in London meets Let The Right One In.
Genre: Horror
Premise: A werewolf living on a remote farm with her older sister takes in a thief on the run just 72 hours before the next full moon.
About: This script finished on the Black List. The above logline you read was my logline. But since I’ll reference it in the review, here’s the very un-horror sounding logline from the Black List: “A young woman is determined to protect a thief on the run when he holes up in her small town, even if it means revealing a darker, more violent secret of her own.”
Writer: Michael Burgner
Details: 110 pages
It can be VERY difficult choosing a script to review from the Black List. Make the wrong choice and you could find yourself sifting through 120 pages of high school freshman level writing. Make the right choice, and you may find yourself the next Nightcrawler.
The stakes are high.
For this one, I noticed that Sugar23 represented it. I know they represent creators who did True Detective and 13 Reasons Why. I also noticed that even though the Black List logline made the script sound like a drama, that the writer had a couple of short films to his name that were horror. So I figured… hmmmm, maybe that means this one is a horror film too.
That was enough to seal the deal. And boy did that research pay off!
We meet Liz, who lives in a Kansas farmhouse with her sister, Jean. Liz has ugly scar tissue all around her neck. What’s that about? She walks downstairs where Jean is waiting. The two walk outside, across the yard, to the storm cellar. They go inside. There’s a big rusty chain and collar attached to a concrete wall. Jean and Liz place it over Liz’s neck, lock it, and Jean heads back into the house.
Later that night, a semi-truck screeches to a halt on the nearby highway. Jean sees this. Oh no. Jean runs across the field to the truck, hollering at the driver to get back in his truck. The driver, who thinks he hit something, gets WHACKED by a blur, pulled into the nearby corn field. Jean turns around and sprints with everything she’s got back to her house. It doesn’t take long for us to figure out what happened. Liz is a werewolf and got free from her restraints.
Cut to a medium-sized town several weeks later where Nick and Crispy barge into a strip club to rob it at the end of the night. After Crispy goes rogue and gets shot, Nick is able to get away with the money. But the owner’s security, a Navajo psychopath named Hashke, along with the owner himself, are already planning on how to retrieve his dough and torture this man.
During the getaway on his motorcycle, Nick’s battery was shot. So when the motorcycle dies, he’s forced to hitchhike. This is where he meets Liz, who looks like she’s going to pick him up, but instead tells him to get cleaned up and drives off.
Furious, he walks the rest of the way to town, where he runs into Liz again, ignores her, and heads to the hardware store to get a battery for his bike. The owner says it’s a special delivery and will take 72 hours. When Liz sees Nick throwing around money, she offers him a place to stay at her barn. Realizing that people will talk if he stays in town, he decides to take her up on her offer.
Meanwhile, Ruby, a sheriff, has made her way into town to find out exactly what happened to her husband (the trucker), and Hashke, taking a page out of Anton Chigurh’s book, has arrived in town in search of Nick. Oh yeah, and did I mention there’s a full moon in three days? About the same amount of time that Nick plans to stay at Liz’s? Yeah, I’m starting to think we’re going to get one hell of a climax.
When people talk about the difference between amateur and pro writing, it often sounds arbitrary. A lot of times it just means the reader likes this script better than that one.
So let’s get specific. Cause this script is a a great example of what a truly good screenwriter looks like when they’re putting together a story. I can show you specific examples of what the difference between advanced and intermmediate looks like. So let’s get into it.
For starters, there’s the robbery that opens Nick’s storyline. Nick is robbing a strip joint with Crispy. They get in there, it’s a room full of people, and when the initial threat of a stick-up doesn’t receive the proper fearful response, Crispy slides open his jacket to reveal that he’s strapped with explosives.
Nick stares over at this the same way everyone else does, with a giant “WTF” look on his face. This was the first indication that we’re dealing with an advanced writer. 99% of writers are going to have their robbers in lockstep, cause they’ll think of them as one entity.
But it’s so much more interesting to the story if one of these two go rouge. It instantly turns a black and white situation gray. And that’s where all the fun is.
Cut to a few scenes later. Nick’s motorcycle breaks down and he’s hitching on the side of the road. Liz is driving down that same road, sees him, and stops. Keep in mind, Nick still has blood on his face from the botched robbery.
Now, let me explain to you how an amateur writer thinks in this moment. They know that Nick is going to stay at Liz’s place. They know that’s the next major plot point. So they view things through the eyes of getting to that plot point ASAP. Therefore, they have Liz see this bloody man hitchhiking, pick him up, and take him to her home.
But in what reality would that happen? What woman is going to pick a bloodied hitchhiker up. That’s how the advanced writer looks at it. They look at it more from a perspective of reality. Of course you’re not going to pick him up. So after a few words with the man, Liz tells him that if he expects anyone to pick him up, he’s going to have to get cleaned up first. Then she drives off.
But here’s where the writing goes from advanced to very advanced: That scene does double duty. Not only is it more truthful but it establishes REAL CONFLICT between the two. Nick hates this girl now. The beginner screenwriter just has his two leads hate each other because it works better for what he’s trying to do. Who needs a *reason* for that? Here, the writer actually creates a reason for Nick to dislike Liz, establishing the necessary conflict between the two leads.
Later, the two re-meet at the hardware store. Liz sees Nick throwing money around. Liz’s farm is going under. Money is everything to her right now. So she offers him a place to stay while he waits for his battery to come in (another well-done, underrated, part of the plotting – the time constraint) and when she brings him back to her place, Ruby is sitting there, the wife of the dead trucker.
This is an EXTREMELY strong writing choice and let me tell you why.
Nine of out ten writers would’ve taken a break at this moment in the story. We just went through Liz meeting Nick on the road, Nick buying the new battery, the two negotiating him staying over… it would’ve been easy to take a couple of scenes off with Liz just sort of sitting in her room and looking tired. Or showing a “day in the life” of living on the farm. I know a lot of writers who would’ve done that. Five pages of mush before we get back to the plot.
By having this obstacle waiting for her – the wife of the man she killed sitting on the couch – tells me that this writer gets it. He knows that movies in small towns on farms die a lot quicker on the page than the Mission Impossibles and the Jurassic World’s of the world. So he knows that he has to keep things moving. It was moments like this that elevated this script above 99% of the other scripts out there.
And then, like any good horror film, you have this looming danger that’s coming. We know that the full moon is 3 days away. We know that Nick is the perfect food source. Nobody will miss him if he disappears. So we’re wondering, is he dead meat? Or is she going to start liking him enough that that doesn’t happen? Or maybe still happens?
And then, as if all that isn’t enough, you have not one, but TWO looming obstacles imposing on the central storyline. One is Ruby, a cop who wants to know what happened to her husband. And two is Hashke (and ultimately the strip joint owner), who want to kill Nick and get his money back.
I honestly don’t know if you could’ve come up with a better series of creative choices than was made here.
All of this sitting on top of the best creative choice of all, which was to make this a horror film. Too many writers would’ve written the version of this that the Black List logline implies. Which is a criminal who stays with a woman while avoiding the bad guys chasing him. That story ISN’T SEXY ENOUGH for a screenplay. You need a genre element to make people care (not to mention, make it marketable!). And that’s what we get here. We get the werewolf element.
How do we know that the non-genre version doesn’t work? Cause we’ve seen it. Jason Reitman’s snore-fest, Labor Day. Same premise. But no werewolf. Which equaled 1000x more boring.
This is the kind of script that, if you can internalize all the choices made here, starting from the concept then moving into the plotting itself, you will massively improve your own screenwriting. Every screenwriter should read this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “Meet Mean.” We’ve all heard of the “Meet Cute.” But how much more interesting is it when your male and female leads are introduced via a “Meet Mean,” as was the case here? Liz drives up to Nick, asks him a few questions, lets him know there’s no way she’s letting him in her car, then drives off. I find that WAY MORE interesting than if they had an instant obsessive infatuation with one another.
