Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Hit List) A young teacher reunites with her reclusive, scientific genius grandfather for the first time at his isolated country estate, uncovering disturbing truths about her childhood.
About: Jay Russell focuses mostly on directing. He directed the firefighter movie, Ladder 49, with Joaquin Phoenix. He’s making a movie about Lou Gehrig called “The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth.” But here he’s turning to writing-directing and doing so in the horror genre. He sold this project to Paramount. Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road will produce. The script finished with 18 votes on the 2017 Hit List.
Writer: Jay Russell
Details: 118 pages
Just as I was putting this review together, I saw the news over at Deadline about “10-31,” a horror script that has been “much pursued” by everyone in Hollywood. It’s about a Halloween night that goes awry due to a message in a piece of candy. Horror director Eli Roth will helm the movie. This is what he said after reading the script: “Very rarely do you get a script that grabs you by the throat, holds you until the last page, and gives you nightmares after. I don’t want to reveal too much, but this is one of the best, scariest premises for a horror film that I have read in years.” You know when someone starts talking about a great spec, I have to read it. And since it’s Halloween Month, we absolutely have to get this reviewed. So if you have 10-31, send it my way!
Today’s script explores the good old fashioned horror premise of a main character who’s convinced she’s seeing a bunch of scary things, but is told by everyone else that she’s going crazy. Let’s find out if it’s any good.
30 year old Lizzie Fleischer is a first grade teacher whose life is on the up-and-up. She’s about to marry her boyfriend of four months, Stephen, who she’s madly in love with. Before she does, however, she has to put her past to rest. When Lizzie was a child, she used to go to her rich grandfather’s mansion, until one day when the family got into a horrible car accident and both her parents died. Lizzie wants to finally move past this trauma and seeing her grandfather again is the final step.
So up she drives into an endless forest until she finally comes upon the mansion. It’s a little more dilapidated than what she rememberers, but her grandfather still has a groundskeeper, the creepy Ben, who’s doing his best to keep things presentable. After she takes a look around and spots a few expensive pieces of hospital equipment (what are those for?) she finally meets her grandfather again, Dr. Rupert Fleischer.
We soon learn that the trauma was so intense after that crash, Lizzie barely rememberers anything about this place. So Rupert does his best to catch her up. It’s here she learns about the wing of the house that’s been “closed down” and not to be entered. Hmmm… I wonder what that’s about? Later, Liz wanders into the forest where she’s convinced she hears children playing. But this is both in the middle of nowhere and private property. There can’t be any kids around here.
That night, Liz wakes up to hear kids’ voices IN THE HOUSE. When she asks Ben and Rupert about this in the morning, they look at her like she’s nuts. But Liz’s childhood memories start coming back, and some of them include a hospital. A children’s hospital here on the premises. The deeper Liz digs, the more skittish her grandfather gets, until he informs her that, in his professional medical opinion, she may be psychotic. Not to worry, however. He’s a doctor and will treat her. Aww, what a nice guy. What ever could go wrong in this scenario? Read “You’re Not Real” to find out!
The challenge with “main character may be crazy” movies is that the writer has too much power to fudge the world we’re in in order to fit his puzzle pieces together. Literally any strange thing that happens that makes zero sense or doesn’t work for the plot, the writer can lean on the fact that the main character was imagining it. Or not imagining it. It’s such a convenient position to write from. Technically, nothing in your script needs to make sense.
The other big issue I see in these scripts is that the authors have no clue what real psychosis is. The extent of their medical knowledge rests on a few quick wikipedia searches and a friend of theirs who used to be a pharmacist named Todd. True psychosis, or anything that has do with mental health, is a complicated subject matter. And most writers just don’t want to do the research to figure out how their character’s condition actually works.
The combination of these two pitfalls is what often dooms these scripts. Which is why I’m happy to say that Russell manages them well. He doesn’t knock it out of the park. But there’s a sophistication to both the characters and the plot that, over time, gives you confidence that he has a plan here. And that’s all I want when I read one of these “crazy person” mysteries. I want to feel like the writer has a plan on where he’s taking me and it’s going to pay off in a satisfying way.
The area where Russell’s script shines the brightest is in its detail. He does a very good job of describing the area and the house and the things Liz is seeing. Normally, it takes the screenplay’s beefier cousin, the novel, to pull this off. But Russell manages it do it in script form, despite the craft’s minimalistic requirements.
In the end, the only thing that needs to work when writing a mystery is, does the reader want to find out what happened? Your mystery has to be compelling enough to pass that test. And the thought of this man taking advantage of children, doing experiments on them, possibly even doing experiments on Liz, made me want to find out what was really going on. While I wouldn’t say the final explanation was great. It was interesting enough that I felt satisfied. This spooky little script was definitely worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Not every car driving deep into the woods needs to include almost hitting a deer (an early scene that happens to Liz). If you have an instinct to write something – a beat, a scene, a moment, a surprise – the most common reason for that is that you’ve seen it before. So if you’ve seen it before, do you really want to use it? If you like the idea, find a twist on it. At least that way, you’re bringing something new to the table. A very basic example of this is, how do you make two superheroes fighting interesting if we’ve seen a million superheroes fight each other already? Well, what if a superhero had to fight himself? Which is what Captain America has to do in Endgame. It’s hard to come up with these ideas because your brain always wants to do the least amount of work. You have to push yourself.
What I learned special DVD extras: Consider the fact that this is the second horror script I’ve read IN A ROW that had a major plot point where parents died in a car crash. That should tell you, when you come up with that idea, it’s probably because you’ve seen it before. Honestly, sometimes I think the only thing that separates the good writers from the bad ones is effort. Screenwriting really is a medium where the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.
