Genre: Horror
Premise: A mysterious drifter gets stuck inside a Chuck E. Cheese like entertainment center called Wally’s Wonderland where the animatronic creatures come alive and kill.
About: It’s here. The single greatest Nic Cage movie that hasn’t been made yet. Wally’s Wonderland! An idea so fun it seems impossible no one’s come up with it yet. I guess the universe needed the idea to collide with a certain Direct-to-Digital icon before it was ready to unleash the greatest midnight horror film ever… that hasn’t been made yet. I read somewhere that the writer wanted to make “the ultimate B movie that was so absurd you had to tell your friends about it because of how stupidly awesome it was.” I admire a writer who knows exactly what he wants.
Writer: G.O. Parsons
Details: 93 pages

When one reads Wally’s Wonderland, one has to ask the question: “Will this be the greatest B-movie ever made?”

Nick Cage taking down an animatronic ostrich with a mop could be this generation’s cut yourself out of the inside of a shark with a chainsaw moment.

I can tell you something this script taught me right off the bat. It’s in reference to idea creation. There are big news stories in our pasts that just sort of came of nowhere and everyone talked about them. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they disappeared. If you can identify one of these stories and find a movie idea for it, you’ve got something that already has “concept cache” because it’s been proven to capture peoples’ interest.

I remember those news stories about how pedophiles and sickos used to hang out at Chuck E. Cheese because that’s where all the kids were. Today’s script has taken that idea to the next level, centering around a group of these degenerates who sacrificed their souls in order to live on in animatronic form.

The Janitor is driving his jeep down a lone highway in Middle-of-Nowhere Nevada when, all of a sudden, all four wheels blow out at the same time, bringing him to a screechy scary stop. And yet the Janitor is unphased. By the way, it’s never clear if The Janitor is named The Janitor because he *is* a janitor or because he must become a janitor due to his circumstances. Such details are unimportant in Wally’s Wonderland.

A tow truck shows up and a man named Jed explains to The Janitor that the police were chasing someone the other week, put out one of those spike lines to blow the guy’s tires, and, wouldn’t you know it, forgot to recollect it! He takes The Janitor back to his garage where he gives him the damage – $1000. Unfortunately, Jed informs him, they don’t take credit cards. It’s clear that The Janitor doesn’t have cash on him so Jed offers an alternative.

Cut to Wally’s Wonderland, a long since closed-down Chuck E. Cheese knock-off. The owner, Tex Macadoo, is planning to reopen the place. But he needs someone to clean it up first, make it spick-and-span. If The Janitor is quick, Tex tells him, he should be able to finish the job by morning. The Janitor hasn’t said a word to anybody yet. He doesn’t even react. He just stares intensely at whoever’s talking to him.

Wally’s Wonderland is a freaking mess. Remnants of hundreds of sad 1990s birthday parties are scattered about haphazardly. And then there’s those rusty creepy animatronic dolls (Pirate Pete, Beary the Bear, Ozzie the Ostrich, and Wally the Weasel) up on stage. They stand there staring out at nothing. Or at least that’s what we think. What The Janitor doesn’t know is that Jed and Tex have locked him in the building. He’s about to be sacrificed to these animals… which are very much alive!

The first one, Ozzie the Ostrich, strikes almost immediately. But a strange thing happens when he attacks. Unlike the other humans who freak out and run and scream for their lives, The Janitor just stands there waiting for the Ostrich and then cracks him in the face with his mop. He then relentlessly beats him to a wirey pulp.

You’d think that after an animatronic Ostrich tried to kill you that you’d prepare for battle with the other three fake animals in the room. But not The Janitor. He simply goes back to work, determined to clean the place up before dawn.

Meanwhile, a group of high school kids led by a girl named Liv head to Wally’s World to burn it down. They know the town sacrifices people in there and they’re going to put a stop to it. But first they have to get The Janitor out of there. So they head up to the roof where they’re able to gain access inside. Once in, however, things don’t go according to plan. The animatronic animals are more than happy to fatten up on young human flesh.

Strangely, The Janitor doesn’t care. He really really really wants to clean. Unless a kid being eaten is directly in the way of doing his job, he ignores them. It’s not clear whether The Janitor doesn’t realize he’s been conned or if he knows he’s been conned but still wants to clean the place. Either answer is acceptable to me.

You know where this is headed. The whole time, Wally the Weasel has been sitting atop his stage perch, awaiting all his other minions to take their shot at the Janitor. And when they fail, he must now get the job done himself. Nicholas Cage……….. vs. a 9 foot animatronic weasel. I’m going to ask you an honest question. Do you even need to go on with life after this battle? Cause I don’t think I do.

One of the first things I wondered before reading this was how is Nicholas Cage going to fight animatronic monsters for 90 minutes inside of five rooms? I was worried the flame was going to burn bright then go out before the second half.

So I liked what Parsons did. He brought in these high school kids. Not only did that give us more battles to show, but The Janitor plays an Equalizer-like character. He handles every attack with ease. So we needed characters who STRUGGLED to defeat these things to make it more interesting. Remember, that’s where you grab the viewer – when things are unknown. If we know our heroes are going to win every fight, there’s no conflict, there’s no uncertainty, and therefore there’s no tension. Bringing those kids in was key.

Also, if you have a character who’s as unstoppable as The Janitor is, you need to look for ways in the second half of the movie to handicap them. That way they don’t have access to their fighting superiority and you DO get uncertainty in their fights. When the town realizes that The Janitor is winning, they go back in, handcuff him, and leave him there so that he can be properly sacrificed. So now The Janitor has to fight with his hands tied behind his back! That’s smart screenwriting.

It also helps, in movies like this, if you can occasionally take us outside. Technically, you can keep everything inside. It’s certainly cheaper to do it that way. But even in script form, there’s a “claustrophobic” feeling that sets in if you’re not occasionally cutting away from the place. So it was good that we’d occasionally cut back to the bad guys. We even get one great scene where the bad guys are driving away only to see an animatronic penguin bash through their windshield and attack them.

This also allows you to cut out boring stuff. If we stayed inside the whole time, we’d have to show The Janitor after he killed someone or washing his hands or doing other boring things. By occasionally cutting outside, we could cut back to the Janitor all set up in a new spot to clean. It’s an aspect of screenwriting I don’t talk about much because it’s unsexy. But the advantage of cutting away to anything is that you can then jump forward in time to a story-convenient plot point once you come back to your A-story.

The only thing I’d probably change here is to have a little more fun with the animals’ personalities. Each animal should have a distinct approach and style and way they talk. This is a stupid example but if there was someone named “Cheaty Cheetah,” he might talk really really fast. Disney movies are good at this. In Zootopia, there was that scene at the DMV and they were stuck with a sloth who spoke at -50 miles per hour. This is such an absurd premise that you might as well lean all the way into it.

Either way, I had a lot of fun with this and I hope they figure out a way to have midnight showings in Los Angeles because that is exactly how this movie is meant to be enjoyed.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Handicap your hero as the script goes on! Whether your hero is as capable as Denzel Washington in The Equalizer or as outmatched as Bruce Willis in Die Hard, look for ways to handicap them as the story goes on so that their job gets tougher. The tougher it is, the more we’ll doubt they can succeed. That’s where you want your audience. You want them thinking, “There’s NO WAY they can pull this off.”

Currently one of the best writers in town, Taylor Sheridan is back with another spec that’s expected to start a major franchise.

Genre: ACTION/CRIME
Premise: A former delta force operator is given a unique opportunity by the DEA to take down drug dealers without any oversight.
About: Can life get any better for Tyler Sheridan? The writer of Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Sicario 2, as well as writer-director of Wind River, recently moved into TV, where he took a project that wasn’t on anyone’s radar, Yellowstone, and turned it into a surprise hit. F.A.S.T doesn’t seem to be following the same narrative, unfortunately. Sheridan was in negotiations to direct it with Chris Pratt attached to star, but those negotiations broke down and the studio brought Gavin O’Connor onto the project. Since that point, it’s unclear if Pratt remains on F.A.S.T. But a new Sheridan spec is always a big deal so I’m excited to find out about it today.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: 132 pages

Will Pratt come back to the project?

I think Taylor Sheridan is one of the best writing successes of the last five years. There are hundreds of thousands of fellow actors writing screenplays. He rose above them all by putting emphasis on the things he knew best – character development and modernizing old-fashioned subject matter like cops and robbers.

The way breaking in works is that you go at screenwriting for a while until you finally write something that people like. Then everyone in Hollywood wants to work with you. Because you’ve been at this for so long, you have 2-3 scripts in the hopper that are almost there. These scripts allow you to keep the momentum going.

But once you get past those scripts, you’re writing from scratch. Now, theoretically, you’re a better writer so you should be able to write a good script faster. But the reality about screenwriting is that you need drafts. No matter how good you are, it takes half-a-dozen drafts before you even start to find your story. This is what famously happened during the writing of The Sixth Sense. That script started off about a boy who drew spooky images about a killer and ended up being about a kid who saw dead people and the psychologist who helped him.

All this is to say that the well appears to be drying up for Sheridan. His first couple of scripts were great. But Sicario 2 was a narrative mess. It was the first script where I thought, “He’s rushing this.” And I’m not mad. Look, you don’t know when the Hollywood truck of money no longer wants to pay you a visit. So you have to capitalize when you’re hot. But I’m worried that Sherdian may be biting more than he can chew. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Kyle is a former delta force operator in the Middle East. But ever since he’s been back in Baltimore, he can barely make ends meet. His wife and two kids are tired of living in a garbage tract house. If something doesn’t change soon, he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep it together.

One day while bringing his kids home from school, Kyle spots two skinheads – who live on his block no less – carrying his TV and furniture back to their house. Kyle has his kids wait at home then goes over to get his effing stuff back. As often happens with skinheads, things escalate, and within seconds, Kyle’s killed both of them.

Kyle calls his old commander, Sheel, who now works for the DEA, and Sheel comes over to help him clean up the mess. They learn that the skinheads were drug dealers in the area. In a roundabout way, they just helped the community.

This gives Sheel an idea. You see, it’s impossible to get anything done at the DEA. There’s a thousand miles of politics and red tape. So what if you just… didn’t have to worry about that? In the Middle East, the CIA used to run a program called “F.A.S.T.” that didn’t have any laws. If you wanted to take the bad guys out, you just went to their house and did it. Sheel wants to do the same thing, but for drugs. And he wants Kyle to run it. The upside is that Kyle gets any money he finds at the houses.

There are rules, though. You can’t kill anyone. You seize drugs and money and then leave. That’s going to require a very skilled team, Kyle says. “You can use anyone you want,” Sheel replies. Kyle gets some of his best men back together and after carefully prepping their plan, they begin their operation.

The first job goes so well that they keep doing them, and within a week, they’ve done more damage to the local drug trade than the DEA has in 10 years. They’re so good at what they do that word travels to the higher-ups, who want them to take on a higher profile job – IN TURKEY. The group is flown out to Turkey where they’re going to be facing the biggest drug kingpin in the entire country. Will they make it out alive? What do you think?

To answer my earlier question – Sheridan is back!

It’s hard to figure out exactly what Sheridan does better than everyone else. Because when you take a step back and look at his screenplays from afar, they don’t seem that special. They’re covering territory – SWAT, DEA, CIA – that are so often used in movies that they’ve become cliche. And yet he’s clearly better than everyone in this genre. So what’s his secret?

The answer very well may be in the opening scene. When I read any script where a character is a vet, they always have post-traumatic stress syndrome. They’re all having trouble adjusting back into society. The ubiquity of thier condition destroys any weight it may have. The only way you break through that wall is by individualizing the character’s experience. You give them something that sells their PTSD in a way that separates them from characters in other scripts. That separation is what makes us believe they’re real.

Here, Kyle is engaged in a therapy session with a military psychiatrist. She’s asking him how he’s been doing. Kyle is trying to say all the right things. But between answers, we’re getting quick flashbacks to his time in the Middle East. He’s inside a moving van where ISIS members are taping an attempt to decapitate him. He’s only barely able to get out alive. The psychiatrist asks another question. He answers with, “I’m fine,” and we get another flashback with him casually chatting with a soldier while walking through a city and then an IED evaporates his friend. Back to therapy.

There was something about this three-pronged attack of a therapist asking him questions, him denying anything was wrong, and a flashback that proved the opposite, that sold me that this was a real vet and not that paper-then “vet in name only” character I typically see in scripts. In other words, Sheridan finds a way to sell you on his characters so that you care more about what happens to them.

And he’s so smart about it. Like the way he updates old screenwriting tricks. “Save the Cat,” for instance. The idea behind saving the cat is to get your character to do something nice for/to someone and, once the audience sees that, they’ll like the character. The problem is most screenwriters’ approaches aren’t imaginative enough to create an authentic moment. They’ll just have the hero pass a homeless man five bucks and call it a day.

But Sheridan realizes that “saving the cat” is a much broader tip than merely being nice. It’s anything that makes us like the character. The “save the cat” moment in F.A.S.T. comes when Kyle is bringing his kids home and sees a couple of skinheads walking his TV and furniture back to their house. He puts his kids in a safe room under his garage and walks over, puts a gun to the skinhead’s face, and tells him they’re going to pick everything back up and walk it right back to his house.

The reason we like this is obvious when you think about it. Skinheads are bad. We don’t like people who take our stuff. And therefore, we love anyone who’s willing to stand up to those people. Because, in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to do that. This man represents who we wish we could be.

There’s nothing you can do in a script that pays more dividends than a character people love. You could be an average writer but if you’re great at that one skill, you can go a long way in this business.

The other thing Sheridan does that makes him different is he finds these little cracks inside well-known subject matter and builds stories around them. So he doesn’t just tell a story about the CIA. Or the DEA. He creates a division within them – a totally new type of team that does a very specific job in “F.A.S.T.” You might be sensing a theme here. Sheridan looks for small ways to make his script different than all the other scripts out there. He knows that generic won’t cut it.

Problems? Sheridan sometimes adds one extra plot beat late in the second act that draws the narrative out too long. He did this with Sicario 2 and he’s doing it here as well. Late-story pacing is crucial to driving a script home. If you linger too long in plotlines that don’t matter, you risk the audience’s attention drifting away like dandelion strands on a late August afternoon. That’s the section you gotta keep tight and, despite its title, F.A.S.T. feels slow in that area.

Still, this fortifies Sheridan as one of, if not THE, top gun in this genre. I can’t think of any other writer who does it better in 2019. Can you?

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Dealing with emotion in screenwriting is challenging. It’s easy to oversell it, and when that happens, the moment feels cliché or on-the-nose. When I read the line, “A single tear falls down his/her cheek,” in a script, I literally throw up inside of my mouth. Which is why I’m happy to show you someone who tackles this issue successfully. Here, Kyle is being interviewed by a therapist and she gives him a rorschach test and asks what he sees. He struggles to come up with an answer, and then Sheridan writes this: “He stares at it and smiles, as his eyes well with tears ….” Why is this better than “a single tear falls down his cheek?” Because the reaction is more complex. He smiles WHILE fighting tears away. There’s contrast in reaction (two contrasting things are going on at once) which is way more honest, and therefore, a lot more authentic.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who sent a submission in for Halloween Amateur Showdown. I got a lot more submssions than I thought I would.

BUT!!!

I have to take a moment to plug my logline service (e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline” for a consult). So many of these submissions shot themselves in the foot due to terrible loglines with fixable issues. If you’ve never received instruction on how to properly write a logline, you should seriously consider a consult. The basic option is just $25 and the deluxe is $40. And, trust me, you’ll have a much better feel for how to properly write a logline after you get one.

Moving on. I tried to vary the TYPES of horror scripts as much as possible. That way we didn’t get 5 contained horror movies. So that may have been why your script didn’t get chosen. Other reasons your script didn’t get picked: There were a lot of loglines that weren’t clear. Some that were too outlandish. Some that sounded so simplistic I thought they were a joke (“A man believes he’s living in a haunted house and recruits his family to help him”). Some that were embarrassingly general (“A group of friends head out to a remote setting and, fearing an unspeakable evil, prepare to face it while also battling demons within.”). Some that sounded too similar to recent entries. And some that may have appealed to others but simply weren’t my jam.

What follows are the pitches that rose to the top.

Amateur Showdown is a single weekend tournament where the scripts have been vetted from a pile of hundreds to be featured here, for your entertainment. It’s up to you to read as much of each script as you can, then vote for your favorite in the comments section. Whoever receives the most votes by Sunday 11:59pm Pacific Time gets a review next Friday.

Got a great script that you believe can pummel four fellow amateurs? Send a PDF to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Title: Genesis
Genre: Creature Horror
Logline: Trapped in a mountain resort by a parasitic fungus that transforms its victims into deadly hosts, a timid CDC epidemiologist must learn to lead the group of mismatched survivors to escape this primordial terror.
Why You Should Read: After my last entry on the site, “The Crooked Tree,” was selected for a previous Amateur Showdown, I received invaluable feedback from the readers that I applied to my latest effort, “Genesis,” which explores the consequences of genetically-altering Mother Nature. Drawing inspiration from a slew of 80s classics, my career as a Registered Nurse, and a few real-life scientific oddities, I crafted a unique creature-feature that serves as my love letter to this subgenre. I hope my entry impresses you enough to select it for a coveted spot in this year’s Halloween Showdown!

Title: Street View
Genre: Horror/Found Footage
Logline: When a Google Street View driver unknowingly captures footage of a murder on a desolate highway, she must figure out what she has and who wants it before she becomes the next victim.
Why You Should Read: Why you should read it: Causeway Films in my native Australia (The Babadook, The Nightingale) recently broke their rule about not accepting unsolicited scripts after my pitch to them but provided only brief feedback about why they ultimately opted against adding it to their upcoming slate, so I believe I’m close enough that the Carson words of wisdom can hone it into something that I can get made. I feel it has the commercial appeal of the found footage/horror genre but also delves into deeper themes regarding the increasing privacy intrusions of big tech in our lives and the increasing divisions between people (particularly city and rural) that stem largely from Big Tech-facilitated ideological echo chambers. The Street View car driving through forgotten towns strikes me as the perfect embodiment of these themes. I’ve also had the awkward conversation of requesting the use of a rural property belonging to a friend of mine to film a home invasion scene where my friend had previously been a victim of a home invasion at that property! I think that chutzpah alone deserves a read. Also, this is the real camera used to take street view photos. The horror practically writes itself!

Title: POSSESSIONS
Genre: Supernatural Horror
Logline: An estranged daughter returns to her childhood home to help with her mother’s extreme hoarding only to discover her mother cursed by one of her many, many possessions.
Why You Should Read: Way back in December (Re: The Interventionist) you asked if anyone had done a hoarder horror movie. And then your review of 10/31 had a hoarder house in it and I was like, damn, I better finish my horror feature already! So after months of it sitting there waiting for it to be rewritten (again), I dug down and got to it. Gone is the Dead Kid Backstory in favor of a story more focused on a woman learning to take care of her aging mother… who happens to be possessed. Yay! I welcome any Marie Kondo / KonMari method jokes. Enjoy!

Title: Catharsis (note to writer: you need to retitle this, “Rage Room”)
Genre: Social Horror
Logline: Following a traumatic incident in a rage room, a spineless office worker develops strength and self-confidence — and an insatiable, murderous aggression that threatens to take over.
Why You Should Read: Rage rooms are simple: pay a small fee to occupy a room for 10-20 minutes and SMASH THE FUCKING SHIT out of mundane, breakable objects. With methods of choice ranging from baseball bats with home run dreams to sledgehammers that have never met something they couldn’t pulverize, you can customize your destruction of plates, printers, and other office or domestic fodder to your heart’s blood-pumping delight. All in the name of “self-care.”

In our current socio-economic and political climate, our globe is warming up to rage rooms in nearly 30 countries, with the US of A boasting 250+ locations that have increased exponentially in the last five years. The real kicker? The pursuit of catharsis often recycles its initial stimulants of stress and aggression. Meaning… this trend ain’t going anywhere soon. And just like escape rooms, you are trying to solve a puzzle: “What do I have to destroy to create a little peace and quiet?”

With this “Catharsis,” great power comes with great responsibility to gain more power, even if the objects in the way are made of flesh and bone. A good horror story should tackle relevant subject matter or universal fears or the dark symptoms of the human condition. Or, hey — crack open this PDF and try to find all three!

Title: INFANT
Genre: Horror
Logline: A sadistic rapist/murderer is captured by a quartet of women and infantized (shaved, crippled so he’s forced to crawl, diaper, etc) in order to re-educate him on how to treat women and act in society but the women instead use him for their own dark psychological needs until one decides they’ve gone too far and plots to free him.
Why You Should Read: INFANT is a proton torpedo into the Death Star of current society that was influenced by Frederick Friedel, Canucksploitation movies like CANNIBAL GIRLS and DEATH WEEKEND and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.

Genre: Time Loop
Premise: A retired U.S. Army Special Forces veteran finds himself stuck inside the same day where a group of assassins hunt him down and kill him.
About: This script was originally written by Chris and Eddie Borey, who have a knack for high-concept ideas. Their last film, Open Grave, was about a man who “wakes up in the wilderness, in a pit full of dead bodies, with no memory and must determine if the murderer is one of the strangers who rescued him, or if he himself is the killer.” Writer-director Joe Carnahan got his paws on the script and decided to make it. But as one of the best writing directors our there, he gave it the Carnahan rewrite special. The film will star Mel Gibson, Ken Jeong, Frank Grillo, and Naomi Watts.
Writer: Joe Carnahan (original script by Chris and Eddie Borey)
Details: 118 pages

It’s official. Time Loop is a genre.

I still don’t know how this happened but I’m not mad. So far, the format has withstood all the excess use. The most recent time-loop project, Netflix’s Russian Doll, was nominated for an Emmy.

The rules for getting these movies right are the same as they are with any genre. You must answer the question, “What new are you bringing to the table?”

Former Special Forces soldier Roy calmly explains to us in voice over why it’s so easy to kill this trained assassin who’s woken him and his one-night stand up by trying to stab Roy in his face. Ya see, Roy explains, he keeps waking up on the same day – today – with this man trying to kill him. And when he kills this man and the Matrix-like helicopter with the Gatling gun that follows, he runs outside where a woman named Pam starts shooting at him from a car.

He must carjack a car from a man who always screams, “He’s carjacking me!” and if he’s able to outrun Pam, he runs into a sword-smith, Guan-Yin. If he can somehow defeat her, he goes to a local bar and drinks. That’s because no matter what Roy does or where he goes, assassins never stop coming after him until he’s dead. He’s never even reached noon. This is the one place where he has about an hour before they find and kill him. Then his day starts all over again.

How did we get here? We get some insight into that when we jump to yesterday and meet Jia, Roy’s ex-wife and the mother of his son. Jia is a scientist who works at an experimental company called Dynow. Jia is working on a doomsday device for her scary boss, Colonel Clive Ventor. Ventor is getting angry that he’s poured all this money into this project and the device STILL isn’t working. He tells Jia that if she doesn’t figure it out fast, there will be consequences.

Roy knows nothing about all that. In fact, Jia is killed by Ventor before loop day so he can’t call her and ask what’s going on. One morning he decides to look into an old theory – that they’ve hidden a tracking device on him. But he’s never been able to find it. So he goes to a friend who knows about this stuff and asks him where he’d put a tracking device if he wanted to track someone. The guy says, “in your teeth.” Roy says, “Can you check my teeth for me?” “No,” his friend says. “I’d need to see each tooth separately.” So Roy grabs a pair of pliers and proceeds to rip each of his teeth out one by one until they finally find out that, yes, one of his teeth has a tracking device in it.

Armed with this info, Roy can get rid of the tracking device every morning, and now has the drop on all his assassins. He can simply plant the tooth, wait for them to show up, and kill them from behind. But Roy needs to do more than that if he’s ever going to escape this time loop. So he infiltrates Dynow, convinced they’re somehow responsible, where he discovers the doomsday device. Armed only with a secret message Jia told him “yesterday,” he must destroy the device and restore time to its rightful state.

I love me some Joe Carnahan. His scripts almost make me uncomfortable with how confidently they’re written. The guy is the screenwriting equivalent of an alpha gorilla. He plows through the page and all we can do is hold onto the edge and hope we don’t fall off.

Boss Level is a natural fit for him. This is a guy who loves tough colorful characters who shoot big, fight bigger, and talk biggest. He gets to do all of that here but inside a time loop scenario. This adds a level of sophistication to the story that Carnahan sometimes seems uninterested in. Boss Level keeps you thinking while you’re enjoying all the action making the script work like one of those dual level bridges.

Like every writer should, Carnahan deviates from the time-loop formula to add a new layer to the story. Right after the first act, Carnahan cuts to “yesterday.” This allows us to meet Roy and Jia before all of this went down, as well as get some context on what Jia did and how her company is connected to all this.

Without this foray, the script would’ve gotten repetitive, one of the biggest pitfalls in the time-loop genre. Once we jump back into Roy’s loop, we’re now seeing it through a different set of eyes. We know some things he doesn’t, which means we’re more invested in him fighting off these bad guys so he can find that information and use it to get out of this.

There’s one scene in particular I want to highlight because it’s one of the most memorable scenes in the script. That would be the scene where Roy proceeds to take pliers and pull each and every one of his teeth out so that his friend can inspect them for bugs.

Why do I like this scene? BECAUSE I’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE. In fact, I’ve never seen anything like it at all. And I have tons of admiration for any writer who comes up with an original scene. Seeing as you’re competing against millions of movies to find something different, doing so is almost impossible. And most writers give up. Which is why most movies blow. Writers don’t want to put the effort in to find original scenes.

So how do you find these chupacabra scenes? Is it impossible? No. Not if you use something called “conceptual sequencing.” Conceptual sequencing is an A++ advanced screenwriting technique that only a few people know about. But I’m going to share it with you today.

I’m just kidding. I made that name up. It sounded cool though, right? But the technique is real. To find original scenes, you must IDENTIFY WHAT IT IS ABOUT YOUR CONCEPT THAT IS UNIQUE. Why? Because when you’re trying to find ideas that haven’t been in any other of the 10 million movies, you’ll always fail. But if you only try to find ideas that are original to THE TIME LOOP CONCEPT, it all of a sudden gets easier. They’ve only made 30 of these. You can come up with a scene that hasn’t been in 30 movies.

The trick is to then go into every scene and ask, “How can I use time looping to make this scene different?” Often, you won’t be able to come up with anything. And that’s fine. Not every scene needs to be unique. Just one every once in a while. In the tooth pull out scene, we had a character who suspected that the bad guys had planted a tracker in his tooth. Now the obvious scene here would’ve been to go to a dentist and have the dentist inspect his teeth for the tracker. Only problem with that? IT SOUNDS BORING!!!

So you ask the question, “How can I use time looping to make this scene different?” Well, Roy is going to die in an hour anyway. He doesn’t need his teeth. Especially because he gets them back when he wakes up tomorrow anyway. So he wouldn’t waste any time. He would just start yanking his teeth out right there. And that’s how you find your original scene.

To summarize: If you’re writing a script properly, there should be something about your concept that’s unique. Use that unique quality to find original scenes. If you write enough of these original scenes, your script isn’t going to feel like anything else out there, which means it will STAND OUT.

Another thing that’s cool about this script is that it has a good ending (spoilers follow). This is important because when you’re playing with high concepts, especially concepts that play with time, you’re expected to write a clever ending. It would be weird if you didn’t. So late in the movie, Roy figures out that Ventor didn’t kill his wife last night, like he’d always assumed. He killed her this morning. Exactly 14 minutes after Roy woke up. But Roy never knew that because for the first 14 minutes of his day, he was always running from crazed assassins.

Once he realizes that his ex-wife was killed 14 minutes after he woke up, he has a goal. He must somehow get to Dynow, infiltrate the company and all its security, then get to and kill Ventor, ALL WITHIN 14 MINUTES. It creates the perfect impossible ticking time bomb ending for a movie.

I really liked Boss Level. I probably would’ve given it a higher rating if this was one of the first time loop scripts. But I have to dock it a few points for being in a genre that’s grown ubiquitous.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: When writing character descriptions, use words that have a dual-purpose. They’re both visual AND tell us who the person is. Carnahan is great with character descriptions. Here’s one for Ventor’s co-worker. “Ventor reaches toward BRETT, an overly tan, tribal-barb tatted, squared-jawed juicehead and his second-in-command.” Notice how these words achieve two things. “overly tan.” We can visualize that and imagine the kind of person who chooses to be overly tan. “tribal-barb tatted.” Again, a good visual and there’s a certain kind of person who likes tribal-barb tattooes. Even “juicehead,” while not directly visual, gives us a visual and tells us who we’re dealing with. So make sure you’re using two-in-one adjectives to elevate your character descriptions.

Genre: Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) A group of friends travels to Sweden to attend a reclusive mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
About: Writer/Director Ari Aster was anointed to “next big thing” status when his intense not-for-everyone film, Hereditary, became indie studio A24’s biggest movie ever. Aster didn’t waste any time, using the buzz to launch his next project, Midsommar, immediately. The film didn’t perform as well as hoped, making $27 million domestically compared to Hereditary’s $44 million. Still, Aster’s now loyal following loved it, and it’s expected to do very well on digital.
Writer: Ari Aster
Details: 150 minutes!

I resisted seeing this when it came out because it was written and directed by Ari Aster, the writer of the worst screenplay ever, Hereditary.

But conflict lives deep within my heart as I’ve always wanted a great modern day horror film about cults. And while I despised the screenplay for Hereditary, I had to admit its trailer exhibited a talented directing eye. Then Martin Scorsese spent 30 minutes of a recent Q&A talking about how much he loved Hereditary and I finally said, “You know what. I’m going to see if this guy learned anything about screenwriting since his last film,” and popped Midsommar into the old Apple TV.

The premise for the film is a simple one. A 20-something girl, Dani, loses her sister to suicide. Incidentally, the carbon monoxide she used to kill herself also leaked into her parents’ room and killed them too. So Dani is one family down.

Her grad school boyfriend, Christian, is tagging along with his Swedish friend, Pelle, and a couple of other guys, to check out a mid-summer festival in Pelle’s rural Swedish village. Dani decides to join them and off they go.

There’s a strong Heaven’s Gate vibe to the white-clothed hippy community and yet nobody thinks to turn and leave. They can’t, of course, or else there would be no movie.

The people there seem nice (don’t they always), and invite everyone to a ceremony where two elders are brought to an overarching cliff to speak to everyone. Except they don’t say a word. They JUMP! And die. Splat.

In real life, our characters would sprint to the nearest airfield and stow away in the landing gear if it got them away from this psychotic Swedish Manson cult. But no, our characters choose to stay and see what these wily Swedes are up to next. Naturally, these things turn out to be nefarious and one by one, our characters die in awful ways.

Before we get to the script stuff, lots of people were surprised that this film didn’t do as well as Hereditary. Yet the reason is simple: It’s hard to pull horror off in the daylight. You can do it with zombies. But you can’t do it with much else.

The reason horror works so well is because the darkness activates the imagination. It offloads the work from the movie to the viewer. They get to fill in their own fears with what’s in the corner of the dark room, what’s at the bottom of the dark basement stairway, who that shadow belongs to at the end of the dark hallway.

You don’t get any of that with daylight. So you have to find your horror elsewhere, and that can be challenging. So when you see this big bright movie that’s being advertised as a horror film, it’s confusing. And people aren’t going to show up to confusing. They want a good idea of what they’re walking into.

Now from a cinematic perspective, Aster’s choice is exciting. There’s irony in the search for fear in daylight. And outside of some annoying directing choices, Misommar works. That’s because every viewer knows this place is bad news. So as long as you keep a log on the fire for the next looming threat, we’re going to be into it.

Surprisingly, the thing that makes Aster a bad writer also helps him. When your narratives are weak and unfocused, as both this and Hereditary are, it gives the story a natural unpredictability. If you’re not following any common act or scene beats, we’re not going to know what’s coming next. And that’s why I kept watching. I had no idea where this was going.

Aster also put a lot of work into the mythology of this village and it paid off. I trusted that whenever something happened that was tied to this place’s weird rules, it was authentic, because I could tell Aster did his homework. I mean there’s a giant barn where the entire inside is covered in a historic mural of this clan’s history. You can’t make that sort of thing up on the fly. You have to know it and convey it to the art department.

Which is what makes this movie so frustrating. If Aster took some time to learn screenwriting, he would be unstoppable. Cause as a visual storyteller, he’s quite talented.

To give you an idea of what I mean by bad writing, Christian comes up to one of the friends after the two elders kill themselves and tells him he wants to write his thesis paper on this clan. The friend gets mad, replying, “I told you already. I was writing my thesis about this place!” Not only did I have no idea that either of these two were writing theses before this moment. But I didn’t even know they were in school. That’s how poor the writing was. We’d find out major story components after the fact.

There were all sorts of character issues here. Why doesn’t Pelle warn his best friends that they’re about to watch two people kill themselves? Why wouldn’t he brace them for that? Tell them that if it’s too much, they might want to sit the ceremony out? I’ll tell you why. Because if he did, Aster wouldn’t have been able to write the scene.

A bad writer says, “Well I’m just going to do it anyway.” A good writer says, “I have to figure out a believable way in which he wouldn’t tell them.” Why do bad writers always go with the former? Because it’s eaasssssyyyyyieeer!! It’s easier not to do the work! Are you telling me I may have to sit down several hours a day for a few days until I come up with a believable reason for why my character wouldn’t warn his friends about this? Screw that. It’ll take too long!

But I think Aster’s taught me the secret to getting these daytime horror movies right. Just follow two rules. One, be weird. Be really really weird. You don’t have the darkness to hide behind so, instead, have a bunch weird crap happen. This is why Wicker Man is still the champion of this sub-genre. You’d have little kids joyously singing about sex through choreographed dances. Or naked women singing about boning you while banging on the other side of your hotel room wall.

The other tool to use is shock. And this is something Aster is becoming known for. I mean he killed a main family member in his last film by having her stick her head out the window and get it decapitated by a telephone pole. Watching an uninterrupted shot of a woman jumping to her death and her head splattering over a rock in real-time certainly jolted me awake.

Now Aster just needs to figure out character. I had no idea who Christian was throughout this. None. Is he a good boyfriend who will do anything for Dani? Is he a bad boyfriend who takes her for granted? Every scene would vacillate between those two extremes to ensure that you never knew the guy.

Seasoned screenwriters know that if a character is unclear, you go back to their introductory scene and you use that scene to make it abundantly clear who the character is. When we meet the Joker, what is he doing? He’s looking in a mirror desperately trying to squeeze his lips into a smile. I know more in three seconds of that scene about that character than I do about Christian from watching this entire movie. That says something.

I’m going to log this as a step forward for Aster. It’s more interesting than Hereditary. And I watched til the end, which says a lot since this is 150 minutes. But keep working on your writing man. Or find a screenwriter you connect with. That could really skyrocket your career.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the rental
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Here’s a simple test to see if your characters are acting realistic or not. If you were in their shoes, would you do it? If you had just watched two people jump to their death in a pagan ritual, would you stay for another three days? Or would you leave? If the answer is leave (which it is), then you need to come up with a realistic reason why the characters would stay. (This is why so many horror films have their characters stuck somewhere. That way, they never have to worry about this question)