What I want my trick-or-treat bag to look like…
You knew it was coming.
It’s time, once again, to piece through some of the loglines that didn’t make the cut for Halloween Logline Showdown and discuss why they didn’t make it. When it comes to loglines, there are some common mistakes that are made. But the most common is that the writer doesn’t know how to structure the logline. So it feels more like a wandering thought than a movie with direction. As always, you can get help. I do logline consults for $25. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
In fact, the logline that won the voting last week, Last to Live, was one I helped the writer with. Well that’s not fair, Carson! You’re just rewarding people for buying your service! Actually, no. I did not include Last to Live in the showdown. It was only after Alex posted it in the comments and started getting a lot of positive reaction that I retroactively placed it in the competition. The point is, you want to put your best foot forward. Let’s find out why these other loglines didn’t make the list so that you can improve your own loglines moving forward.
Title: The Hot Kills
Genre: Slasher
Logline: In the sweaty, sultry summer of 1982 in New York City, a tight-knit gang of punk rockers on their way to an underground show are stalked by an obsessed killer.
Analysis: There’s something to this idea. But it struck me as one of those “almost there” concepts. I even wrote the writer and told him there was something missing. You always need at least one element in your logline to stand out. Something original. Cause that’s the thing that separates your script from all the other scripts. What’s the stand-out element here? 1982 New York City is more original than modern day. But is it enough to get me to read the script? The punk rockers? Yeah, that’s sort of unique. But again, there are shades of gray to this stuff. It’s never as simple as “good element/bad element.” Sometimes an element is decent but if it’s not paired up with a bigger element, it may not be enough to strike the potential reader’s interest. Then you have the ending. “Obsessed killer” is such a boring way to describe the antagonist. But the real real REAL problem here is the dynamic. You have four punk rockers, who, from my knowledge of punk, are usually pretty tough guys. And ONE KILLER??? Why would these guys be scared??? To make a horror movie work, your hero has to seem outgunned, not have the clear advantage.
Title: Tomb
Genre:Horror
Logline: When desperate thieves who yearn for a fresh start discover a fountain of youth in a house where a gruesome crime occurred, they must escape before terrifying wrathful ghosts trap them forever.
Analysis: This is one of those loglines where, immediately after I read it, I had to go back and read it again to fully understand it. That’s a bad sign. I don’t think the logline is bad. I just think there’s a bit too much going on. You have thieves who, presumably, are robbing a house. That’s one element. They discover a fountain of youth. That’s another element. A gruesome crime. Third element. Wrathful ghosts. Fourth element. And maybe even a fifth element since the ghosts want to trap them there forever. That’s a lot going on and I just think it could’ve been simplified. Also, something about this fountain of youth isn’t gelling with wrathful ghosts for me. I’m sure it makes sense within the context of the script. But in logline form, they don’t naturally work well off each other. One idea to make this concept better would be to organically link the protagonists to the concept. For example, if these were desperate 70-year-old thieves, now the fountain of youth feels more relevant. As constructed, the idea doesn’t feel cohesive enough.
Title: BASKEL VILLAGE
Genre: Horror
Logline: A young Marine and his badly burnt little Brother have been sent to Baskel Village, Maine for treatment. Tunnels under this abandoned ski town have a miraculous way of healing ghastly wounds if one can walk through them three times. A secret government facility has been set up to help soldiers accomplish this feat except… No one has ever made it through. A CURE FOR WELLNESS meets BARBARIAN with a dash of INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE.
Analysis: I wanted to include this one despite it being such a beginner logline because a lot of writers are making similar mistakes. At most, your logline should be two sentences. It should never be three. And 97% of the time, it should be one sentence. That mistake alone dooms you. But also, you’ve got too much going on here. Figure out what the real hook is and build your logline around that. The “hook” seems to be these healing tunnels. So write one sentence centered around healing tunnels. “Two badly injured marines try and make it through the infamous Baskel Tunnel, which is said to have incredible healing powers, if you can make it to the end…” Even cleaned up though, I don’t see enough of a marketable concept here. It feels too obscure. Oh, and never reference a movie that did poorly at the box office (Cure For Wellness) when pitching your material!
Title: No Body Recovered
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Logline: Following a police raid on his homeless encampment in rural Oregon, a wounded man, desperate to find refuge and start his life anew, agrees to stay with a local fisherman — unaware that his new host harbors ulterior, sinister motives…
Analysis: The first part of this logline sort of caught my interest. Again, I want to emphasize that the acceptance or rejection of a logline occurs on a scale. It’s not always “DEFINITELY YES” or “DEFINITELY NO.” Oftentimes, I struggle with how much I like an idea. In the end, I simply ask, “Do I want to open the script?” If the answer is yes, I know that there’s more good than bad. So this starts out good. Homelessness is very topical on the West Coast right now. But then we take a hard left turn into this fisherman, who comes out of nowhere. That was jarring to me. How are we all of a sudden in a fishing movie? Remember, you started out in “rural” Oregon. No lakes or oceans have been mentioned (I’m imagining trees). But the nail in the coffin was “ulterior sinister motives.” These are platitudes and they mean nothing to script readers. You need to be detailed. You need to tell us what the motives are if you want us to request the script.
Title: Give It Your All
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a German fitness guru returns from the dead and curses his laziest ex-clients to walk forever without rest, two of his fangirls must overcome their cult-like brainwashing to save their hexed pregnant friend before the baby arrives.
Analysis: The first mistake here is not including “Comedy-Horror” as the genre. I mean, I’m hoping to death it’s a comedy. Cause if you’re starting your logline out with, “When a German fitness guru returns from the dead and curses his laziest ex-clients to walk forever without rest…” and it’s not a comedy? You are living in a different reality than the rest of us. But even if the comedy label was clearly assigned, this script does a 180 in its second half that feels completely detached from what had been set up. People, the elements in your logline have to organically connect. If we’re in rural tree-laden Oregon, why are we all of a sudden hanging out with fishermen? If we’re dealing with a demon German fitness guru who’s forcing his clients to run, why are we all of a sudden dealing with a pregnancy? Sometimes I don’t think writers are able to see their loglines objectively. Cause if they did, they’d clearly see that these two halves are not connected. They sound like two different movies.
Title: Not Alone
Genre: Horror (Found Footage)
Logline: A contestant on a popular survival competition show goes missing and when her footage is recovered, it’s revealed that a strange breed may have turned her into prey.
Analysis: I’m trying to come up with an acronym for loglines like this. I’m favoring, “2VNC,” which stands for Too Vague Needs Context. A “strange breed” is so vague I’m not even sure what to do with it. A strange breed of what? Aren’t there hundreds of thousands of animal breeds on this planet? And then you have this rather mundane climax. “Turned her into prey.” It feels way too basic. Again, you need that standout element that’s going to sell your concept. Maybe the ‘breed’ part of this logline is the standout element, if it’s some cool unique monster. But that needs to be included in the logline if you want people to request the script. You can’t hide it.
Title: Doomsday (Pilot)
Genre: Conspiracy Thriller
Pilot Logline: Five years after the United States and Russia engaged in a nuclear war, a freelance journalist seeks the aid of a former White House Communications Director in proving a vast conspiracy behind the decision to launch the warheads.
Analysis: This is a good example of the importance of seeing challenges down the road before you start writing a script and deciding whether those challenges are worth it. Cause when you read this logline, it doesn’t make sense. “Five years after the United States and Russia engaged in a nuclear war, a freelance journalist…”. No no no no no. There is no freelance journalist after the United States and Russia engaged in a nuclear war. There is NOBODY after the United States and Russia engaged in a nuclear war. And definitely not five short years later. But let’s just say that the writer has a good reason for why society still exists after a superpower nuclear war. Maybe only 3 or 4 nukes were launched, for example, before they were able to stop a full-out nuke launch. Well, unless you can easily explain that in your logline, you’re never going to get any requests. Cause everyone’s going to react the same way I did. “How is there still a functioning society after the U.S. and Russia engage in a nuclear war?” If you don’t have a plan for how you’re going to answer the tough questions your specific idea creates, it may not be worth it to write the script in the first place.
Title: Dark Frost
Genre: Horror
Logline: A crowd phobic woman becomes the lone winterkeeper at Glacier National Park in order to escape society, but must fight her way back to the world when a pack of nocturnal creatures emerges from the mountains, determined to kill every living thing in their path.
Analysis: This logline starts out clunky right away. “Crowd phobic.” It’s an unappetizing way to describe your protagonist. The idea itself isn’t bad. But when it comes to concepts like these, I’m looking for clever connections between the elements. I don’t like when the elements feel isolated from one another. We have this winter-centric National Park backdrop for a horror film. So my mind is in “cold” mode. Then we have “nocturnal creatures” as our main antagonists. So we’ve gone from a story that seemed like it was going to focus on the unique element of cold, and just threw in some night creatures? Where’s the clever connection? In the Vin Diesel movie, Pitch Black, the nocturnal creatures were a more organic part of the story because this planet only experienced night once every hundred years. So when night unexpectedly came and the nocturnal creatures arrived, it felt like one cohesive narrative that had been carefully set up. This does not feel like that.
Title: Night at The Morgue
Genre: Horror / Comedy
Logline: A female med student on her first night on the job at the morgue, befriends a ghost. The vampires, werewolves, zombies and tentacled Cthulhu monster who attack her that first night insist that ghosts aren’t real.
Analysis: I get quite a bit of entries like this one, where I don’t even know what I read, to the point where I’m not sure how I would critique the logline. Besides the confusing premise, where’s the conflict? It sounds to me like this script follows a med student sitting at a table with her monster friends for 90 minutes and they tease her for seeing a ghost. I’m not sure how that’s a movie.
Title: THREE BAD SEEDS
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A teen orphan and her two friends invade the home of the man she believes got away with murdering her mother ten years ago and try to coerce a confession out of him.
Analysis: I wanted to finish off by critiquing one of Brett’s entries. He’s always such a cool positive guy that I wanted him to know why this didn’t make it. Simply put, there’s no special attractor here. There’s a personal element, as the protagonists are confronting the person who murdered one of their moms. But it’s just not an original enough setup to get me to request the script. I know Brett also submitted his fumigator entry. The reason I haven’t picked that one for any of the showdowns is because when I think “fumigation,” I think comedy. And the script is always pitched as straight horror (or thriller). Brett, get the 5 logline evals for $75 deal and I’ll tell you which script you should write next. For that matter, if any of you are tired of sending loglines out that never get script requests, it may be that you’re picking weak concepts. Figure out a great concept BEFORE you write the script and then you can write the script knowing that, when you finish, people are going to read it. 5 loglines for $75 deal is live for the weekend. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
Look, picking a good concept is hard. That’s not a mystery. Even when we learn the difference between good and bad ideas, we still fall in love with unmarketable movie ideas because we have some personal connection to them, making it hard to be objective. Just make sure you’re all getting feedback, preferably BEFORE you write the script, not after.
Join me tomorrow for the winning logline script review: When six influencers perform a stunt that inadvertently kills the daughter of a cartel boss, he forces them to undertake a deadly series of their own YouTube challenges. SAW meets MR BEAST
