Today’s writer bets that a very unlikely combo can win over the site’s host. He’s got an uphill battle. Can he pull it off??

Genre: Horror
Premise: In the aftermath of a city’s comprehensive AI program experiencing an identity crisis and believing it to be a vampire, a group of resistance fighters with the reluctant expertise of a psychologist try to take back their wrecked and traumatized city.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me horror movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, sold! Today’s script was voted in by you, the readers of the site.
Writer: Randy Williams
Details: 85 pages

Today’s screenplay is a good example of why, for the High Concept contest, I took over all selection duties.

I didn’t think this concept should’ve made it into the contest. I’ve read the logline quite a few times and I still don’t completely understand it.

The “loglines are pointless” argument I always hear from writers is that a screenplay gives them more room. They have more words, more scenes, more time to explain the things they couldn’t squeeze into a logline. And I understand that to a degree. A logline can’t explain every detail of your movie. But it should communicate the central idea in a way that both makes sense AND gives us a sense of the movie we’re about to watch. If the logline doesn’t meet that criteria, you’re usually in a lot of trouble before you’ve even written “FADE IN.”

With this one, we have an AI program that thinks it’s a vampire. I immediately get stuck on that. The defining thing about vampires is that they drink blood. An AI program doesn’t even have a body. So you’ve taken the thing we most associate with vampires off the table, and I’m left wondering what being a vampire actually means in this movie.

Now, I’m writing all this before I’ve read the screenplay. As always, I will root for myself to be wrong. But I don’t think I’ll be.

Our story appears to take place in the near future in a town called Glumford, where an artificial intelligence has taken control of the town. The twist? The AI believes it’s a vampire. It drugs blood donors to keep them coming back. Meanwhile, loyal citizens have their teeth sharpened to demonstrate allegiance to their overlord.

A group of rebels kidnaps psychologist Dr. Lauren Saulk, hoping she can talk the AI out of its vampire identity. The group is led by former cop Waltham and includes Elita, whose sister died from contaminated blood, and Nelson, whose teenage daughter, Katy, has disappeared. Elderly computer whizzes Esther and Luther sneak Lauren into city hall, where AI Dracula resides.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn how these people became involved in the resistance. We also discover that Katy recorded a vampire audiobook for the library. Because the AI’s biggest fear is death, it loved the idea of vampires, since they cannot die.

Lauren’s therapy session ends up being a decoy. While she confronts the AI, Waltham and the team launch a separate mission to blow the local power plant up. Can Lauren get through to a machine that thinks it’s Dracula, or will the rebels have to pull the plug themselves?

I’m going to be blunt here folks. Because you know I always am.

The readers of the site let Randy down.

The thing I talk about more than anything on Scriptshadow is the importance of the concept. It doesn’t have to be the greatest movie idea in the world. But it has to be solid enough that you can build a movie around it. Before you commit months of your life to writing a screenplay, you need to know that the foundation can support the thing you’re building.

Look at Obsession. A friend-zoned guy wishes that the girl he loves would love him back. His wish comes true. But her love becomes a terrifying obsession. Simple. Clear. “Be careful what you wish for.” You hear that premise and immediately understand how it can sustain a movie.

With Glumford, I had the opposite reaction. I read the logline and saw all the places where the idea could go wrong. I couldn’t even confidently picture what the movie was going to be (does the AI place fangs on all of its servers?). And that’s why this is so frustrating. The entire reason I created these pitch contests was to address this problem. Let’s make sure the idea works BEFORE you spend six months on it.

If we vote somebody in because we like the writer, or because we want to encourage them, without honestly assessing whether their idea can work, what have we accomplished? We’re setting them up for this very moment, where we say this script never had a chance.

Ironically, buried somewhere inside Glumford is a narrative that might’ve worked. Something powerful and dangerous is hurting people so a group of rebels bands together to stop it. Plenty of successful movies have been built around that setup.

But the vampire angle makes everything so bizarre that I spent much of the script asking, “What am I actually reading?”

We have an artificial intelligence that apparently believes it’s a vampire. Okay. Then we have people breaking into a blood bank and drinking blood. Wait. I thought the AI believed it was a vampire. Do the citizens think they’re vampires too now? Are they actual vampires? Are they pretending? What are the rules here?

Then you have the flashbacks.

Please, people, stay the hell away from flashbacks unless they are absolutely essential to telling your story. They are diabolical little momentum killing gremlins. You finally get your movie moving and then you slam on the brakes every few scenes to go backwards. BACKWARDS!

Let me be very clear: 99.9% OF THE TIME IN SCREENWRITING – BACKWARDS = BAD!!!!

I understand the intention. Randy wants these characters to have personal reasons for fighting.

But here’s the thing. One of the most difficult things to create in storytelling is MOMENTUM. People get bored fast. Therefore, momentum is EVERYTHING. I know writers who would cut off toes if it guaranteed their stories consistent momentum.

The reality is, whatever momentum you think you have in your story, it’s probably not even close to what you actually have. So the fact that you’re going to risk injecting one of the most powerful momentum-killers out there: the flashback?? It’s just nuts to me.

Okay, let’s try to move into a more positive space. I always like to play this game: What if I were a producer at a studio, and the studio told me, “We’re making this movie no matter what. Your job is to get the script into the best shape possible”? What would I do here?

The first thing I would tell Randy is to get rid of the vampire stuff.

I understand that’s what makes the idea unique. But unique doesn’t mean good. Sometimes the thing that distinguishes your concept is the very thing preventing it from working.

Take away the vampires and you have a fairly compelling (as well as timely) premise. Ten years in the future, an AI has taken over a town. That’s a movie people could be interested in because it taps into something they already fear is coming. Just by removing that weird element, the story becomes way more manageable. From there, stop jumping around between so many people and their histories. This isn’t American Beauty. Focus on a group trying to take the AI down.

I’m sorry to be blunt but I’m not here to make writers think they’ve done a good job when they haven’t because then they’ll just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Hopefully, my big note here: SIMPLIFY THE CONCEPT, SIMPLIFY THE EXECUTION, helps Paul in his next script.

Screenplay Link: Glumford

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

What I learned: Don’t use your opening sentence to prove you’re a writer. If you do that, you’re serving yourself. Instead, always serve the screenplay. Here’s the opening line in Glumford: “A pair of elderly woman’s hands, veins like winding canyons beneath waxy skin hover over a piano keyboard.” This is a prime example of a writer trying to prove that they’re a writer. And ironically, it achieves the opposite. I had to read it several times to understand it. You’re over-complicating a very simple description, and in the process, giving us a line we have to put some effort into to decipher rather than one that allows us to see what we’re supposed to see. Keep it simple: “An elderly woman’s hands hover over the piano keys. Veins stand out beneath her waxy skin.”

Good screenwriting protagonists, Marvel eliminates flashbacks, and Star Wars leaps headfirst into the Sarlacc Pit

I believe there’s a good screenwriting lesson to take from this weekend at the box office.

Both Heart of the Beast and Primetime did solid, with 20 million bucks each. But, for screenwriting success, it actually doesn’t start at how your movie performs at the box office.

The real success of a screenwriter is getting either a big actor or a big director to attach themselves to your project, because it shows that you write material that the best of the best in the industry want to be involved in.

What’s the connection between Heart of the Beast and Primetime?

Main characters that possess WEIGHT. Main characters that move the needle.

Chris Hansen in Primetime is bizarre, complicated, and ambitious. There are angles to play here. Contradictions. Weirdness. Ego. Drive. It’s not a surprise that one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood wanted to play him.

Heart of the Beast’s main character also has weight. But the weight is simpler: He’s ACTIVE. He is one of the most active characters you will ever see onscreen. Actors love active characters and audiences love active characters. A dude doing shit. Trying shit. Making decisions. Moving moving moving. It is very hard to make a boring character who is extremely active.

So, when you’re writing your next screenplay, keep that in mind.

And it builds some irony into today’s Mish-Mash Monday because I now want to move into the anti-main-character. I’m talking about the kings of the ensemble, gigantic franchises Marvel and Star Wars.

Avengers: Doomsday is coming.

And Kevin Feige wants to make sure that in the weeks leading up to that film, you forget all of the mistakes he’s made in the last five years.

That’s led him to one of the best choices he’s made in a while. Which is re-releasing Avengers Endgame. You know how a toxic ex can weasel their way back into your life by becoming that sweet nice version of themselves you fell in love with? They immediately make you forget all the bad times. That’s what Kevin Feige is doing here.

But those bad times were pretty damn toxic.

The Marvels.

Brave New World.

Black Widow.

Dare I say it? The Eternals!

But if I’m being honest, he deserved it. For five years there, you placed diversity as the number one determining factor for making a movie. And it nearly destroyed your franchise, which, before that decision, was more bulletproof than the Incredible Hulk.

Making a good movie is almost impossible. There are too many things working against you. Your number one priority should always be: come up with a great concept and then write a great script. If you try to go about it in any other way, you’re going to fail.

The low point was The Marvels. There may not be a project in Hollywood history that put the blinders on the people working at a studio more than that one. That they thought it was a good idea is so far beyond any rational argument I could make for it.

And to Marvel’s credit, after that movie, they did some soul-searching. Namely: Are we making this movie because we genuinely think it’s going to be good and people are going to love it? Or are we making it so the New York Times pats us on the back?  The Marvels is probably why Blade got canceled.

Speaking of mega-franchises, did anybody hear this Star Wars news over the weekend?

That Jon Watts is going to direct a Rey Skywalker trilogy written by Simon Kinberg?

Let me start off by saying, do you remember when Star Wars directing announcements were exciting?! JJ Abrams at the height of his powers directing. Taika Waititi at the height of his powers directing. Guillermo del Toro directing a Jabba the Hutt movie. The Daniels eyeing a Star Wars movie. Josh Trank, when he was the hottest young director in Hollywood, directing a Boba Fett movie.

Now we have Jon Watts.

And I have no issues with Jon Watts. Having directed three Spider-Man movies, he certainly understands spectacle. But has Jon Watts ever gotten anybody excited that he’s attached to a project? I certainly haven’t ever met anyone who’s uttered the words, “Holy shit. Jon Watts is directing!”

Jon Watts who, by the way, has already directed Star Wars material, as he created the Disney Plus series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. The show was cute. It weakened as it went on. And it left almost no cultural impact. So you’re bringing in someone whose contributions aren’t going to feel fresh and whose general impact on Star Wars we already know. That’s not how you build excitement for a movie. It’s like me saying, “I’m investing in this exciting new restaurant that’s going to blow everyone away with its fresh take on food. The chef? Guy Fieri!”

But he’s not even the least interesting thing about this new trilogy. Simon Kinberg is writing the thing! Simon Kinberg, when he is at his BEST, is an average screenwriter. And newsflash, he’s rarely at his best. His work got so spotty that the guy hasn’t had a produced feature film credit since 2019. And that was Dark Phoenix. Before that was X-Men: Apocalypse. Before that was the 2015 version of Fantastic Four. That’s the one that everybody calls the worst superhero movie ever made.

The Star Wars franchise is Princess Leia in A New Hope. It is in dire need of saving.

Are we really betting that Simon Kinberg is our Luke Skywalker? Because I’m more inclined to call him Bib Fortuna.

I want you to think about this for a second because it really does show you just how misguided Lucasfilm has become. They want to create a new $750 million trilogy that will span six years. And after everything that’s gone wrong over the past decade, the three people they’re betting on to put Star Wars back on the map are Jon Watts, Simon Kinberg, and Daisy Ridley.

Really?

That’s the team??

That’s your billion-dollar plan to make Star Wars feel like STAR WARS again???

How insane are the people over there if anyone even remotely thinks that a single Star Wars fan will get excited about this? You can already see the creative board meetings. “And then we’ll bring Mark Hamill in as a force ghost!!!” And they’ll all clap and think they’re genius.

They’ve so lost the plot over there that it’s not even fun to make fun of them anymore.

If there’s any good news to this at all, it’s that I don’t believe these movies have any chance at getting made. Everything about the project seems suspicious.

Simon Kinberg has supposedly been working on this trilogy since 2019. So he’s been writing a Star Wars trilogy for 8 years despite the company going through major philosophical changes several times during that timespan?

Jon Watts has been in the Lucasfilm fold for three-plus years, already produced a show, and they’ve only just now decided he’s going to direct this film?

One of Lucasfilm’s longest in-development projects has been the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Star Wars film, which oddly also centers around Rey.

David Filoni, who’s now in charge of Lucasfilm, has never expressed any overt like for the character of Rey. You can hear him wax poetic about 30 different Star Wars characters. But Rey is not one of them. So he’s now hitched his ride to a Rey trilogy??

Everyone knows that the direction of Star Wars will very much be formulated by how the public receives next summer’s Ryan Gosling Star Wars film, Starfighter. If that movie does well, they’ll build the future of Star Wars around it. If it doesn’t, they’ll likely scrap everything in development and rethink their strategy.

And here’s the biggest kicker of all: THE MOVIE HAS NOT BEEN GREENLIT. They’ve been burying that tidbit in the articles in order to make the announcement look like a bigger deal. But if I had to make a bet, Jon Watts has been attached to this film since Skeleton Crew and some reporter finally sniffed that attachment out and now it’s being packaged as recent news.

Star Wars fans are starving for great Star Wars. But they’re not going to get it until a competent person is placed in charge of Lucasfilm, they start picking A-list directing and screenwriting talent as opposed to B and C level. And they do Pixar levels of story development where they put their scripts through the ringer until they become great.

This new trilogy, with this level of talent attached, would absolutely put the nail in the coffin of the Star Wars franchise.

The genuine blueprint for writing a great screenplay

So I was reading this consultation script recently and I really wanted to like it. It had all these elements that I’m into.

And the thing is, I did enjoy it. It had some fun moments and I was mostly curious what would happen next.

But the thing about screenplays that take over the town, that shoot to the top, that sell for a million bucks, that get fast-tracked into production, is that you don’t just “enjoy” them. You fall into them. They become an extension of you. The two of you fuse into one singular organism.

People always ask me, “Carson, why don’t you write scripts? You know everything about screenwriting.” It’s true. I know enough that I can write one of these good scripts. I can hit the proper beats, set everything up, create a reasonably compelling main character, give them a goal, throw obstacles at them, and construct a story where people will probably keep turning the pages.

But that’s not what results in the screenplay we’re talking about here.

We’re trying to write the script where, at some point, the reader loses awareness that they’re reading a script at all. They’ve become so completely absorbed in the story that the script doesn’t even exist anymore. The characters feel real. The situation feels real. You’re no longer analyzing anything. You’re just THERE. That’s a different ballgame. And figuring out how to get there has become something of a life’s work for me.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that there’s one gigantic component of this that is extremely difficult to control. Every once in a while, something magical happens where all the elements you’ve chosen for a story start interacting with each other in this perfectly harmonious way. The concept, the characters, the relationships, the plot, the voice, the theme. Everything starts feeding everything else, and suddenly the story becomes more than the sum of its parts.

I want you to hone in on that phrase: MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.

That’s the screenplay that fucks.

And today, I’m going to show you how to give yourself the best possible shot at writing one.

99% of the screenplays I read are PARTS. And some of those parts are great. Great character. Great scene. Great midpoint. Great dialogue. Great climax. But they’re not summing. They’re not interacting with each other in a way where they start to feel like one living breathing organism. A screenplay cannot break into the stratosphere unless it eventually becomes more than the sum of its parts.

But here’s what’s annoying. Before you can get to the sum, you first need those parts!

Which is why I want to reinforce the foundational parts of a good screenplay. It all starts with the concept. I know that “good concept” is subjective. But after reading through thousands of ideas for the High Concept Showdown, you notice patterns. Most weak concepts are undercooked, too familiar, too obvious, the stakes aren’t high enough, or there simply isn’t enough conflict built into the idea.

But there’s another reason you want a great concept that I don’t think gets talked about enough: A GREAT CONCEPT WRITES THE MOVIE FOR YOU.

If your concept is, a group of people visit a state-of-the-art theme park filled with dinosaurs, only for the security system to fail and the dinosaurs to get loose, I already have scenes. I have people trapped in cars while a T-Rex approaches. I have velociraptors hunting people in buildings. I have characters trying to restore the power. I have people attempting to escape the island. The concept is generating situations before I’ve written a single page.

Compare that to: Two friends travel around the world trying to figure out who they are. Okay. What’s scene 12? I don’t know. What’s scene 27? I don’t know. What’s the midpoint? I don’t know. You’re going to have to invent everything because the concept isn’t generating anything for you. And since a screenplay is going to have 40 to 50 scenes, you’re essentially asking yourself to come up with 40 to 50 great ideas in a row.

Why put yourself in that position? Do the hard work up front, come up with the great concept, and let that concept start generating scenes for you.

The other thing I want from the concept is IMPORTANCE. Whatever’s happening in this story should be the most important thing that has ever happened to these characters before. That doesn’t mean the world needs to be ending. Losing your family’s restaurant can be just as emotionally important to someone as saving New York from a time-traveling alien invasion.

Look at Braveheart. William Wallace isn’t having an interesting six months in Scotland. His wife is murdered. That event sends him into war. This is THE defining event of his existence. Your story should feel like we’re meeting your character at the moment their life can never go back to what it was before.

Once you have that, I want a great main character. And “great” doesn’t mean likable. It doesn’t mean funny. It doesn’t mean they need to be some flamboyant larger-than-life personality. It can mean all these things if need be. But most importantly, we want our main character to be INTERESTING in some way.

A good way to measure this is, if you removed your plot, would we still be interested in watching your main character?

Louis Bloom from Nightcrawler is a great example of this. Take away the nightcrawling, the car accidents and murders and news stations, and Louis is still fascinating. He has insane ambition, a bizarre self-help language, a transactional understanding of human relationships, a complete lack of boundaries. I could watch Louis Bloom work at a Starbucks and still be entertained.  And baby, I got receipts for that claim…

Your character obviously doesn’t have to be that extreme. But there should be some sort of internal conflict inside of them that would still exist if you removed the entire plot. If the serial killer disappears, if the aliens leave, if the heist never happens, this person still has something they’re wrestling with. The plot shouldn’t be the only interesting thing about them.

Then I want RELATIONSHIPS. Relationships are secret weapons that are vastly underutilized in screenwriting. Because relationships are stories unto themselves. Every unresolved relationship creates a plotline of uncertainty that the reader must keep reading to resolve.

Good Will Hunting is one of the best examples of this ever. There’s Will and Sean. There’s Will and Skylar. There’s Will and Chuckie. There’s Will and Professor Lambeau. All four relationships have different unresolved questions attached to them. Will has to decide whether he’s going to let Sean in, whether he’ll become vulnerable with Skylar, whether to stay in the familiar world he shares with Chuckie, and whether he wants to become the genius Lambeau so desperately wants him to be.

So now I don’t only care about the plot. I care about what happens in FOUR different relationships within that plot. If you can create two or three really compelling unresolved relationships in a screenplay, it becomes exponentially harder to put down.

Then there’s the plot. Interestingly, I don’t think the plot has to be amazing. But it can’t be predictable. One of the fastest ways to lose a reader is to let them get 20 to 30 pages ahead of you. Which happens in 90% of the scripts I read. I get bored because I know what the next scene is before you’ve even written it. As well as the next one. And the next one.

This doesn’t mean you need to be M. Night every ten pages. It just means you need to occasionally knock the reader off balance. You need to do something that makes them realize, “Oh, wait. Maybe I DON’T know where this is going.”

I was reading an article about the re-release of the animated Transformers movie from the 80s. One of the most infamous decisions in that movie was killing off Optimus Prime early on. Imagine being a kid watching that movie in 1986. WAIT. WHAT??? You just killed OPTIMUS PRIME??? Whatever you thought this movie was, you were wrong. And once a movie proves it’s willing to do something you never thought it would do, you stop feeling like you’re ahead of the writer.

Next, we get to VOICE. Voice is tricky because writers hear “voice” and think they need to reinvent the English language. You don’t. There are probably five screenwriters working today who have voices so distinct that you could remove the title page and know who wrote the script within five pages. Everybody else exists somewhere in the same realm.

The goal isn’t to sound radically different. It’s to sound JUST DIFFERENT ENOUGH. Aaron Sorkin has this stage-like quality to his writing. Jordan Peele mixes social awkwardness, comedy, horror, and racial observation. Then you have Zach Cregger, who enjoys disrupting traditional storytelling patterns.

With voice, there should just be something about the combination of your sensibilities, your humor, your observations, your characters and the unique way you look at the world which comes through in the way you choose your concept, plot, story points, characters and dialogue. Again, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Almost the opposite. You have to open up the restrictions within yourself that often keep those quirky aspects of who you are locked up.

And then we arrive at what I consider the final helping on the Thanksgiving plate. Your story should be ABOUT SOMETHING. Don’t worry. I don’t mean politically. Although it can be if you want. I’m talking more about humanity. What do you believe about people? What are you curious about? What bothers you about the way we behave? What have you noticed about love or greed or ambition or loneliness or family or friendship or jealousy or success?

The Truman Show is one of my favorite examples of this because it’s got such a great setup for a movie. A guy slowly realizes that his entire life is actually a television show. You can watch that movie purely for the concept and have a good time. But underneath that are questions about freedom, fear, comfort, and whether you’d rather live in a safe artificial world or take your chances in a scary real one (something that’s more relevant today than ever, btw).

Readers are constantly trying to connect the dots. We want to understand why you told us this story. We learn this when we’re children. The earliest stories we’re told have a moral to them. The boy who cried wolf isn’t just a fun story about a kid playing pranks. We’re being taught something about lying and trust.

As we’ve gotten older, we’re still looking for those morals in the stories we’re told. You can absolutely write a movie whose only goal is to entertain people. I would argue that Resident Evil is just that. But when you’re exploring something about humanity, you have a better shot at making the reader see that screenplay as an extension of them.

Okay.

So you’ve done all of that. You’ve created all those parts.

Congratulations.

YOU’VE WRITTEN A GOOD SCREENPLAY.

But this next part is how you make it great.

You ready?

The big secret?

YOU FUSE THE PARTS TOGETHER so that the script becomes MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.

Back to the Future may be the best example of this I know. You can certainly break that movie apart and admire all the individual pieces. Great concept. Great protagonist. Great supporting characters. Great relationships. Great set pieces. Great ticking clock. Great climax.

But that’s not why Back to the Future is Back to the Future.

What’s amazing about that screenplay is how difficult it becomes to separate one part from another. Marty travels into the past, which is the concept. But the concept puts him in direct contact with his parents, which creates the central relationship problem. Then Marty accidentally prevents his parents from falling in love, which turns the relationship problem into the plot. Now Marty’s own existence is at stake, which turns the relationship into stakes. The disappearing photograph then takes those stakes and turns them into a visual ticking clock.

And look at George McFly. George isn’t simply “Marty’s dad,” some character off in his own little character box. George’s weakness affects Marty’s life in the present. Marty then meets the younger George and realizes who his father actually was. Marty’s actions help George change. George’s change then alters Marty’s life when he returns to 1985. Character, relationship, concept and plot are all feeding each other.

Then you’ve got Biff. Biff isn’t merely the villain of the 1955 section. He’s bullying George in 1955 and still bullying him 30 years later. So defeating Biff isn’t just an obstacle Marty has to overcome to finish the plot. It’s connected to George’s character arc, which is connected to Marty’s family, which is connected to what Marty’s own life will eventually become.

Even Doc isn’t sitting outside of this web. Marty’s relationship with Doc creates the mechanism through which the time-travel concept works. But Marty also knows Doc is going to die in 1985, which creates ANOTHER unresolved relationship and another goal. Now Marty isn’t merely trying to get home. He’s trying to save his friend. And the movie finds a way to connect THAT to the mechanics of time travel.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say the sum becomes greater than the parts. Pull on one strand of Back to the Future and five other strands move.

That’s when a screenplay becomes ALIVE.

And this is where that final component comes in. Rewriting.

Your first job is to build the parts. Get the concept working. Get the protagonist working. Find the relationships. Figure out your plot. Figure out what the movie is actually about. Those things have to be strong because weak components aren’t suddenly going to become amazing just because you connect them to other weak components.

But once those pieces are strong, your next job changes.

Now you start looking for CONNECTIONS.

Can this character flaw affect that relationship? Can that relationship complicate the plot? Can something you established in the concept force the hero to confront their flaw? Can the villain somehow be connected to what you’re trying to say thematically? Can an object that currently exists just to solve a plot problem also become emotionally meaningful to the character? Can something that happens on page 15 come back on page 95 in a completely different context?

This is why you read so many scripts with the “correct” ingredients that still leave you cold. They haven’t done the connecting.

Which leads us to our final FINAL ingredient. It still doesn’t guarantee a great script. But it’s a multiplier without a doubt. You should love the story you’re telling.

I know that sounds corny, but it’s real. Because screenplays are long, they’re hard, and if you’re going to spend the agonizing number of hours required to find all these connections we’re talking about, you’re only going to do that if you love the story you’re telling. You’ll stop connecting if you only kind of like the script.

Writing a great script is really fucking hard. There are no guarantees. But this is the closest thing I’ve found to a formula that gives you a legitimate shot at it. Use it wisely. And have a happy weekend! :)

One of the most popular movie ideas to come out of the Blood & Ink Pitch Contest finally gets a review!

Genre: Horror
Logline: New Mexico Territory, 1891: A vengeful Apache is forced to ally with ruthless convicts when a shape-shifting demon turns their prison train into a rolling slaughterhouse bound for Los Angeles.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me horror movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, sold! Today’s script was voted in by you, the readers of the site.
Writer: Jack Azadi
Details: 88 pages

I did not vote this script into the Blood & Ink Contest for a reason I’ll get into later in the review. But this was easily one of, if not the top, most upvoted idea in the contest. A lot of people loved this idea. Its time in the limelight has finally arrived. Let’s see if you were right!

It’s 1891 and our hero, who, taking inspiration from the show, “Heroes,” is named, “Hero,” is an Indian out hunting when he returns home to find his wife and son brutally murdered. He tracks the killer across New Mexico and eventually catches up with a prison train that has just picked up Helen, a very pregnant woman who claims she’s running from an Apache. Hero insists Helen is not what she seems. The soldiers carefully consider his argument, then beat the shit out of him, shoot his horse and dog, and toss him into the prison car. Welcome aboard!

There, Hero meets a bunch of gnarly dudes, and one woman, who are convicts headed to LA. We then start meeting everybody ELSE on the train. More convicts. More soldiers. People in this car. People in that car. Apparently, Amtrak’s passenger limit had not yet been established.

Anyway, Hero was right about Helen. She’s actually “Big Owl,” an ancient shape-shifting demon who eats people’s hearts and brains and can then assume their identities. Which is bad news for Ginger, who makes the catastrophically poor decision to get frisky with her and winds up becoming demon food for it, starting with his most private of parts. Big Owl then becomes Ginger and starts working its way through the train, killing people, eating people, becoming people.

Hero explains that if Big Owl reaches Los Angeles, he’ll be able to, like, hide forever, and stalk and kill to his heart’s delight. So Hero and his new convict buddies load their weapons with silver and begin fighting their way through the train while Big Owl starts turning prisoners into a small army of possessed psychos. The Grindhouse Express has officially left the station.

From there it’s basically Hero and the surviving convicts trying to battle their way through car after car while figuring out who’s human, who’s possessed, and who’s currently being used as a Big Owl Halloween costume. With Los Angeles getting closer, Hero needs to recover his missing silver crucifix-dagger and kill the demon before the train reaches civilization.  Will he do it!!??

One of the things I won’t shut up about on this site is creative choices. Because you can make 99 good choices in a screenplay. But if you make one bad choice and that choice has its tentacles in 70 pages of your story? It can destroy the whole script.

That’s what happened here. There were SO MANY CHARACTERS. I didn’t count them all but there had to be 30 characters in this thing. Maybe more. And when you’re writing a movie like this, a movie whose entire reason for existing is to be FUN, you cannot have the reader playing memorization games. You want to play memorization games? Write your 1730s period piece about the origins of Nairobi. Give me 48 characters and three different royal families. I signed up for that shit.

But even then, I would argue you shouldn’t do it.

Ember Knight is exactly the kind of script you’d expect to have this problem. It’s a period piece. It’s 180 pages long. You hear “180-page period piece” and you’re already checking to see if there’s a cyanide capsule taped to one of the brads.

But here’s what Ember Knight did so well. Every time an important new character entered the story, the script gave them a proper entrance. It gave you a scene, a moment, a personality, something that allowed you to go, “Okay, I know who this person is now.” And then when that character showed up 25 pages later, you remembered them.

And despite being 180 pages long, it didn’t have a billion characters! It kept the character count reasonable. So whether you liked these people or hated them, YOU KNEW WHO THEY WERE. That’s the important part. The script understood that every character you introduce is another piece of information you’re asking the reader to store.

The Grindhouse Express does almost the exact opposite.

When Hero first gets thrown into the train car with MacMurphy and Lisa Love and Billy Bones and Griz and Digman, I thought, okay, I can handle this. These are my guys. I’ll remember these people. Let’s go.

Except then we started going to OTHER train cars. And there were people in those train cars. And then more people. More soldiers. More convicts. Another guy. Another guy. This guy is talking to that guy, that guy is arguing with another guy.  This car holds these prisoners.  That car holds those ones.  And now somebody’s eating somebody’s brains and I’m sitting there thinking, “Wait. Whose brains are these?”

The problem is that because there are so many characters to introduce, Jack doesn’t have enough time to properly introduce any of them. Sometimes we basically get a name and we’re off. Okay, here’s Davey. Here’s Bushy Roberts. Here’s Ginger. Here’s Jones. Here’s Nathaniel. And now we have to go somewhere else because there are seven more people we have to meet.

Well, what happens when Davey comes back 25 pages later? How am I supposed to remember Davey? You didn’t give me anything to remember Davey by!!!

The nicknames help. “Spider,” for example, is easier to remember than “John Smith.” Ginger is the red-haired guy. That stuff helps. But a colorful name can only get you so far. Eventually you still have 30 different people bouncing around inside ten different train cars and my brain is going, “I’m out.”

And this is where you have to understand the limitations of your screenplay. This is a 90-page script taking place over a condensed period of time. You simply DO NOT HAVE THE TIME to properly establish 30 characters.

Now, I understand the problem Jack has here. This is a movie about a demon moving through a prison train. You need train cars. And there need to be people IN those cars. So I’m not saying there’s some magical version where Hero and four people are riding a 900-foot-long train by themselves.

But this is screenwriting man. You recognize the issues you’re up against and you figure out solutions.

Call somebody FAT CONVICT. Call somebody SOLDIER #2. Call somebody GUY WITH ONE EAR. Whatever. The people I should be remembering are Hero and the people in his car. That’s your movie. Establish those guys. Make me love or hate them. Then send those guys through hell. Everyone between them and the demon should be the absolute minimum number of people necessary to make the story work.

Now, there’s something else going on here that I want to be fair about. I didn’t love the demon angle.
I know, I know. This was a HORROR PITCH CONTEST. “Hey Carson, I’ve got a great idea. What if we take the horror out of the horror movie?”

But if I’m being completely selfish about what I wanted this movie to be, I would’ve rather the threat been human. A Con Air inspired Western on a train was a great hook. I felt the demon angle made it messy.

But that’s me. A lot of you voted this into the contest specifically because you liked the demon. So I’m not going to sit here and tell Jack that putting a demon in his demon movie was a mistake.

What I WILL say is that this illustrates something important about readers. If a reader doesn’t like one of your major creative choices, they’re going to be less patient with everything else. If I love the demon, maybe I’m willing to work a little harder to remember Bushy Roberts and Davey and Jones and Nathaniel and whoever else is running around this train. But because I’m already not totally sold on the demon, now Character #27 shows up and I’m like, “Oh come on, dude. ANOTHER ONE???”

And this is why you can’t freak out over one person not liking your script. Sometimes that person simply doesn’t like one of the foundational choices you made. Another reader may love that choice and therefore experience the exact same screenplay differently.

Having said that, THERE ARE STILL TOO MANY CHARACTERS. That part I’m sticking with.
So that would be my number one change. Simplify simplify simplify. Hero. His train car. Those are our people. Everybody else? Introduce only who you absolutely need. Because the less time I spend trying to remember who everybody is, the more time I get to spend enjoying the demon eating their brains.

This was not my jam but I’m super curious what you guys think of it because you’re the ones who voted it in. In fact, this might have been the top vote-getter in the contest. So, read the script and sound off!

Script link: The Grindhouse Express

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

What I learned: Always always always consider the reader experience. Are you doing anything that makes your script harder to read, harder to follow, or forces the reader to work to remember things? If so, figure out a way to simplify it. And if you absolutely HAVE to do it, have a plan for making it as painless as possible. The reader should be spending their brainpower enjoying your story, not trying to understand it.

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise: A medical courier delivering an organ to a hospital finds himself pulled into a quickly deteriorating scenario involving a rapidly growing number of monsters and zombies.
About: Zach Cregger strikes again, improving on his flawless resume. His Resident Evil film just opened higher than any Resident Evil film in history, with 60 million, as horror continues to thrive. Cregger says producer Roy Lee asked him if there were any video game properties he’d want to adapt and Cregger said Resident Evil. He then wrote the script with Shay Hatten, who he describes as his “good buddy.” Hatten popped onto the screenwriting scene about 6 years ago at a super young 25 years old. He had a couple of scripts on the Black List before joining the John Wick franchise and writing on a bunch of those films. I suspect that with Cregger’s time being stretched thin these days, he elected to bring on a co-writer, unlike with his first two films.
Writer: Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten
Details: 95 minutes

Zach Cregger has been listening to all this chatter about the new plucky crew of YouTube filmmakers who are supposedly the next generation of horror and said, “Hold my kombucha, chumps.”

It’s actually insane that this movie has done so well. Think about what Resident Evil used to be. This was a MAJOR action franchise. Guns. Armies. Explosions. Elaborate set pieces. And now the movie that’s shot out of a cannon to become its highest opening weekend grosser is basically ONE GUY running around by himself. A guy who doesn’t know how to use guns. A guy who’s never been in a situation remotely like this. Just some dude trying to survive.

It speaks to the magic of screenwriting, and specifically the choices we make BEFORE we start writing the script. Sometimes the most important creative decision isn’t what happens on page 60. It’s deciding what version of the movie you’re going to write in the first place. Those choices determine whether your movie feels fresh and exciting or like something we’ve seen 25 times already.

Because when you saw the trailer for this Resident Evil, you didn’t think, “Been there, done that.” You thought, “Wait, what is this??” And I talk about this all the time, but that’s the name of the game. You have to find a fresh way into whatever story you’re telling. If audiences know exactly what they’re getting, they’ve already started tuning out.

Resident Evil follows Bryan, a medical courier whose job is to transport organs from one hospital to another. But Bryan isn’t doing this because he’s some noble crusader. He’s a glorified Postmates driver who needs straight cash, homie.

Tonight, his girlfriend just told him her pregnancy test came back positive. Bryan’s clearly in denial about it but he knows he has to go home and talk to her. That is until the hospital offers him double pay for a super urgent delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital. Bryan decides, “Okay, I’m in.”

The problem is Raccoon City is up in the mountains, it’s nighttime, there’s a snowstorm, Bryan doesn’t have chains, and his car is barely staying on the road. Then, just when he thinks things can’t get worse, a woman comes flying out of the forest and Bryan SLAMS INTO HER.

Bryan, to his credit, isn’t the kind of guy who’s going to leave a bleeding woman in the middle of nowhere, so he puts her in his car and figures he’ll take her to the same hospital he’s heading to. A cop eventually stops them and agrees to take the woman himself while Bryan follows. Sweet. Problem solved. Until the cop’s car goes flying off the road into a field. Bryan goes down to investigate and discovers that the cop is dead and the woman he just rescued is now trying to kill him.

Bryan somehow survives that encounter and makes it to a nearby farmhouse, where things get really weird. He gets attacked by a dog that suddenly sprouts appendages. The people associated with the house aren’t welcoming either. Bryan is beginning to understand that something VERY BAD is happening.

But he still has his package, he still believes it’s time-sensitive, and therefore he still has to get to that hospital and get his money! Which means that while every instinct is screaming, “DON’T DO THIS!” Bryan keeps heading toward the place where all the monsters seem to be coming from.

Once Bryan finally gets to Raccoon City, he discovers that the entire place is falling apart. He briefly hooks up with a couple of Umbrella employees where he learns that his mysterious package is actually an ingredient scientists at Raccoon City General need to complete an antidote.

But then Bryan gets infected himself, which gives the delivery a much more personal ticking clock. Bryan fights his way through sewers, monsters, and an ooey-gooey maternity ward, finally reaching the scientists who can complete the antidote. But will they finish it and cure him in time? Or are Bryan’s future plans as a dada officially kaput?

Resident Evil is a horror movie that does something I honestly didn’t think you could do. It turns horror into a thriller. The conventional wisdom with horror is that you need to slow things down, milk the suspense, let the audience sit there and wonder what’s coming next.

Think of one of my favorite horror movies, The Others. You’re wandering around this giant house, you enter a room where every piece of furniture is covered by a sheet, and then you take your sweet time wondering if something might be underneath one of those sheets. That’s horror.

Thrillers are the opposite. They’re about MOVEMENT. They’re about getting somewhere, doing something, solving something, surviving something. Somehow Zach Cregger has figured out how to make those two things coexist.

Because this movie is MOVING. Our hero is driving down highways. He’s stranded in a field with a crazy woman. He’s racing to deliver his package. He’s constantly encountering some new problem that forces him forward. Early on, Cregger will still hit the brakes when he needs to deliver a killer horror sequence. But what’s interesting is that, as the movie goes on, even the horror sequences start becoming thriller-like. There’s less lingering, less waiting, more GO GO GO.

Cregger also does something I wish more writers would do. Whenever I’m evaluating a screenplay, I ask myself: If you gave this concept to 100 professional screenwriters, what movie would 95 of them write? With Resident Evil, I think 95 writers would’ve written some variation of the original game. Two cops arrive at a house. Something seems off. They investigate. They find increasingly disturbing things. Eventually they discover this is bigger than the house. There’s an underground facility. There’s a corporation. Monsters. BORRRRRRRRRINNNNGGGGG. You just lost the assignment. That pitch is so weak you don’t even get your parking validated, loser.

When you’re going up for an assignment, whatever direction those 95 writers are going to take, THAT’S THE VERSION YOU DON’T TAKE.

Instead, Cregger embraces the five-percent version. Forget the cops. Our hero is an organ courier who’s been dropped into the worst possible situation for his skill set. He doesn’t know how to investigate a crime scene. He doesn’t know how to operate a gun. He’s probably the least qualified person on the planet to survive this, which immediately makes him more interesting to watch.

On top of that, making him a courier gives the story something horror movies rarely have: a ticking clock. He thinks he’s transporting an organ that has to reach its destination within an hour. So before a single zombie needs to show up, we already have a goal, stakes, and urgency. Get the package there. Someone’s life depends on it. And HURRY UP.

There’s another sneaky-good screenwriting lesson buried in all this. We reveal that he’s not transporting an organ at all. He’s transporting a serum that can cure what’s happening. A lot of writers think that once they’ve established the stakes of their movie, they’re locked into those stakes. They’re not. You can eliminate your original stakes halfway through the story. You just have to REPLACE THEM. Preferably with something bigger. That’s what happens here. The original “save this one person’s life” stakes disappear, but by then Cregger has replaced them with stakes involving a whole lot more people.

Now, I’ve heard the word “classic” thrown around with this movie, and I wouldn’t go that far. It’s very good. But I think we’re starting to see one of Cregger’s weaknesses as a writer, which is that there isn’t a ton of depth to his characters or his thematic exploration. I’m not sure Resident Evil is really trying to say much about the human experience. I’m sure somebody on Reddit can write a 4,000-word dissertation explaining that every zombie in this film represents late-stage capitalism but I’m talking about purposeful thematic exploration. By the end, I wanted this kid to survive, but I didn’t feel like I’d learned much about him.

There is an attempt at a character arc involving his girlfriend, who may be pregnant, and this vague idea that our hero has reached the point in his life where he needs to grow up. But that’s delivered in isolated scenes where the movie essentially stops and reminds us, “Oh yeah, there’s this whole girlfriend/pregnancy/growing-up thing too.”

That’s not character development. Character development works when the story forces the character to confront the thing they need to change. If your character is selfish, don’t have his girlfriend call him three times and tell him he’s selfish. Put him in situations where he has to choose between selfishness and selflessness. The first time, he chooses himself. The second time, he hesitates. The third time, he doubles down and says, “I’m selfish, that’s who I am.” Then, when it really matters, he finally chooses someone else over himself. Now the plot itself is developing the character. That’s the difference between having a character arc sitting next to your story and having a character arc built INTO your story. Resident Evil is incredibly good at keeping its hero moving. I just wish all that movement had been taking him somewhere character-development wise.

I thought the first half of this movie was excellent. I was hoping that the whole movie would be low-budget Resident Evil. So I wasn’t thrilled when it went more “video-gamey” and CGI for its second half. But it still manages to keep the train on the tracks due to all the goodwill it built up earlier. Also, this actor, Austin Abrams, is the best “stumbling and mumbling” actor in Hollywood. Guaranteed there is no one in his league who can stumble and mumble like this guy. He turned it into an art form here.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I like the idea of injecting non-genre-friendly elements into particular genres IF YOU HAVE A GOOD GAME PLAN for how to do it. Thriller and Horror aren’t natural bedfellows. Which means if you can somehow make that marriage work, your script is immediately going to feel different. Could you inject tons of urgency into a Drama? Conventional wisdom says no. Which is exactly why, if you pull it off, you might have something special. Uncut Gems comes to mind. Fargo injected comedy into a movie filled with grisly violence. Those two things should’ve fought each other. Instead, that strange combination helped make Fargo iconic. The point is, sometimes the thing you’re NOT SUPPOSED TO DO in your genre is the very thing that can make your script stand out. Pulling this off requires an incredibly high level of skill, though, so don’t engage with this lesson flippantly. I’m just asking you to consider it.