Shutterland by Steve Meredith - Short, Horror - After a seven year vacancy, the Shutterland Hospital for the Psychologically  Ill is reopening its doors.  It is now named the Fitzpatrick Hospital for the Psychologically Ill, but even with a new name, the secrets of the hospitals past comes back to haunt the patients.  Danielle Fitzpatrick, the hospital adminsitrator, must find out what these secrets are...but she might be risking her patients lives by doing so...maybe even her own. - doc, format

SOME SPOILERS

This is a short that is really too short. What plot there is zips by so fast that no time is devoted to much of anything. There is no character development of really anyone, including Danielle, and she has the most screen time. You deny 1.5 million, but then grant 700,000 to fix up an older facility. Seems like a really strange compromise. I would say make the new building more expensive or the old one cheaper to bring up to code. Something sinister out of Madison would have been nice to indicate what she might be capable of. The allusion to what the old facility used was nice, but not enough. Then you introduce a character to save the day. This convention, used a lot in old Greek dramas, is called deux ex machina, which means God in the machine. In those old dramas, when things were at their worst, the gods would come down in the clouds (lowered on an old time contraption) and save the day. It is dramatically unsound, and Danielle should solve her own problems.

I think the premie has some promise, but the execution her is not very good at all.

You also committed several huge formatting snafus. First, unless you are planning on making this film yourself, you need to learn to tell the story without using camera conventions. By saying "we see" this and "the camera follows" that, you are removing the reader from the story and reminding us that we are reading a screenplay. Second, you need to at least read the format page in SimplyScripts or get a book on screenwriting format. The screenwriting class also has threads concerning this and I regularly cover it with someone, but in your script, you need to at least get the basics down.

The key word for this script is expand it. It needs to do more and have more to be a decent story. You tried to do too much in too short a span.

Well..the good thing is that it was short.

But, agreeing with George, I have to say this script had some problems.

But don't feel down if you recieve bad feedback on your scripts. There are a lot of professional script writers on here (George, in fact, is a great writer) and they will help you make your scripts better and more believable.

But I too think you should expand this.You could make this better and more suspenseful if it were longer and had more running time than 8 pages.

Good luck on future scripts,
Sean