Drink Your Milk...Save Christmas by Nathaniel Murphy (n7) - Short, Horror - A young man and his father struggle to see eye to eye until a glass of milk and a special vistor makes it their most memorable Christmas Eve ever. 7 pages     A October '06 One Week Challenge entry - pdf, format

Hey, I got past the pdf formatting issues and finally got this one posted. Up a little later than the rest, but hopefully will get some reads. new to the board and looking forward to any feedback.

Dude, this is a very strange script.  Kind of an anti-Christmas special.

You lost me a bit when Reggie “came out” to his parents about his lactose intolerance -- is that what you were going for with that scene, or am I reading too much into it?  And when Santa shows up it gets even weirder.

But once the elves started popping out of the chimney, I started visualizing this with stop-motion puppets -- like those old Christmas specials on television.  That is the only way I could see this actually played out -- and I liked it better once I started “seeing” it that way.

Is Rudolph tonguing Santa’s balls taking the joke too far?  Eh.  Perhaps.  I’m not sure what you set out to do with this story, but I have the oddest feeling that you somehow achieved it.  Not a bad story if you go in expecting something a bit surreal as opposed to something to be taken literally.  

Hey Bert, thanks for giving it a read. I was definitely going for the surreal with this. Glad you could visualize it as animated, was aiming for a south park, adult swim type of feel. Tried to set up the story as somewhat normal and made sure the characters took the situation seriously even though it was completely unbelievable. thanks again for looking it over.

This was a bizarre read. Not really a horror. More of a black comedy. A very black comedy. If anything, the idea of Santa as a drunk, knife-weilding maniac is hilarious. I thought the "coming out" (as Bert said) was funny as well. It was just too melodramatic to take seriously. In any case, I liked this though perhaps not for the reasons you wanted people to. I think it could've fit the guidelines better as well. I did get the Adult Swim vibe you mentioned though. I can recall a few Robot Chicken episodes that felt similar to this.

All in all, extremely weird but amusing and fun to read.

I thought I'd bump this script up from the October one week challenge, considering its subject.


Phil