What's Bugging You? by Ian Lempert (bobtheballa) - Short, Young Adult, Horror - Chasing your crush is hard enough, but trying to survive an invasion that only you and your lady friend believe is real? That's what's bugging Elroy. - pdf, format

Haha, it's the film, Bug meets American Pie.

Good read, nonetheless.

I liked this one, a lot, especially the beginning it was great setup. It was cute, funny all that. The idea of being able to read the mind of your high school classmates is scary enough. I liked the whole man/woman trying to read another during courtship, and it’s like you’re trying to read their mind. “He’s saving me!” Classic funny.


I would of liked though if there was a little more subtext if Elroy missed a couple more of her hints, rather than actually saying “come sit next to me” she says, “aren’t you cold too”, which she really means get over here and cuddle with me klutz. But still limited time, limited pages hell of a job. It’ll be tough to follow this act.

This didn't work for me at all.  Hopefully, this is being played for laughs, cause there's literally no horror here at all.  I don't see much of the OWC requirements either.

So many of your sentences are passive, with "ing" ending verbs.  You should try and avoid this.  Your action scenes are few and far between, making for a slow read, relying on dialogue, which for me didn't work at all.

Not sure about your scene headings either...most ended in "CONT'D", which I don't follow.  I don't think your action always took place where the scene heading listed, either.

Sorry, but this one didn't work for me.

Bugs, don’t like them. Interesting take on the horror concept, but for me it doesn’t work. Sort of creepy and might appeal to a young audience but high school love and lust tends to dominate rather anything horrific. Too many holes in the dialogue to make it work. Too much going on.  - walford

I thought this started out pretty cute...a few mistakes in there a long the way...Kevin is with Stacey but it says Tina, so that must have gotten changed.

I like a "bug" concept...so creepy, crawly"...but this doesn't deliver and got too diluted in the end.

I liked this one, it was a breeze to read and was really entertaining.

I know the bugs were a metaphor for paranoia but I still felt a bit unsatisfied by the ending. It felt strange that they were making out while the bugs swarmed all over them, plus why would they go after the kids that they had already bitten. I didn't get the sense of an invasion, these bugs made people read minds but didn't actually do anything that bad; didn't eat people, didn't take over someones body. I struggled to see the big problem with this.

I liked your characters and the idea was quite good and well written. If you could come up with a more dangerous aspect of the bugs and a better ending this would be great. As it is, it's a really well written comedy but I didn't really get the horror part.

I thought this wasn't bad.  It had a great start then got a bit slow for a while then it got a bit clumsy around the action part.  I didn't really care too much for the ending.  It was clever but it seemed a bit like a dream ending without the dream.  I also think this didn't meet the challenge because they didn't really try to convince anyone else that the hoax was true, unless I missed that part.  

The idea of the bugs creating a kind of telepathy was interesting. I didn't feel there was any kind of Halloween vibe happening here though. And it wasn't a young adult genre.

This one failed to get and hold my attention. It starts immediately as a flash back which can work, but I don't feel it's necessary. You could have easily begun in the living room with Elroy and Tina.

Sandra

This one reminded me of that other one with the green worms.

I thought this started out well and was written well too, but then it sort of lost traction.

I lost track of the characters too. I think there were too many or maybe they were just too similar to tell them apart.

I think the premise was good though and with a rewrite to fix it up, it could probably be quite good.

Thanks to everyone who read my script and a little later I'll respond to each individual post. In the meantime, I thought I'd elucidate my thought process while writing this script so everyone has a better idea of what I was going for.

I don't do a lot of watching or writing in the horror genre so I started brainstorming for ideas for this script from two different angles: one was what scares me when I watch movies and the other was what scared me when I was a young adult. I determined that the most uncomfortable scene in a movie for me was when Indiana Jones is trekking through the room filled with bugs, while the "young adult" genre brought up memories of middle school and constantly being paranoid that others were constantly judging me  and could read my mind and know the embarassing things I was thinking (like which girl I liked). In a bit of laziness, the two ideas were combined.

After a few pages of writing, I came up with the idea of having the bugs represent hormones as they invaded the teens' bodies; a different kind of invasion. As each of the teens ventured deeper into the dating world, their hormones went crazy to the point where the kids could either choose to live in fear or take control and make a move to further their respective relationships.

Admittedly, I didn't spend as much time on the second half of the script as I did on the first half since school picked up later in the week. My script was hanging around 6 or 7 pages until the Friday when it was due, when I added everything else on and submitted seconds later.

Thanks to all who read, will respond later with individual replies.

Ian,


This was a funny, cute little script. Some things I want to point out is that 1) I'm sure someone's pointed this out already, but you intorduce Kevin twice, which confused me a bit, but then I realized what happened. 2) You mixed up Stacy's name once somewhere towards the end. I think it was when Kevin was looking at her legs, you accidentally said Tina. Um, I think that's it. But I liked the bug infestation scenes and how people reacted. And I thought it was a good metaphor for teens insecurities and stuff, though, I don't know how everyone could have seen it, since not everyone has insecurities when it comes to relationships...I don't think...Maybe it's like a disease. If someone sees something and they talk about it enough to one person, they finally convince the other person to the point where they can see it too...

Sean