Almost Home by Jeff Rosenberg - Horror - Two sisters out for a day of shopping, three college students heading home for the weekend, a handsome fourteen year old boy and a woman taking her niece and nephew for the weekend, they have one thing in common. They were all almost home. Now trapped in the middle of nowhere they must face the greatest evil of all, greed.  114 pages - pdf, format

Hi Jeff,

Gave this a read up to page 10. There are a few format-related things you need to change.  Your format overall is clean, with no camera directions or 'we sees', but a few things stand out.

I'm not quite sure why you broke up the action lines into sentence fragments, and then gave each fragment its own line and a semi-colon, but it's unnecessary, and quite distracting. Gather them into 4-5 line paragraphs and make more complete sentences. It'll be much easier to read.

Characters' names should be capitalized when you introduce them, not the gender or noun (men, children, etc).

Natalie's mom's dialogue from the phone should be (V.O.) rather than (O.S.)

The dialogue is another issue, it sounds stilted and unnatural. This stood out:

NATALIE
Because I didn�t want to wait, look
mom if you don�t want me to come
home...

MOM  (O.S.)
I taught you too well.

NATALIE
Learned from the best.

MOM (O.S.)
Now you know I can�t wait to see
you it�s I just worry about you
driving that road alone.

I didn't quite understand what  the mother meant by "I taught you too well". If that's something that's paid off later in the script, I apologize. But I would study the way people speak, their cadences, pauses, and so on.  Adding a comma here, a period there, rewording a few things over there, would make all the difference in making dialogue seem natural.

Regarding less technical things, the first ten pages didn't quite hold my attention. I understand you don't want to reveal all your cards at once, but all the best horror movies open with a sense of dread and danger, and I wasn't quite feeling that here, until a gun appeared several pages in. I would consider starting the script with that scene, or the disappearance of that child. You should grab your audience with something as soon as you can.

Hope this didn't seem too negative. Like I said, you avoid the amateur mistakes of overwriting, camera directions, and 'we's. Now it's just a matter of further polishing what you have.