The Intruder by Todd Martin - Short, Horror - An uninvited guest breaks into the home of an unhappily married couple. However, it turns out that he isn't the worst thing in the house and by the time morning comes no one may be alive to see it.  28 pages - rtf, format

This didn’t work for me but I did read through it all. There’s way too much dialogue and most of it sounds unnatural, forced. Quite a lot of it is on the nose. If you are not sure what ‘on the nose’ dialogue means:

(I’ve taken this from a website)

“Essentially, it’s when a character is speaking precisely how they’re feeling or thinking, without room for the reader/audience to fill in the blanks when it comes to a particular character’s emotions, thoughts, and so forth.

Why is this bad?  Well, for one, picture the scene playing out on-screen: what’s more interesting, leaving subtlety to a conversation, or having two people explain everything for us?  For the vast majority of audiences, the latter of those two options can be uninteresting, dull, cliché, sappy, and a host of other negative results.  Not to mention the fact it doesn’t give proper justice to the complexity of your characters.  

So for instance, compare these two lines of dialogue:

MARCUS: “Because it’s not totally about you, it’s about me and my own problems.  I love you.  I’m just really upset because you cheated on me with my best friend, Dave, when I was at work, so I need to move out.”

Or. . . .

MARCUS: “I left a key for you. . . I figure Dave can use the back door, like usual.”

The second option gives away the same amount of information (e.g. he cares enough to leave a key for her, is still bitter about the affair, etc.), but with greater nuance.  Though it’s out of context, you can get an idea of what to stay away from when writing dialogue, especially in an emotionally-charged scene. “

End of stuff I’ve taken from the internet.

The script is full of ‘on the nose’ dialogue. An example is Taylor explaining the pill he was working on at his company that allows him this miracle recovery. But the script it littered with this so you take a simple, straightforward revenge/horror story and draw it out to excruciating lengths.

I didn’t care about any of the characters, I was quite happy that everybody died and Taylor ended up in prison, although if he was effectively immortal this epilogue makes no sense really.

Also you use parenthesis a lot. Parenthesis are telling the actors what to do and should be used sparingly as actors like to interpret the role themselves. You mainly use it when it’s not obvious at all what the actor should be doing or feeling at that point. If you’ve described the action correctly and written the dialogue well the director/actor should know what to do in most instances and not need it in the script.

I hope my feedback helps.

Hello Todd Martin

the story was pretty cool like the description...that is what caught my eyes  to read it

but i has some few issues....

you open up with EXT. A BRICK HOUSE -- NIGHT ....which is fine though i would have taken out the "A" but that's just me.... but the problem is what came next

"We see a large brick house with a few lights on inside."

first never have we see in the script second you write large brick house again when you already put that in the slug line....that redundant .... you need to dramatize it
a little more also

then

avoid using ing for action...stick with present tenses like The man carefully places his clothes in his suit case instead of  using "putting"
you didn't even describe them

another thing that threw me off is you have "INT. THE HOUSE -- NIGHT"
then you go and say they are in the bedroom (i personally would have written
"INT. MASTER BEDROOM -- NIGHT") make it flow better .....REALLY THREW ME OFF
IS that  for about ten pages we are in the BEDROOM ---that's way too long to be
in the same scene....industry standards are three pages  more only if the
scene is really really important...

i hope my advice is not confusing

anyways good luck on the rewrite and hope it helps

Ugo