Please, Harry by Nathan Harper-Wendt - Short, Horror - After a storm begins a teenage boy and his sister are taken in by a kind stranger. 6 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hey Nathan.  I read your screenplay and have a few suggestions.  First...don't be discouraged.  This is a decent effort but there are some serious issues.  The story itself is pretty unbelievable.  Everything that happens seems forced and too convenient.  They just so happen to meet a woman who invites them to her home, makes them dinner and asks them to stay the night?  Why didn't she just have them call their uncle?  And what is up with these kids?  They're obviously off but why?  What point does it serve them to kill these people?  

The dialog was pretty good.  Just work on your story.  Flesh out Harry and his sister.  Give us more insight to why they are the way they are.  Then give us some believable circumstance like Susan invites them in to use the phone.  And then show us why they are killing these people.  

FORMAT:  You need to CAP characters names when first introduced.

Keep writing!  And read a lot of screenplays.  That really helps.  Best of luck!!!!  :)

What I liked about your story: it was a total shocker that the lil girl was the one doing the killing. It was a weird story, but I liked the fact that the end was not what I expected.

Now, you need to proof your work and learn formatting as you go along. You need to build the characters a lil more instead of just telling us their age. Also, give us a hint as to why they are lil kids going around killing people. We have to know something about that or the story doesn't work. You could, for example, put in a short flashback of some traumatic experience...that would at least let us know why they are the way they are.

The dialogue was ok..kinda long and sometimes it didn't sound like it was coming from kids that age.

Keep workin on it and keep writing. Read more than you write. That's what I try to do now. There's so much to learn. If you have a really good story sometimes you can squeak by with some errors but it's tough to even get a read if there are too many errors on page 1.

Best of luck.

D

D, please give us a little warning before you reveal the ending.  A little SPOILER SPACE never hurts.


Phil

Hey Nathan,

Had a read and I hope you join this discussion.

This is not far off. I doubt much would need to be changed to turn this into a decent short.

SPOILERS

Like Marnie, what jumped out to me was the "not doing the obvious" moments, which I think sets decent scripts part from others. By this I mean if you have an event, the cause, what you then expect is the most obvious reaction, the effect. When this doesn't happen, for no good reason, it starts to suffer.

In this example, I just couldn't buy the woman not ringing the uncle, not dropping them home, suggesting they stay there without any notification - surely the police would be called by night fall?

Then we have no foreshadowing of Why? This isn't always required but again if a story is to be engrossing, it has to suck the reader in by being possible, if not likely. Here we suddenly have a sad boy and a cute little girl who wants to kill people with an axe. why? And then why would he go along with this? Etc etc

All the best.

hey nathan, for some reason your name sounds familiar. might have posted on one of your previous scripts.

p1
slug is wrong. just say KITCHEN. "dark" is unneccessary.

"A silhouette of a of a man fills the kitchen doorway." of a of a

"His eyes widen as a hatchet axe come swinging down towards his face." comes

just reached your second scene, and your grammar is abysmal. unless you comment in this thread, I'm going to stop correcting you (out of fear that you'll never read y remarks). i'm just going to focus on story from this point out.

reached the end. to be completely honest, this story has no merit or value whatsoever. the characters lack motivation. if i were you, i'd scrap this one.