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The Withered
Hello.
Ok. I Liked the idea of stalker warlock against witches. Why does Jacob, who has obviously got special powers, comes there with a sledge hammer? You are not clear about that. A pillory also is no real hurdle. Good characters, I connected to the girls. Still a lot of cliché.
Don't let them justify their selves with things like: The cops cannot help us...
All action, no story. Short, choppy sentences that give no real voice to the author. No clue what these people are about or why I should care. Sorry, this one did nothing for me.
“Every piece of writing... starts from what I call a grit... a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away... but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.” ~ Rumer Godden
I loved the way this ended... I mean it felt rushed but I like the fact that she was in an institution.
The things I did not really like was the weapons and the hands chasing them around. That seemed cheezy to me. I also never found out why Jacob was trying to kill them. A bit confusing and the story needs work but a pretty good concept for this thing.
I'm sorry, this one just didn't work for me at all. It was too hard to follow at times and just down right confusing. More practice with the way your descriptions come across would do this wonders.
I'm sorry that I don't have anything more positive to say, but keep working at it
The premise is decent enough and some of the gore was fun. The writing and dialogue were pretty weak though. And at the end of the day, there's not much to go on except for some bloody shenanigans. I mean, the severed hands mixed it up a bit but dismembered body parts don't make up for a lack of more important stuff (story, characters, etc.).
The ending is abrupt to say the least and the rest of the script has a frantic feel to it. I expect this was a rushed affair.
Points on being short though. Plowing through 48 scripts of varied quality had me wiped out more than once. It was a breath of fresh to end with a 7-pager. This was also horror, without question. Feel like a lot of scripts skimped in that department.
A nice atmospheric opening. I liked the bulbs going out. I could almost hear the horror music in my head. Good sense of humour. I liked the bit about the powder. Listing ingredients. Haha. Some interesting images. I'm thinking of the naked witches with goggles. Eerie. Confusing. Sexy.
I loved some of your descriptions. One standout: "the saw comes alive. She feeds it." I love it. Naked girl covered in blood. A horror cliche I'm okay with. This is where it got all EVIL DEAD 2. I do like me some splatstick. You were creative with the gore too. The hand metamorphosis reminded me of the practical effect geniuses of THE THING (Rob Bottin?). It kept this fun.
I loved it so much til the end. I haven't read the reviews yet so I hope I'm not repeating or diggin it in too much. I just didn't like the cops showing up and taking her away to... someplace (PSYCHO anyone?). I thought they WOULD show up because you set it up earlier. Since Carla wasn't too worried about them. I think she even thought they'd be useless in this type of situation. Well I did anyway.
Couple of ideas. Maybe the cops could see the dead bodies. She'd realize they'd take her/not believe her. So she kills them or charms them or potions seem to work a lot. Jokes. But maybe her friend is blinded and not dead. Or just one eye gone. They could argue and fight cops. I guess I want to see her forced to use her powers to save her friend and their secret. My 2 cents. Hope that's cool.
Enjoyed it so much until the end. Funny. Gory. Reminds me of my favourite horrors.
48. The Withered by Thirty-Six - Horror - A woman severs the hands of her stalker. Locked up, he boasts he will finish the job. But how? Brief - Two witches vs one warlock + Sam Raimi
Location(s) - Suburban street, driveway, van interior, house exterior and interior, garage, sanitorium interior Cast - Protagonist(s) - SARA, 20s, ?? BREE, 20s, ?? Antagonist(s) - JACOB, 20s, covered in shadow Genre & Marketability - Action Horror. This is not written for the market I'm looking to serve. Comments - Don't underlilne your title on the title page. FYI, shooting at night's a PITA. Character intro format is name in all caps, approx age, brief three or four word description. As producer I'm deducting the expense of that replacement door from your pay as writer. And wall repair. LOL! "Buzz Saw"? Do a google image search for that. How about circular saw?! "Presses a button, the rips the cord."Dafuq? Chainsaw? I'm glad we're making this bloody mess in the garage. FYI, electric power corded saws, of any kind, require no cord ripping. (Ur a girl, aren't you?). By pg6 this is is looking like Judeo-Christian demonized witchcraft. SFX costs alone are killing this more than anything. But it does have that nice Sam Raimi 'Army of Darkness' look to it. Script format - fair. Final word - Nice, but not what I'm looking to produce this time.
$2,000 - 4,000 Lo/Hi Estimated Budget Range / 6.6 Screenplay Pages = $303 - 606 Estimated Cost Per Screen Minute
Adherence to Given Criteria: Modern Witches and/or Warlocks - Nope Horror - Yes!
I like the story, but the writing and dialogue could use some work.
The action lines aren't clear some of the time. The beginning, for example -- I couldn't tell, at first, if Jacob was in the van or standing somewhere else.
Some of the dialogue's a little on the nose. At some parts I wondered if this was even meant to be taken seriously.
Maybe you were rushed. I don't know. Anyway, this was not bad, but it could use a rewrite.
Good job finishing the OWC.
Will
I'll take the first comment by Will for one reasonly. He's pretty much spot on and addressed some of the issues with the work. Several folks have pointed out ine action in the van. Are we looking in the van or out of it? I didn't think it was that confusing, but when I looked at it again while I was starting the rewrite, I could see where some confusion in regards to this could happen. For the record, Jacob was in the van until he got out with his (enchanted) knife and sledgehammer.
"Rushed"? Nothing really was except for two things: ending of the script 'The Smithsgrove Santitarium' (a nod to 'Halloween' of course) and the fact that I was barely making six pages. There was extra pointless dialog ("you kicked me out of the coven" line; some profanitry) to get to seven. I struggled with these two areas. I simply rolled with it, even though it was careless on my part. I actually didn't think I'd finish - and technically, I didn't. Back to that 'kicked from the coven' line. If I had more time that wouldn't be Jacob's reason for going after her. That bit will be addressed in the rewrite.
I almost didn't bother to enter - as I only had four days to write it, as opposed to a week. While I found out about the OWC on Sunday, I wasn't released from the hospital until Monday night, and I was knocked out for most of Tuesday. On top of all that...the OWC was about witches and warlocks. As I said before, I was was getting a bit burned out by the subject matter.
But I had thought up a logline for The Writers Challenge, and if I made the killer a Warlock/modern day evil sorcerer, it could work. A few eagle eyes spotted the loosely reworked logline.
This 'story' is not bad. Definitely schlocky horror - and entertaining at that.
The writing does need quite a bit of fixing though...but I expect you might know that given it has a rushed feel to it and lots of little errors/typos etc.
Sometimes when I write action, I don't rush it. I simply put into a pace. If I don't then I tend to get 'prosy', I was of two minds in my four days that I wrote this (see previous comment) only some dialog and the final scene was put in at the last minute to at least give a seven page count. My first thought was was to have Jacob do some sort of astral projection, but I would need more time on that - maybe another week, so I went with something I haven't really tried yet on a OWC.
You are 100& spot on. I went over the top,bloodbath with exploitation up to the neck. The problem was one half of the work does not match the other in that tone. That's my fault.
Glad you liked it though. Sad to say it isn't my best...and this version will go the way of the dodo. It'll still be a hort script, but it will involve my original gut feeling regarding Jacob Tophet (hey, I cut the dude out of one script...I'm putting him in this rewrite). So in the near future I'll make this a whole lot better.
It'll also no longer be called The Withered. I'm thinking of other titles.
Ther is however, one comment that troubles me. There's only one typo in tis old draft you see before you.
Why did Sara end up in a sanitarium? Did she imagine the whole thing?
Lots and lots of typo's and grammar issues. The writing is a little too choppy. Some details are lost which makes some of the action confusing.
The crazy house was a last minute addition. It was one of the few actually rushed things. Looking at it, while the event did drive her bonkers (and a possible story in between) I totally understand why it wasn't as effective. Some interpetation was that the event was a bit of BS and will be MIA in the rewrite. Some of that dialog too.
You'll note I highlighted something you wrote. There was only one typo in the script and one pointed it out in the comments.. But sometimes a rule of thumb for some is if there's one there's bound to be another. If I'm going to get a bit defensive about this draft - it will be in this area. I'm not going to defend it entirely. There are some valid points and I've done much better. I'm also rewriting this and shape it up because there was some confusion overall.
Yeah. Blood clot in the left leg and a bactirial infection. I was in the hospital for two weeks. Watched a lot of Law & Order and NCIS marathons during the night while being poked and doped.
I try to put time into my reviews, but I don't think the writer put much time into this story. It feels thrown together five minutes before the deadline. I mean I don't think the writer even tried, which kind of aggravates me, because I am taking time off from regular writing to try to read through all these.
The ending was obviously tacked on at 2 minutes to deadline.
I did try. Didn't quite get there. And you are right to some degree. The ending, which I now disown, was pretty much tacked on along with a few lines of dialog nonsense to fill up a page. The rest of it wasn't that rushed. The pace when the hands break loose was meant to read frantic, however. It also went over the top and it gets some love, but not all.
First off, the writing style is a little hard to get through for me and leads to some awkward phrases. Such as on page 4, “Frees her bra.” Does this mean she’s topless now? And now that I’m picturing them naked with safety goggles on, I’m assuming any dark humor is intentional.
Ok, so the concept here is pretty good. I went into this kind of knowing what to expect and it delivered story-wise. I could sense the humor and the energy you wanted from this.
The writing style, however is not my favorite. It left me struggling to visualize a lot of what was going on. Elements of the scene would tend to come out of nowhere, rather than being set-up and then payed off. It also would have been good to have a little more back story on who these people are and how they find themselves here.
Over all a good effort though. Congrats!
Yeah. I've done better. And looking at it while I started rewriting, the script is like an apple and an orange, so to speak. Some dialog was added to get with the over the top tone of the orange part. But it's clear (even from my retrospect) that it still didn't mix. It wasn't my original intention, it just went that direction overall.
Some liked it, others didn't. Fair enough. But in the end if it's something I wouldn't want to film, why should anyone rlse want to? I do need to dial it down a notch.
You lost me when the hands came to life. Stuff like that's been done before, and I never cared for it much then.
However, I still think this can be something special if you toy around with it some more. Just my opinion, of course.
Stuff like the hands...yeah severed hands crawling around,..I don't know if that's a valid point. Sure, there's stuff like that in other films, but does that make it invalid? Not entirely. It's your subjective least favorite horror gag, that's all. I will admit it wasn't by first thought to go there, but I wound up doing so.
That said, I am working/reworking this and making it better. Will the hand job still be in there? Maybe a little, but I most likely wiill reel it in a bit, as some of it did go over, above and beyond the call of duty.