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The melodramatic reaction of the girls to the dolls would be amusing, if people didn't start dying because of them. Diet, not murder is the answer, if you're that concerned about other people's reaction to your appearance. I think this premise might work if it were the dolls that did the killing for their owners
For me, there was too much going on. Lots of loose strands. I get the horror vibe. I don’t read loglines, I just jump in and see what I can feel. I didn’t realise this was suppose to have comedy. That was a surprise.
There's nothing funny in this. It's just teenagers doing teenager things. The larger criteria problem is the psychiatrist's office is barely used at all, it doesn't even feature until well into page 4. That's not meeting the challenge requirements, especially since it's used like any other room with a door.
Way too many characters, and they all sound like. They all act alike. Not one of them stands out.
Most of it is pure exposition, and even when the "horror" gets going it's mostly describing what happens off-screen. I don't see how they can brush off someone's dad getting killed and continue on like nothing happened in what seems like minutes later. And what stabs? They saw severed arms, where's the rest of the body? Aria is the daughter, right? (It's so hard to tell.) And she's sitting casually in the very next scene and doesn't even speak a word, has zero actions...she's suddenly a background character in what should be her reaction scene if you want to keep up pretenses until the "twist."
The ending makes no sense at all. If the girls were behind it, why did Aria scream when she found Henry's arms? And they were killing their parents because of bobblehead dolls? My God, I'm shocked the parents weren't killed before then over something else just as trivial. But Sophie isn't in on it, she's surprised, and suddenly she has to choose which of her parents to kill because they share the same initials? Where do you go from there? Do they commit suicide on stage for their crazy fans? Actually, I hope so, that would be terrific.
Let this one go, dust yourself off, and give us more in the next round.
First, second, and third, I want to thank everyone who muscled through this and gave good feedback. As I mentioned in the contest thread, I typed this thing up in a rush, and it shows. It probably scored better than if I'd missed the week entirely.
This was an attempt at horror and comedy. I'm not strong in either genre, and other writers did orders of magnitude better at horror, at comedy, and at fusing. I thought a sixteen-year-old girl serial killing adults was a funny inversion of typical horror. Given that I know little-to-nothing about the horror genre, maybe a murderous teen is old hat? In any case, no one else got the joke.
The story ran about seven and a half pages at first, and apparently I cut it down badly. The more-or-less original version is at this link if anyone is interested (I re-arranged a couple lines for clarity). If there was some value in revising it, I'd probably stretch out the time between the deaths to build tension and suspense.
The girls were supposed to be differentiated, but that didn't come across well on the page. Here's a primer:
Sophie - business-savvy but non-empathic band leader Tara - has impostor syndrome and she's relapsing into bulimia Aria - pure artist in her own little world Ruby - protector and quasi-parent to the other girls
They'd be easier to distinguish on screen (different color streaks in their hair, different ethnicities, whatever), but how they are distinguished isn't important to the story. Their roles in the band were cut completely from the five-pager. Sophie was the keyboardist, Tara the drummer, Aria the vocalist, and Ruby the guitarist.
"S.T.A.R." got shortened to "Star" as I was trying to save space, which probably led to some of the confusion over the girls' names.
PK got the gist of the story. My intention was to misdirect the audience into thinking Tara - who obviously has some psychological issues - is the one who snapped. She's conveniently off-screen when each attack seems to occur. Actually, it's Ruby who snapped from the self-imposed stress of watching over the others. Reading back over the whittle-down nub that I submitted, I see there weren't enough clues left about Ruby. Bad editing on my part. She's clearer about her motives in the longer version linked above.
Matthew, you spotted a mistake I noticed shortly after the deadline. That "Mom!" was originally Tara's line, in reaction to Ruby revealing herself but Tara's Mom being distracted by the phone, and got mooshed together in my attempt to fit this in five pages. Simply changing "Mom!" to "Hey!" would have fixed the problem, but I missed it.
henb, you probably weren't the only one who missed that the woman in the labcoat was Dr. Hayes. I thought it was obvious so trimmed the description, but it wasn't obvious. The slightly longer version describes her nametag.
Kinda gave up on Sean's original parameters... more than 5 pages and no longer trying to blend horror with comedy. I think this version could work as straight horror with just the right music and visuals, but what I'd really like to do is find a way to make it actually read scarier.