From The Leyd To the Shed

((Wo)((M/m)an)), I appreciate that you at least worked in the realm of Horror, Horror comedy, but there are no single signs of other main genres…
here, it was absolutely clear what this is. Nice ironic world-building and I like your own version of hijacking a plane. I liked the whole satiric momentum, which throughout felt deliberately placed and eventually escalated in the Hezekiah situation. The script just felt overall self-aware. Not a true thinker for sure, however it steps its path in the madhouse segment.  Thumbs up.

Very interesting story. At first I was like "This ain't horror." Then on page 4 that Dude transformed into a hairy winged monster and my interest peaked. Pretty cool stuff.

I'm a little confused on the mythology behind the monster. Why does the hand sanitizer turn him back into a human?

You should give Tech-Bro a proper name.

Writing is solid, nothing spectacular, but it got the job done. Decent character work and dialog, too.

Pretty solid effort here.

I hate being too critical, but I have to be honest.

It didn't work for me.

Not suggesting a page 1 re-write here.

While I thought the majority of the action lines were tight and fast.  Nice!  Unfortunately, it was not the case for some of the dialogue.  It needs tweaked.

The conflict feels false.  The deal with the CPR, the passangers reactions, ect... not saying you've artificially injected conflict wherever the scene turns by any means, but... this felt more like a comedy than horror.  If so, maybe that explains some things.

I really wanted to like this one.  Good job for competing.-Andrea

This has a great mythology to it. It's a very ambitious story for five pages, it could have used some room to breathe, but it's not a bad effort.

The antagonist was a cookie cutout, the logic of everything was questionable, and the writing could have been clearer around the action. I did like the use of the hand sanitizer, it felt organic, it wasn't a MacGuffin, and it was instrumental in the story. And I had no idea it would be kosher, but apparently that's a thing too.

It has its flaws, but overall I like it.

So, this one was mine. I'm glad that see that many of you seemed to like this one, whether it scored well or not.

I will immediately send a sheyd to go eat the S.T.A.R. girls from round one, which everyone should like

Jeff, only one flight attendant had lines, so she was "the" flight attendant. Originally had her as the Head Flight Attendant, but dialed it back to save a bit of space and fit "the" in front every time she was mentioned. I got hammered last round for switching between "X" and "the X".

Of course, now that I think about it... I could have avoided the whole mess by giving her a nice, short name

I could probably have found a way to squeeze in a name for the Tech-Bro as well. Calling him a "tech bro" shorthands a lot of description about a casually-dressed techno-chauvinist who's probably a white male, and his mention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster specifies that he is an atheist. "Pastafarians" tend to have a broad (if not particularly deep) knowledge of world religions, all the better to mock them. Such a person would definitely know that the Jewish sabbath begins at sundown on Friday.

The annoying label "Tech-Bro" only had to appear once, then I could have used some normal-sounding name (or a Matrix-style online handle) after that.

JE and Matthew wondered how someone could come up with this story in 72 hours. I didn't invent the sheydim or the idea of ultra-orthodox Jews going stir-crazy on a delayed flight. The real story-making here was putting the airplane (with its ability to travel from day to night and back) and the idea of cleansing (hand sanitizer) together to hang some dire consequences on breaking the Kosher rules.

Valid criticism from several folks that the horror is kinda weak in this one. You've got the hijacker who demonstrated his power to knock down Kaleb, and then set his group up for psychological torture with about a three-hour wait before breaking their religious laws. Oh, and there's also a monster. Wasn't tied for top "meets criteria" so obviously didn't meet some folks definition of horror.

He was supposed to be demonstrating a new, simple way to take over any fly-by-wire aircraft. One guy, one laptop, one dead-man's switch. Usually when a new attack emerges, regulators ban or restrict the tool. Trying to ban laptops from flights would be basically impossible.

Kaleb and his crew would typically be better equipped to handle a marauding sheyd, but they can't get that kind of equipment through an airport security gate. Wasn't clear due to space-saving cuts, but Hezekiah was in the middle of their block of nine seats to keep him surrounded by caretakers while in transit... not that this containment strategy worked.

You'd think by now movie characters would realize that Plan A never works, and they should have a Plan B ready.

I also had to cut the bit about Kaleb's "black hat" being different from any widely-known sect's hat style. Not sure what the sheydim-velderer hat might look like, but it'd probably include some stylistic nod to the sheydim's horn or wings.

Certain sects of ultra-Orthodox Jews have been known to get violent when their taboos are threatened, so Kaleb's knee-to-balls move would not be unprecedented. Besides, his day job is dealing with things way scarier than this hacker. It's also decent odds that all but the youngest of Kaleb's group are veterans of the I.D.F.

Technically, sheyd and sheydim are Yiddish while the proper Hebrew would have been shed and shedim... but the former has a much spookier false-cognate in English. In modern usage, the term has evolved to the rough equivalent of "ghosts and goblins," but two older myths were more specific. One applied the term sheydim to Adam's monster-children with Lilith, the other applied that term to a Sixth Day creation after Man that was also somewhere between beasts and angels. I went with the second option, and those beings were described as winged, hairy, and with a single horn.

One bit of the script that needs fixing is describing the sheydim as "unfinished." From an outsider's point of view, that's exactly what they are... God wasn't done with them yet when the Sixth Day drew to a close. On the Seventh Day, He rested. He did not go back and fix them up on an Eighth Day, and this is supposed to feed into the notion that a task interrupted by the Sabbath is considered completed. So, a true believer would have used some word other than "unfinished," but by the end of 72 hours I hadn't come up with a better way to say it... and still haven't in the time since (at least without cramming in even more exposition in a short space).

In my limited research, I couldn't find out exactly what was "unfinished" or lacking about the sheydim. They were described as not inherently evil, and could even choose to live according to God's laws. With this annoying hole in the middle of my source material I did the same thing any decent writer on a deadline would do... I made something up! And thus, keeping with the Kosher-with-dire-consequences theme I decided sheydim require outside guidance. There's nothing in the world setup that demands all sheydim end up Jewish, presumably any sufficiently strict set of holy laws could work.

So keep this in mind when you delay a Jewish family's trip on a Friday, or interrupt a meditating Buddhist, or wipe the ash off a Catholic's forehead... they might turn into a monster and bite your face off

Quoted from FrankM I could probably have found a way to squeeze in a name for the Tech-Bro as well. Calling him a "tech bro" shorthands a lot of description about a casually-dressed techno-chauvinist who's probably a white male, and his mention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster specifies that he is an atheist.

Worse... a New Atheist.