Hey, Pia. Thanks for reading. Sorry for the delayed response.
"Just a curious thought. Why is Ethan the one digging, when Ben is the strong thick country boy and Ethan is the overweight out of shape one?"
Simple. Ethan is dumb and is being manipulated into doing the dirty work by Ben.
"Btw, why is the hole 3' x 5'? Seems kind of small for a casket, no?"
Meant to imply that this grave is VERY old. I read somewhere that people used to be much shorter half a century back. Whether that's true or not, I'm not too sure. lol
"Another thought, I'd ditch the bugs inside the corpse, unless this person was buried recently."
Yeah, I'm aware that's not very realistic. Just a bit of a cinematic liberty on my part.
"Ah, punk rock. Would you believe when I was 13, I listened to Sex Pistols and I had green hair!!!"
I knew I liked you for a reason!
"He looks like he's possessed, but he sounds like Ben, not the evil spirit."
Whenever possessed Ben speaks, the collage of whispers is meant to be heard behind his voice. I suppose I should have made that more clear.
"Would've been helpful to know Tommy and Maddison were siblings earlier than page 29'"
When they are introduced, they both have the same last name. Then, in the same scene, I tried to give them some sibling-like back and forth. Maybe I can make it more obvious with their introductions.
"Lots of ''The darkness is overwhelming''."
Still got some bad habits.
I'll clean this up.
"Page 33, Ben again talks a lot, but the more he talks, the less scary he gets. I also don't get why he's talking about Flash being a wild one. It looked to me she died pretty quickly."
Agreed that I went a bit overboard with Ben's dialog. As for his comments about Flash, that's just him trying to get under Cort's skin. But still, Ben wouldn't know about Cort and Flash's relationship, so I will cut that.
"He retaliates with a brutal kick between Maddison's legs. I would assume you mean something similar to a kick in the balls? If that's what you mean, I don't think that would do much damage. Getting kicked there doesn't feel any different than getting kicked anywhere else. Just saying."
It'd still hurt. Lol. I didn't mean to imply that it'd have the same effect as a Dude gettin' kicked in the nuts. Maddison even jumps back up pretty quickly.
"I think the main thing needing some work, at least IMHO, is Ben. I don't understand why he does what he does. I want to know more about the evil spirit and the book."
I originally had a lot more backstory for Ben, or rather, the spirit that possesses Ben. But the script was running too long and I figured it'd make the spirit creepier if we knew next to nothing about it. Perhaps this was a miscalculation on my part. Good news is that I've got plenty of deleted material for a potential feature version.
Thanks again for reading, Pia. Happy you didn't hate it.