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The Torture Scene by Matt Layden - Short - Two men in one room. One is tied up, the other sits in front of him with a black bag. One of these men will be tortured and one will die. But who? And why? 8 pages. - html, format
A lot of these torture scripts are popping up now. And to be honest i think it will be overdone very soon. But i'll put that aside and read your script.
Here is what i think:
At first everything will think "oh great a Saw ripoff" but i think you did an excellent job with making this NOT seem like Saw. Good job on that.
Your format is excellent so i won't bitch on that.
The dialouge could be better. But it gets the point across. I would say it's average but if were to be filmed i'm sure people would get a few unintentional laughs out of it.
Why is DAVE always capital? And SAM as well. You only need to have it capital when we first meet the character.
Okay overall it was JUST OKAY. It could of been a lot better but i saw this to be a lot worse.SO you suprised me because i thought it would be bad. But it was only a little better then bad. Good attempt at a torture story though.
Well, I liked the premise. It does have a SAW feel to it. Don't know if that was your inspiration. You have a few typos here and there but they're not hard to notice si I won't bother you with it.
The problem I had with this is time. When you put a timer in a script, everything shuld revolve around it. The characters should react to it accordingly. I think that the opposite happens here. You put in the timer when it really didn't matter to the victim anyway so no suspense was created. You see?
If you could put it in earlier and make the victim actually believe he has five minutes to live, well, that would make it a lot more anxious of an environment. And the fact that the man in black is talking and talking and wasting time, then your character shoudl get angered at this too.
I liked the fact that you don't really know who killed who. That's a proper ending.
I mostly agreed with what Andrew romance and Leanordjenkis wrote. Except I think it more closely resembles Hostel than Saw. And the part with the five minutes between tortures is out of the middle short film "Cut" out of the movie "Three Extremes", a horror movie from Japan...I think. But I really dig your style, very similar to my own in fact, your format is really good which is a relief. Dave and Sam shouldn't be in caps all the time however, and the main problem I have with it I guess would be the time in which you did it. I really liked your dialogue, and I thought it was really great considering you did it in five minutes, but think it could be A LOT better if you put more time into it, and develop it into say a 20-30 page short. It could have been better if we knew more about what Dave did rather than just imply what he's been doing, more unique torturing every five minutes would have been better, just the drill is old hat. Plus, there was no relevance to the clock, especially when he said tat he would torture him but not necessarily kill him. It seems he would have had more"fun" with Dave before killing him. I thought it ended too abruptly, and Dave seemed to take it in stride too much at the end. I also didn't like the ambiguous ending, it just happened to fast. Maybe if you would have had Dave doing something with his hands or something like that during their talking to make it seem like he could get loose, but it just didn't fit with everything. Otherwise, not bad for 10 minutes. I enjoyed it very much.
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Thanks for the words everyone who read. Now, before anyone says anything about the next short, I did put all their names in capitals again. I wrote it before this one was up, it's called The Novel.
I'm thinking of writing a longer version of The Torture Scene and sharpening all the edges. Obviously I'll put more time on it then just ten minutes.
Your title hooked me enought to read your script. My first impression was a take off of the "SAW" theme.
In the first two paragraphs you introduce Dave and a Man. It might be better if you give the man a name. Also, a bit of an introduction to the man would help out. Remember characters are not flat but layered should be presented in three d.
I did like your dialog. Someone else said they didn't so you can see that feedback is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Your ending was weak. It just suddenly stopped. And if this were a torture scene you didn't really torture Dave enough. One cut over his eye is not enough. Tear him up. Get creative with his torture.
I liked it. And I liked the ending also. Though agreeing with other people, not much torture. But I did like most of it. Just like everyone else, the first time I read the summary, I thought it was going to be exactly like Saw, but then it wasn't.
Yeah, I saw a bit of Saw early on. A bit of Hostel. This scene also reminds me of the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. Very talky, but I like your command. Conversational, but not bland. I like Sam's dialogue better than Dave's. Some of Dave's talk early on doesn't always ring true. But then again, I didn't know his character at that point. Once it's clear Dave is a man of influence, I think I buy into his words.
Start that timer from the get-go. Have Sam refer to it often. It's the old ticking bomb routine, so use it to your advantage. Why is the drill scene at the end done offscreen? This is a torture story. Or are we the one's getting tortured in anticipation? I think Sam's got to make the head cut early. Then as each minute passes, he does something else. Each torture different. A cut here, a pull there, a burn after that, you get the idea. You've got 5 minutes to mix talk with torture. Get to it.
This seems like a prelude to something bigger. Maybe not. It kind of works on its own. Great work on format and the technical things. Really impressed with your style. Will read more of your stuff as it comes.
I didn't much care for this one. The title is misleading as there isn't any torture at all. Most of it was just dialogue, which isn't neccesarily bad but I didn't think the characters were very good at all. It would help to explain what exactly Dave does for a living. It's not enough just to say he cheats people out of money for a living. I don't think his reasoning for what he does was very realistic either. If he's trying to keep himself from getting tortured, I don't think it'd help to say he takes pride in ripping off jerks. Even if they are rich folks who've never worked a day in their life, he's still admitting to ripping people off which is the very reason why he's being tortured. Also, Sam says he wants to know something from Dave but never says what it is and he says he's good at his job yet he ends up killing Dave without getting any information from him. I assume the end was supposed to be an ambiguous one as well but it's quite obvious that Sam killed Dave. Maybe if Dave broke out of his chair, the ending would have a better effect. Not much else to say. Good effort but I think it needs a lot of work.
I guess I liked it. I agree that you could of used more torture. And I didn't like how the names were in capitals. But i did like the ending, liked how we didn't know who it was for sure.