Hometime by JD Long - Short, Horror - A girl breaks curfew and decides to take a short cut through a quarantined  street. 3 pages - pdf, format

After an evening of dinner and celebrating...meaning a few beers, I decided to read a short. I saw this one and thought I'd give it a try. It was only 3 pages after all.

I opened this script up and my heart sank. I wanted to close it right then and there. Why? Your formatting is not good. Usually when I see this kind of formatting, it tells me the writer is new and more often than not, the story is on par with the formatting. However, since it's only 3 pages I decided to ignore formatting and concentrating on story only. So, I did...

My initial thoughts proved to be right...again. This story is very thin. It's basically a girl who we never even know the name of being attacked by a zombie after breaking curfew and when she gets home, she finds out she's now a zombie too. My suggestion would be to first of all ditch that one phone call where she tells us basically everything. She tells us about the curfew and the repellant. These are not necessary things to tell us. In fact it's all exposition. You're telling stuff we need to learn on our own through actions and if necessary subtly told via dialogue. For example, she tells us about the curfew, but shortly thereafter we see a sign that tells us about the curfew. The sign is all we need to see to get that part. Her telling us about it is just repeating information. Use the phone call to instead add mystery, drama and character development. Not tell us what we can already see.

You could also study action writing a little bit to drive that part of the script home visually a little better.

Another suggestion would be to add something that has a bit of an emotional impact. Make us care a little bit about this girl. Right now we don't. She just comes across as a ditz who ignores curfews. Give us something about her that we can care about so we at least have someone to root for and feel something when she turns into a zombie.

I think we also need a reason for why she's out this late. Maybe a friend was in trouble and she had to visit that friend? Maybe her car broke down so she has to try to get home through this zombie infested area by foot? Whatever, give us a reason for the situation and try to raise the stakes.

Welcome to SS. This is a great place to learn screenwriting. Especially if you're willing to learn.    

My thoughts, for what they are worth

I'm with Angry Bear... the formatting is immeadiately challenging, you need to read some scripts, maybe some screenwriting articles/books etc.

I'm not being picky BUT if you have the greatest short in the world, you run the risk of a reader giving up before they discover it's so good.

So I'll leave the formatting and let you re-write it properly.

Story, like the idea of a repellant, I've seen a ton of zombie movies and not sure i've seen that device before. You could have had some fun with the aerosol not working, the nozzle jamming or something and built up the tension of the fight.

But you don't really build on it... the scene looks like it may be the pro-logue to something longer? As it is it feels fairly generic I'm afraid.