Thanks for the read TAnthony,

Frankie is a little more mature than most 12 year olds, but losing a parent at a young age can make you grow up quicker, or do the total opposite, so I chose for him to be a little more mature than others his age.

I know things don't start off right away, I kind of wanted it that way, I waited for the first kill to happen halfway through the second act, I wanted to see how long I could hold it off for, maybe I held off a little too long.

There are some bits that need to be trimmed, like some of the dialogue you mentioned.  That will be something I will have to improve on.

As for the ending I am still trying to figure it out, I know it is kind of a let down, so hopefully I will be able to come up with something.

Thanks again for your read and comments.  I should have down and dirty done by Sunday or Monday at the latest.

Hey theboywhocouldfly,

SPOILERS!

I got to finally finish the script. Sorry it took so long to finish. I enjoyed it most of all. Found sentimality as an important issue in this tale which kinda touched me since it involves with an important relationship: a son with his mother. That developed well throughout the script.

The dialgoue was somewhat believeable in certain scenes. It seemed controlled. For instance, the scene when Stevie and the stranger fight, I that dailgoue is kinda weak.  

I found the scene where the villian is revealed sickly hilarious showing all the bruises and beatings he took. Very funny.

What I think you should develop more is the dislike between the Dad's children with Helen since it's not revealed so very clearly. The fact that they call her helen is alright but didnt show much. Not as much as the relationship with the babysitter.

The ending where Helen revealed her intentions and her son completely surprised me in a negative way it just came out as such as a surprise. I encourage that you try to develop this idea. Allow the audience some inforamtion about what's going with the characters.

Hope this helps. Need any clarification or more questions, contact me.
Gabe


    

Hey Gabe, thanks for the read and comments, I didn't even see this....LOL, I gotta keep up on things.

This was my first script and still needs some work, especially the ending, I have a few idea's for that.

I think you are correct about Helen and the kids and that does need to be explored further, so thanks for your advice.

I'm glad you enjoyed most of it.  Hopefully I can fix this up and make it better,

Thanks again.

What a fantastic script this was. Whispers is your most accomplished work to date, Jordan. High praise is deserved here.

***** SPOILER WARNING *****

What I liked:

The pacing was top notch. This ties into my point about your characters, so I'll try and tie the two together here. First, your pacing. You allowed this script room to breath. For a thriller, it's a big risk to not have any thrills or kills for about the first hour or so, but that is what happens here. Of course, in a conventional horror movie, this would've been death. Who wants to see boring, cliched teens babbling on for an hour about whatever mundane monologues the writers happen to pull out of their asses? I don't. Here, you've managed to avoid that by creating characters that are likable, that ring true to actual human beings. There were a few people from my own life who popped into my head while reading your characters. This is an effective device, because you managed to manipulate me into caring about your characters, so that when the blood starts to pour and the bodies start to pile up, the horror was more shocking, it had more of an impact. Which brings me promptly to my third point of praise.

The writing was quick and snappy. As you'll recall, one of my major grips with your other script Underneath was that characters talked when they didn't need to, and kept on talking after their point had already been made. Here, you don't have this problem. You took your time building to the slaughterings in the house, and when they finally arrived, you did not disappoint. There were some disgusting, gory things here, made all the more disgusting by the fact that I had actually invested in some of these characters. I didn't want some of them to die (Stevie) but you killed most of them anyway, which was completely brutal and also necessary. I get that you were trying to be a little more emotionally deep with this one, but you still had to have some horror in there, otherwise what's the point? The emotion was good, which brings me to my next point, man I'm getting good at the segues.

The dream sequence with Frankie and his mother. This scene was extraordinary, my favourite scene in the script. This scene would've been incredibly effetive wirth older characters, but because you used Frankie, a small child, his innocence added another level of power to the scene. You had the balls to leave the slaughter in the background for a few pages, and focus on this, something so emotional and so raw. That showed real courage. It's also a tribute to your skills that this scene didn't come off as either too sentimental or that it didn't slow down the tension outside of Frankie's dream. I know other people have probably mentioned this scene already, but it's certainly worth nothing one more time.

The ending (no good segue there) was pretty good. The twist, I didn't see coming. I was wondering who the masked killer was all the way through and when his mask finally did come off in the end, I was not disappointed. Perhaps a few subtle set-ups throughout the script might be of help (I don't know where you would put them without them being too obvious, but you're the writer, not me). It was a good climax, a good ending. The reappearace of the mother was absolutely perfect. I know maybe you weren't going for this, but I felt a little subplot with Christine and her faith going on. A crisis of faith, as it were. She said earlier she doesn't believe Frankie that he saw his mother in the dream, and then she's there and she believes. Perhaps you could flesh this out a little more in future drafts (if you're even doing any), I think its so far in the background here that you didn't even intend to do it. If so, that's fine. I just think that giving Christine something to do when her mother reappears would add another dimension to the characters.

What I disliked:

I hated Jacob. But he died, so it's okay. Another tribute to your character construction, I actually hated one of them, instead of just intellectually knowing that he was a character I was supposed to hate. That's just plain old, simple good writing there.

I can't really think of anything else I don't like. So moving on.

Final thoughts:

Whispers is a bloody, scary, and emotional story. Most slashers go for the kill, this goes for the heart. On this level, you have succeeded admirably. Jordan, you have accomplished what no other script on this site has accomplished before: it's been more than a few hours since I finished reading it, and I'm still thinking about it. And that is the biggest success of all. Very, very, very, very well done.  


Matt.

Yo Matt, you're gonna have to send me a link to your scripts cause I'm starting to feel like a shit not reading any of yours.

Thanks for the read and comments.  This is under a re write, the ending will have the biggest change, I already know what I want to change, hopefully it will work better and be a bit darker.

Thanks again.

Hey Jordan,

Looks like you're up for the last of the first round.  Took me a little longer than I had hoped fo rto get to this, but the new job and a writing assignment is keeping me quite occupied.

The scene in Frankie's bedroom was moving along nicely, suspense wise, but when the window blew the window open it took me out of it for a second.  Is this the house from The Wizard of Oz?  Most windows open up and down....if you want to startle him maybe a shutter or tree branch can tap up against the window.

Jeez, Mrs. Bergman's a preachy old broad, ain't she?

I can see you're really working on the character development in this one, which is good, but I think you may be overdoing it just a bit.  I'm on page 35 right now and there hasn't been any action outside of some creaks and Frankie's dream.  At 107 pages I think you could trim a little of this stuff of the front.

Holy shit, the Stranger's The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.  Glad to see he got out of the basement.

Stevie's lines to the stranger outside of the house seem a little far fetched.  If somebody threw me across the room into a coffee table just a few minutes prior, I'd probably say "I'll be seeing you, kind sir" and then get my ass out of dodge.  I'd only threaten to rip out someone's heart and show it to them if I were Chuck Norris.  Stevie's death is reminiscint of Zombie as well, but it fits.

I think if I were to actually see the Madison death scene, I would laugh my ass off and replay it about six times.  That would be classic.

Why didn't they think to grab any of the tools in the basement for use as weapons though?

It's funny I decided to read this on the day of the big motive discussion.  I was starting to wonder if this guy was ever goign to have any kind of motive, and it turns out that it came right at the end.  I'd lose the part where Helen grabs Frankie, though.  Based on her plan and the rage she was in, she would most likely justcut his throat right away.

I thought this was pretty good.  The core story was pretty much in line with most films of this genre, but the interesting twist, actually dual twist, made it that much better.

I thought your dialgoue worked for the most part, but I noticed in the earlier part of the script that you had the characters excessivley addressing each other by their first names.  It's best to use this sparingly since it's not that common in everyday conversation.

The pacing in this also felt a little weird to me.  Like I said above, you took a little longer to develop the characters and get the story rolling than is probably necessary, and then the last 25 pages or so of the script is really rapid fire.  I was alright with the rapid fire part for the most part, but I really think you could stand to trim about 10-15 pages off of this, mostly at the front.

Anyway, a good read, and a nice spin on the teen slasher flick.

Hey Mike thanks for the read, glad you liked most of it.

About the window, that is how the windows are at my mum's house, they don't open up and down but in and out, that was where that idea came from.

I did model the killer to look like the gimp, at least in the outfit, I thought a black S&M outfit would be cool...hehehe.

Madison's death was probably my favourite.  I wanted one big laugh kill in it

I am making a change to the end of the film and I think it will work out a lot better, little more gruesome.

I am also planning on cutting some more out at the beginning as well, I'm gonna take the video store scene out completely, and trim a few others as well.

I also didn't want there to be a kill till the middle of act 2, I thought it would be cool to wait for it because the last act is almost non stop blood shed.

Anyways thank you very much for the read and your comments.

Hey Jordan,

There were parts of this that I thought were a nice twist on the teenage slasher genre, but when I finished this up I felt let down.

It started out routinely for me, what with the folks going out of town and then Christine tells her girlfriends and they're all horny pothead bitches and then the two guys hear about it and one of them is this douchebag guy blah blah blah.  

The night of the get together, though, I felt really swayed from the routine teenage slasher characteristics...which is good!  There weren't too many characters so everyone was easy to keep track of, the pace flowed well from there, and overall it was enjoyable to read...but then the killings happened, and that's when the reading got kind of frustrating for me.

When Jacob died I pretty much knew where this was going and that one by one, everyone else was going die.  And it wasn't just the swaying back into the routine teenage slasher genre that irked me, but all the running around and stuff and "can we get out!" got really blah to me.  I was also waiting for something about the stranger to come to be revealed, but that never happened.  In a sense, that kind of frustrated me as well because for a while he's just this peeping tom that shows up everywhere, and when he's killing everyone it's like...okay?  I mean, I didn't feel anything.  It was just...basic, ya know?  Not evil, not good, not creepy, just kind of there.

The twist at the end, well, the idea was good, but the execution didn't do it for me either.  We see Helen for like 2 pages in the beginning and we don't even know anything about her character.  Then at the end it turns out she masterminded this and wants the dude's life insurance.  While it did come from completely out of the blue, I wasn't as shocked or thrilled as I was probably supposed to be.  I mean at the end the stranger was just that - a stranger.  He killed people.  I didn't feel much else to him.

Characterwise I thought you had a good bunch here.  Even though Alexis, Madison, and Nicole were pothead bitches, I didn't dislike them as people.  Jacob was annoying at times, but I think that was the intention.  The relationship between Christine and Frankie was very well fleshed out.  You did an excellent job of creating that atmosphere of sentimentality and what's even better is that you didn't turn them against each other.  A lot of movies that create strong brother-sister bonds like that eventually have them at each other's throats at some point during the flick, but not here, which I thought was a very nice touch because it made them feel authentic.

Frankie was definitely a fun kid.  Ya know, come to think of it, you do a really good job at developing kids in your stories.  I remember in "Kindness of Strangers" you had some very well developed children, but I think Frankie is your best.  Christine I felt was a very respectable heroine, too.  Had morals, had respect, wasn't a bitch...good stuff.

So, honestly, this wasn't my favorite piece by you.  I think its got good intentions and the foundation is there, but it goes from teen slasher to unique flick and back to teen slasher for a 2:1 ratio which wasn't enough to salvage it for me.  Keep your characters going, as I think that's your strong point with this story.  Hey, I think this completes my readings of the J-Rock collection!  Yes!  Buckets of Blood 2 next, right?? muwahaha

hey G Spot, thanks for the read.  This was my very first attempt at a feature length script and I went with the "mad slasher" Genre, probably my age and I was into them at the time, so ya, it is not that all original.  I am working on making it stand out a little more than just an average hack'n' slash, right now it is kinda like 10 little Indians, one by one each teen is killed.  I have changed the ending a lot and there will be more will Helen in the script so hopefully it will add something to the ending, which will be totally different, gonna be a bit darker.  Thanks for the comments, I will try and put them to some use.

Hi Jordan I decided to stop by and give your story a read and here is my review on it.

1.Ok I noted that this is suppose to be a horror/thriller piece but I'm currently on page 25 and havent seen a lick of either. So I would suggest that you put something within the first 5 pages to atleast confirm this as your genre.

2. You have a couple of grammar mistakes also within the first 25 pages but none are turnoffs. And I'm more of a story person so as long as your story is good I will continue reading. But as far as speaking of your story it isn't bad but it lacks tremendously in the genre you put it in. I feel like I'm reading a dramatized porno at times with all the sex and masturbation comments everyone is making. I.E Mrs.B, Christines friends

3. So with this said I would suggest you start back with the beginning of this story and give me some thrills man. Or give me some horror. I mean not a lot though just enough to confirm that I'm reading a thriller/horror script.
Peace Vaproductions