The Darkness Before (was The Monster) :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Excellent screenplay. This was easy to read, a good story, mature and intelligent. Thanks for posting your work here again. I really enjoyed it, so if I make a few points there is no adverse criticism intended.

[SPOILERS]

Now that 'CUT TO:' has been seen off with a shotgun there are moves to round up 'FADE IN' and 'FADE OUT' and run them out of Spec Script city. Format is not an issue here, it's professional as expected, but the problem opening straight into a sentence is it looks like pages are missing. It could begin OVER BLACK or include a title page.

As with your other scripts the writing is stylish and very assured, although I was jarred by 'God vomited here'. The hint that the couple have lost their child ("It will get better") goes too far by Clara spelling it out over the next page or so. I couldn't get sense from 'The meaning of the moves is lost in contrast'. I loved the description: 'Clara swims through the rooms'.

It is a little confusing that memories are triggered first by a six-year-old girl and then the vision of a five-year-old, yet we learn Samantha was sixteen when she died. It isn't specified what age she is all the other times she appears, except when she is 16 but acting ten years younger. It's understandable that the grieving father would have all sorts of memories, but sixteen is nearly a woman and he's going to lose her sometime. I'd have her frozen in memory at the point that she died, as a little girl. A six-year-old would need her daddy more than a teenager.

They run over the dog somewhere out on the highway, possibly hundreds of miles from their destination so it doesn't seem anything significant. It might be more effective if this happens the very moment they enter Mayflower, as a foreboding. Does the man that picks the dog up have to wear a white lab coat? It telegraphs the situation, if the idea is that there is a mad doctor going round reanimating dead things. Just the one example is enough. The dog doesn't figure in the way that it could, if the bodies were described as torn apart for example.

The endless debate around these here boards about slug line fragments and need for CONTINUOUS could usefully come here; there is INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT followed by a short flashback also at NIGHT, then I assumed he came back to scene as he woke up. He went through two INT. scenes without time of day to a CONTINUOUS and then offers to go out for some groceries. At night? That made no sense so I had to scroll way back to find I missed EARLY MORNING after the flashback without being certain the flashback was done. For the sake of a few words, I ask Why?

There are many niggling spellchecker errors that detract from the overall professionalism. When the script is this good it shouldn't matter, but it's ironic English teachers say get's and lets, and 'widow by the kitchen' has a certain meaning in that circumstance.

Dialogue throughout is terrific. I'm not a fan of beats or ellipses but that's a personal thing.

There is some good background with Abe and the shop and the evangelist on the radio ("Have you been saved/Not yet"). There is your theme and this scene could even come earlier, when they stop for gas for example. The school scenes are well done also, if perhaps the contrast between kids walking home and then being picked up is too literal. Not as much as the montage of door locks! 'Grey eyes return to blue' is a fantastic line, it sums up the situation exactly, but then we are told he is in the groove doing what he loves and knows best, in case we don't get it. When he announces the student is dead there might be a more shocked reaction than pointing out her empty desk. I'd have Cameryn make some connection in his introductory scene, where he thinks he sees Samantha. It would serve your story in several ways, as without knowing the victim the discovery of her body seems quite dispassionate despite the puking policeman.

It's not immediately clear that the Woman and the Creature are the same in his eyes. She appears in a first floor window and then the basement, and the creature on the street is just 'a figure'. It's referred to as the Creature, then described as a monster and elsewhere as a 'thing' when from the title and the summary we are all expecting a monster not just a thing. THE MONSTER has a more abstract meaning than being about this particular 'monster' of course, but it helps to be clear. The eyes without pupils is an arresting image so I'd use that for consistency - when he first sees the woman she can open her eyes suddenly, and he sees (or thinks he sees) the same eyes when he meets the slender figure in the storm. The eye looking back through Russ's peephole is red, so I didn't get what that was about as he backed away from the door, especially as he was happy to open it straight away soon after to the detectives.

As the detectives drop by to question the prime suspect, I'd expect them at least to press Russ on his whereabouts at the time of the murders. Clara can step in with an alibi so that suspicions are allayed, and with the course of the story her motives become clear.

The scene with the fly swat is a clever metaphor but not quite the thing because Reece smacking himself to splatter a fly on his cheek makes him seem more of an oddball than a threat. Fair enough if he snatches it into his palm like the guy in The Magnificent Seven. If I understand it, the plan was to do nothing and wait for the killer to make a mistake, but this simply allowed him to carry on killing?

When Russ puts on the zombie act it could be stronger if Dr Prather had given Clara the task of actually feeding him his pills. She could wipe the drool with a paper towel that he takes off her as she tidies away. Poor Russ. Then we see the pills in the towel as he crumples it into his fist, and we get that he's faking without the choppy scene going upstairs and staring at himself in the mirror. Left to his own devices she might even suspect he is not taking his medication.

The house across the street 'smiles' more than once, which robs it of menace, even if that usage is antithetic. Russ has a cell phone, and they can take pictures, so why not have him return from the house with the snap of the Creature on it, and when he tries to show Clara it is too blurry, saving the otherwise wasted trip to One Hour Photo. He could see Sally's picture nailed to a tree, or in the police station where he goes next. Reece can view all his photos on a PC. Perhaps inadvertently, something Russ has taken a snap of sets Reece on the right track.

I'd like a stronger responsibility for Clara. Perhaps she can be a trainee doctor, inspired by Dr Prather, there when her husband was brought in to the hospital. They have been working on an experiment and now is the perfect opportunity to test it. The way it is mentioned requires a leap in the family doctor happening to be surgeon at the hospital (in the place where the accident happened), being contacted by Clara on the off chance he can bring her husband back from the dead. It makes her directly culpable, serving her right. She might better be wholly unaware and the doctor took it on himself to use reanimation to spare his favorite the pain when the patient appears on his operating table. Good intentions gone bad.

By the ending it is hard not to draw a comparison with JACOB'S LADDER, in which there was a reason why his child called him but life held him back. You could arrange things a little differently so that Russ was actually responsible for his daughter's death, by drink driving instead of being caught in a random accident (if that is indeed what you meant I missed it). Now the monster is his drinking which haunts him, and each moment of stress is when hallucinations appear. He could make his peace with Clara through some circumstance and a symbolic banishing of booze to resolve his guilt.

I had no idea what may be meant by heading for Phoenix. Are they working through The Promethean Order and Dr Gilmore is next?