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The Snake Leaves by Raphael Howard - Short, Horror - A King uses three mysterious leaves to resurrect his deceased wife, but this decision has disastrous consequences. 10 pages
Based on the Brothers Grimm Fairytale "The Three Snake Leaves" - pdf, format
I don't mean to sound desperate, but it would be nice to receive some feedback quickly.
This script was inspired by the scripts I read in the October 2016 One Week Challenge. I plan to do a couple more short scripts in this vein in the near future...
The logline is a bit misleading. What are the disastrous consequences?
So a few things before I get to the story.
There is lots of passive writting, you don't need to get rid of all of it but there is too much here and it affects the read. Generally look for parts of the script where you have "is" followed by a word ending in "ing". There are lots of articles on passive writing you can Google. Other people will tell you not to worry about it at all so what you do is you choice.
You only need to capitalize your characters the first time you introduce them, it really affects the read to have them capitalized every time and it serves no purpose.
You start almost every action block with a capitalized name. Try changing the perspective from which you are writting to stop the script feeling like a grocery list.
It's quite over written in parts, for example, when you describe how the snake gets chopped then healed, it's just too much.
Almost all the dialogue is on the nose, there is no subtext at all. The characters say absolutely everything they are thinking.
As far as the story goes. It's okay. Not really a whole lot to it, no real element of horror other than the gore.
With no explanation of the leaves or the snakes this kinda falls a bit flat. Coincidental stuff just happens to pull the story along.
I didn't read the source material so I don't know how close it is.
If it was cleaned up and we have some idea why things are happening you might have something.