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Safe by Harold Lucas - Short, Horror - A young woman starts to receive cryptic messages from a stranger that eventually leads her to a horrifying discovery. 6 pages - pdf, format
The logline kept us interested to read until the end. Unfortunately the Screenplay didn’t interest me as much. . It’s overwritten. Find was to make your action lines less long...
The idea is cool enough, but yeah, like they say above, give this a good trim.
For starters, lose Brenda. It's not that the banter is poor -- it's even good, in spots -- but she serves no purpose here in terms of driving the story forward.
What is worse, her presence undermines your entire narrative.
You want Donna's situation to be dire and hopeless, but instead, it is only a matter of time before Brenda wanders upstairs to check on her missing friend. Maybe a half-hour, tops. Donna should be alone throughout this entire script.
I do not know what you have, folks. The script is good! It plays with our fears. Sure, here and there it could make a small difference in terms of timing, but on the whole it's a good job. It was fun to read it.
Overwritten? I don't know, maybe just a tad. I wouldn't notice if not the slow beginning. Later I was drawn into the point I didn't look at the words much.
But this is a horror porn in some way for me as you don't explain anything and don't leave the room for me to make guesses. So, I'm not completely satisfied with it. I did like it as you built up to the suspense extremely well in my opinion. I'd want some resolution at the end though.
I'm not sure if everyone is reading the same script here, as the one I just read has pretty much every mistake in the book, on every single page, and a story that makes absolutely ZERO sense, and has ZERO impact, because we know nothing about Donna, our Protag.
OK, not to be mean or anything, but this reads like a first attempt at screenwriting, and you'll hopefully learn quickly the mistakes on display here. Let's throw a few out...
Don't go over 4 lines in a passage and keep each passage to a single shot, thought, description, etc. If the camera "has to move", you need a new passage.
Don't repeat words for no reason in passages, or include your Slug in your passage. Repetition is overwriting, and overwriting wastes valuable space.
Once you set your scene (by your choice of Slug), you have to stay inside it. Once anything leaves the Slug, a new one is needed. There are multiple examples of action taking place outside your Slug.
You're missing numerous apostrophes throughout. Apostrophes show ownership and are important.
Turn off the CONTINUEDs on each page and get rid of the scene numbers.
Page 2" think its broken" IT'S This is Donna's story...you don't need anybody else. Increase the pathos up to a terrifying final. I like your descriptions. Work on it and you'll have a great script. As the other reviewers have pointed out, watch for grammatical errors and sentence construction. My best, Fausto