Night of the Skullmen by Mykle Van Hausen (mvh) - Short, Young Adult, Horror - Jeremy and Sherridan fight to survive and warn their friends of costumed men quietly spreading horror through their small town on Halloween night. 11 pages - doc, format 8)

Hey Mykle Van Hausen.

I hope thats a fake name...becuase this is supposed to remain anonymous. Also your headings aren't exactly formatted correctly. Reading further none of it is formatted correctly. I have to say, i'm trying to read through and i'm sort of just bothered that its a slight struggle.

I'd just say to read more scripts and get a feel for them.

-Bryan.

First I want to say "thanks" for early christmas presents to read today!


The review:  It was a little difficult to read this due to formatting.  Not a lot of talking, mostly discription of scenes.  What I do get about Jeremy and Sherridan is that they are boyfriend and girlfriend trying to escape the skull men, they tell everyone at the dance that "they're here" and at least "they know". There was no explanation, no true "meat" to the story, but I think expanded, there is a good idea in there.  It just needed more for me...and I realize with limited pages it is a bit hard.

I like the story idea, it was a little hard to read with the format and it did bore me little since i broke out into song half way through ... not sure why ....

Where to begin?

As others have already noted, formatting is terrible.  Mistakes on every page.  Absolutely no clue what is supposedly going on here...seriously...no clue.  Many "new" scenes don't have new scene headings, which make it impossible to follow.

I am seriously curious as Hell to find out what the idea is behind this.

This is hard to read. For the formatting software is the thing to do. I'm told that celtx software is free. I think the thing I found most irritating were the spelling mistakes that the automatic underlining thing highlighted because they are easily fixed.

The story suffers by being lost in the description.

This is fast paced thinking on the run which can leave people behind. However, if you could turn some of the description into dialogue get the formatting right, then this fast paced story would really power home. I’m of the of opinion that you can only really explain so much, then you have to tell it. Some people demand to know the in’s and out’s of every fine detail which can be detract from the creative approach. I think the audience can fill in the gaps with a bit of ‘audience logic’ I mean we can’t start writing every story with ‘in a galaxy far far way’.  I liked your ballsy approach to the challenge. (if you are female its still ballsy)  Raw but creative.  Cheers Walford

Okay, the format is definitely off, but I wouldn't say that it was so bad that it was hard to read, like the others did.  It wasn't completely terrible.  Take the advice of the previous poster and look into getting Celtx though.  It'll put everything in its proper place.

As far as the story goes, you definitely kept in line with the challenge, and I thought the skull men were pretty interesting.

I think you could have done a better job of describing your main characters, since there isn't anything in there that describes their ages or anything.  Sherridan's age would've definitely been more helpful than the fact that she has long, brown hair.

Anyway, I'm going to take a guess that this was written by someone who is still really, really new to screenwriting, and I think given that, you did a good job.  

Night of the Skullmen

First off, you need to set up a context. I don't have a clue what's going on and it gets too frustrating to read.

The following is well written action:

Instinctively, he shields Sherridan as a blinding silent flash goes off and shakes the room. Red tracers punch holes in the ceiling.

Jeremy needs to be introduced properly.

Learn how to clarify the characters because they are what drives a story most of the time.

Sandra