Spook Night by Warren Peace - Short, Family Horror - A couple of school kids, Jack and his young sister Gillian are being coerced by their parents to get psyched up with fear of mythical  demons, monsters, and evil spirits on Halloween. Much to their parents dismay their kids don’t buy into the fright thing. The children perceive all that stuff about zombies, vampires, monsters and demons is in the same category of phony Santa Clause and Easter Bunny stuff. At their Grammar School’s All Hallows Eve Festival something happens that turns the family’s beliefs inside out and upside down.  - pdf, format 8)

I liked parts of this...but it was under developed and had numerous mistakes.

It also had a number of places where people were talking at the same time.  I thought it was tedious, in that usually, those instances are limited to short comments...was this a really rude family?  They just kept talking on top of each other :)

I certainly liked the concept...for me it needed more...
Morgan

With a LOT of OWC scripts entered (I can't read them all) I have to go by the logline to decide which ones to read. Your logline didn't make me want to read yours. I'm sorry...  I thought for a short it was too long and over written. I imagined the script being a looong read even if less than 12 pages.

Please understand that I'm only trying to be honest and helpful at the same time.  :)

A few things in this story made me laugh.  The kooky parents and some of the strange dialog.

But there really wasn't much of a "story" and even though the vibe of the dialog was good, the dialog itself was a bit rough.  I saw what you were trying to do so it wasn't buried too deep.  Just needs some cleaning up.  And the talking over each other just didn't work.  It was too much.

You do need more of a story though.

Oh boy!  Sorry, another one I'm not going to be able to finish.

As Pia said, the logline here is very poor...WAY too long, WAY too detailed...just poorly written.

Opening is pretty bad, sorry to say.  Sounds really odd starting off the way you do (Kitchen table is surrounded...and then only "list" Adam).  It gets worse, as it's a big old run-on sentence that should be broken into at least 2 sentences.  Actually, your first 3 sentences are all bad, and all extremely passive, which doesn't work here at all.

The dialogue isn't good either, and the script starts off with nothing but dialogue that goes on and on, doesn't sound realistic, and then the double dialogue starts.  Crazy...doesn't work at all.

Sorry, but this ain't gonna cut it.

I hate when people write dual dialogue, but when they don't understand moderation of the tool... It just makes things worse. By chance was this written on Celtix?  

It's like people see new features and then rush to over use them.

Anyways, your story is weak... One of the worst I've read thus far of the OWC. I guess you met he standards of the challenge, but how you got there was a tedious read only the oblivious would enjoy. And thus your script remains impossible.

Sorry writer, this one was a difficult read that had me scratching my head. Other readers have commented on the writing and dialogue but the ending/payoff was esp. weak.

BTW, your observation re: evil humans (Hitler) vs evil monsters was memorable.

Gary

Sorry, I can't finish your script after page 2. I scrolled down the script and I still see all those huge blocks of dialogue.

Right now all I am getting is a family talking about Halloween costumes....boring.

I know I sounded a bit harsh, but you really have a lot of work to do.

Inearly gave up on this straight up. The opening action lines were formatted wrong. But I kept at it.
Not sure about all the name dropping, and I'm sure this was by a'guest writer', but i liked the scene at the school. Things improved there.
A  wry old ending but that was on the cards.

I found the whole thing rather pointless. It is not a story, but more of an anecdote (as so often with short scripts). It is certainly not a horror story, as the "demon" isn't real (and the whole image is nicked from the Wizard of Oz!).

There is far too much dialogue - especially for seven pages - and it's not very good. I would tend to agree with the above comment that you seem to have found the dual dialogue button on your software and decided to go mad with it!

It didn't do anything for me at all, I am afraid.

Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Jane Curtain and Gilda Radner would play the family.  Laraine Newman would be the Witch and Garrett Morris would probably be the demon, as this would only be played out as an SNL skit.  The dialog between the family would have to be rapid-fire-as-one-long-sentence.  

Oh yes, the Impresario would have to be played the week's special guest host!  Whoever that would happen to be.  Say, Donald Trump?

Did this fit the challenge?  Heck no.  But I bet the above mentioned cast could pull it off as a funny skit, I betcha!

I read this quickly - didn't get it!

will read it again tonight, see if I can get a better insight.

"Kitchen table is surrounded by ADAM WANETE..." How does a wirey guy like Adam surround a kitchen table?

"he is agreeing with his lovely red headed wife SYBIL about shared Halloween memories." Show, don't tell.

With split dialogue, both characters are speaking at the exact same time. As it is,  Adam and Sybil are talking over each other...

Not much else to say, other than it didn't work for me.

First off, you need to learn a little bit about writing loglines. They are short, but really hard to write.

I'm only going to note on a few things here:

These constructions might be consistent:

>is surrounded
>is agreeing
>are listening

But they are consistently wrong. Avoid "to be" constructions like this because you are always going to need a participle past or present tense and it lengthens the read.

So instead:

*surrounds

*agrees

*listens

Good dialogue here:

SYBIL
Halloween Night! Creepy spiders!
Remember the Egyptian mummy Joe
Schider made. Wow, that was scary…

ADAM
Especially when the miles of
bandages he wrapped himself in
began to unravel…

The trouble is, you've got a lot of banter going on, but you're not working with character aspects really at all.

Keep working and it's just excellent that you submitted!

Sandra