The Injurious by Luis Garza - Horror, Supernatural - The Mcarthur Family must seek help after terrible hauntings that they have been experiencing at their new farm house. 3 talented paranormal investigators come to the conclusion that their house hides secrets, curses and souls of those who lived there more than 100 years ago.  108 pages - doc, format 8)

Hey Luis, I feel like I've seen your name around here before. Have I read anything else you've written?

Anyway, I was hesitant to open a Word file. Most people probably won't open it at all. PDFs are generally the best way to go.

Moving on, there are some writing issues almost immediately. First, don't repeat info from the slugline in your action lines if possible. In the first paragraph alone you tell us it's a "house" twice, which is redundant.

Keep verbs active... "Two men are moving things" would be "two men move things". It's a small change but it makes things read way better.

Be sure to intro characters the first time they appear on screen. So instead of saying "4 kids" then introducing them pages later, just give us their names right off the bat.

Not to mention it's kind of odd how it's written... as if the 4 kids were a single person. "The 4 kids grin". "The 4 kids get out of the car and run to the house". How would that even work on screen? 4 completely silent kids doing everything in unison?

Dialogue isn't too great either, pretty on the nose. "This is such a lovely home".

Anyway, I'm going to stop on page 5. Nothing at all interesting has happened yet. It's just a happy family moving into "a lovely home". They need to be more real, and you could definitely establish some interesting problem or have some conflict by page 5. People write whole short films in 5 pages.

Sorry. Needs work. Hope this helps...

Will

Crookedowl,

Thanks for your constructive criticism. I do not know what you mean by "there needs to be a conflict by page 5". Do you mean a conflict between the characters? Something odd happening right off the bat? The first "odd thing" actually happens in page 5. There are supposed to be 5 rooms and they can't find the 5th one. When they actually find it, the door is locked. If you're  talking about something odd as in "paranormal things" I believe the first "odd thing" starts on page 11. I'm into slow pacing in the first scares in scary movies like in "The Conjuring" or "Insidious"

Thanks for taking a look at it. If for some reason you decide to take another look, please let me now.

-Luis  :)

I wasn't saying to add paranormal stuff. I can definitely appreciate a slow-build horror story.

Maybe a better way to phrase my feedback would be "give us character" instead of "make ddd things happen". I think a good opening gets us into the world of the story right from the start. We have to believe it. But here, nothing seemed authentic. It was too superficial, just characters driving to a house, getting out of the car, and going in every room. Not only is it generic, but the characters themselves were too shallow and uninteresting.

I think my main hang-up was the dialogue, which wasn't that realistic and didn't reveal anything about the characters. Do they have any quirks? Are they angered easily? Do they always get along? What do they want? There didn't seem to be anything to set them apart from each other. They just didn't seem like people, to me.

I don't know if that makes sense, but I hope it helps. Basically, slow build is fine, as long as you give us interesting people.

Thanks for your detailed answer.

I will go back and move the character development earlier. And I will try my best to add an opening sequence that suits the story.

Definitely expect an opening scene for my next script.

With much respect,

Luis