Scaredy-Cat by Matt Thompson (Dark Shape) - Short, Horror, Comedy - As a madman chases a nubile teen through an empty house, a dedicated feline waits for the perfect jump scare opportunity. 4 pages - pdf, format 8)

Matt,

Cute logline. Read the short then wondered...  What the hell did I just read?  Not sure what to think, actually.

Tony.

Hi Matt

There's a great energy to this, but it's every stalk n slash film rolled into one with an added cat!

An weirdly I liked it ;-)

But you need to work on the formatting, at the moment it's a way off 'normal'. Make the formatting 'normal' and this could work.

Anthony

I will agree to disagree when it comes to formatting errors, but thanks for the reads!  I thought of this on a whim.  Never really designed to ever be shot -- I just wanted it to be cute.

You do not need to work on the formatting.

I quite liked this until the end. The idea of a cat caught up in horror movie tropes really works. Trouble jumping between the two is cute, and the "what the hell?" moment with the music is always good -- there's that great use of this gag in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

What I didn't like, and maybe what I just didn't get, was that Trouble turned out to be sorta flat-out evil. To me it kills the cuteness to have what lands as an arbitrary twist. Maybe I just read it wrong and was rooting for Trouble when I sort of shouldn't have been, but I thought Trouble was at worst a spectator, at best a saviour. Is there supposed to be intent in the end? Trouble means to kill Scarlet?

Anyway, I think this could work quite well as an animated short. I'm not sure that I "get" the end, but I enjoyed the ride.

I thought this was kind of amusing. I liked it even!  I liked Trouble. :)

Writing wise, I had no problem with formatting or the way the story was told. I know a few other writers that write very similar to you and all I can say is that all the asides are fine. Especially with a 3 page script. However, when you read 110 pagers written in the same manner, it gets tiring and loses its charm. At least IMHO.

All in all, an enjoyable read!  8)

Quoted from Heretic What I didn't like, and maybe what I just didn't get, was that Trouble turned out to be sorta flat-out evil. To me it kills the cuteness to have what lands as an arbitrary twist. Maybe I just read it wrong and was rooting for Trouble when I sort of shouldn't have been, but I thought Trouble was at worst a spectator, at best a saviour. Is there supposed to be intent in the end? Trouble means to kill Scarlet?

Nah, Trouble just wants to scare Scarlet.  I initially got the idea while watching FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 last week; there's an egregious cat scare at the beginning, and I wondered out loud if the cat was in on the scare.  So Trouble misses the obvious cat scare moment (just before the killer actually strikes), and because she's so determined to get the jump, she pulls it off at exactly the worst time for the lead.

And the final bit is just my little nod to the end of HALLOWEEN.  There are always cats out there waiting to jump through your window and terrify you. :)

Oh! I didn't quite get the central joke, then. That's funny, and clever. It would need to be spelled out more obviously for me, or maybe I was just a bad reader yesterday. The fix that I'd imagine really clarifying this -- though it might threaten to add a bit of running time -- is if Trouble's first attempt at a scare (and subsequent failure) came before the killer showed up. This would narratively mirror the way we experience those scares in horror movies. This draft logically mirrors that experience -- the first scare attempt still comes right before the killer reveal in terms of Scarlet's experience -- but it was too much for my brain to have already seen the killer, and then still put together that it was a gag about cat scares.

That's my ramble. It's an enjoyable read without the joke being crystal clear; maybe the ambiguity works. But I do like the joke, as you've explained it, and I didn't quite get that joke from reading this script.

I'm a major nerd for getting that Halloween reference at the end.