Up Came The Sun by Your Best Nightmare

A young Couple are terrorized by a tiny pest while a hurricane rages outside of their beach house.

Short Comedy Horror based on The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Wasn't a fan of this one, was basically 10 pages of chasing bugs around a room. I think this could be condensed a lot.

Some of the dialogue was cringe worthy.

It is relatively well written but it's going to have to be a pass from me because the story is lacking.

The comedy didn't land and I'm not sure there was any horror.

This was great.

" a preppy boat shoe enthusiast, LEO, " made me laugh more than it should have.

This is (unintentionally?) topical what with the hurricane in Florida setting.

"Nah, I don’t kill living things." -- how do you kill things that aren't living?

One thing I didn't like is that you a few instances where newcasts/TV news predicts the storm as DEFINITELY being a hurricane, a bad one -- and yet Leo simply just says "nah, it'll die down soon". Is he intellectually disabled? Surely he is paying attention to the constant newscasts? Furthermore, it seems a little strange that they still went on holiday, with hurricanes normally having at least a day or two's warning.

I liked the interactions between leo and Heidi. They all orked for me and it was mostly pretty funny.

After Leo is bitten, there's little to no suspense. Like, this isn't a supernatural spider right? Even in Austraia there's few spider bites that are fatal.

Aside from all that, it was fun to read and I enjoyed myself. The bookends with the spiders climbing in and out of the waterspout work well, too.

The couple in a rundown each house during a storm seems a sound enough basis. A kind of monster in the house type script.

The tracking spider seemed a tad unlikely but I guess it's an evil spider

I also wondered whether the felt of the spiders bite could be more interesting - e.g. Makes the bitten person go strange, mad, sordid, etc

I think if the spider and its bites are the core of the story, this needed to happen sooner rather than later. We went through quite a lot of things with the couple first.

I also felt you had the chance of finding corpses - previous kills - but can't doing anything about it due to the storm.

Opening Slug is wrong.  

"places" - Nope.

Not sure how in this fierce storm, headlights from a car could show us this "small brown spider".

"BNB"? "P-O-S" - WTF?

Completely missing a Slug as Heidi exits the car.  Very poor so far.

Dialogue comes off as this is a pisser or comedy.

"beach scented candles" - Really?  Do they have a sign attached to them saying this?  How in the world would this transfer to film?

Damn...just terrible dialogue unless this is a pisser comedy.  No horror, bad writing..I can't go on. Sorry.

The source material doesn't allow for much of anythign and is a very poor choice.  The execution here is quite bad.

Grades

Challenge parameters - D

Script/Story/Execution - D  

A few typo's here and there and a bit too long on the setup, but I liked it.

Simple and effective, good effort.

Writer,

Sorry, but this one didn't do much for me. The writing wasn't bad, but the story itself just kinda goes on and on in this Hurricane in the room at the beach house. With a spider. No real tension, or stakes. You probably could've gotten away with cutting three pages off this and still end up with the same story. Sorry, but it's just kind of repetitive.

Good job on entering and getting this done in the time allowed.

Steve

Writer, really sorry but this just didn't grab me.

There's a hell of a lot of buildup for very little pay off. I reckon you could easily take a couple of pages out of this, and if you did it would be easier to read and leave a bigger impact. The writing itself seemed ok, but the pace dragged and killed it for me.

Anyway, not terrible, but just overly long.

Cam

I liked this one.  But like some other comments have mentioned, I struggled to imagine it as a horror.  I thought the writing was good, aside from the issues some others have pointed out, and I actually didn't mind the dialogue.  

I like some of the suggestions above about the spider bite causing some kind of strange behaviour in the characters, I think that could have worked.  Or maybe the spider was some sort of supernatural spider.  I really don't know.  I feel this is more of a comedy with some sort of horror/suspense sprinkled into it.

It was a decent effort in my opinion.

Nolan

Not sure where the horror aspect came in at all. For 10 pages it kind of dragged on and on.
At least kill Leo off early, that way you could have tension set up with only heidi and the spider.

Sorry wasn't my fav

I thought this was quite well done. It dragged a bit at the start but made up for it with a nice payoff. A few things here and there didn't work as I think they were intended. For example when they play Monopoly and the spider chases towards his hand - that kind of falls flat as we don't yet have a clue about the spider being some poisonous super-killer. Then, after all, why do they play monopoly at all and don't get straight to the action? Playing monopoly in a dark room at their anniversary during a hurricane doesn't sound like something they would do.

All in all, I liked this script, but I think the monopoly part and the part about the centipede (which doesn't really add anything to the story) could be removed and generally, the action lines could be trimmed a lot.

This one I'd call light thematically-based Horror.

I enjoyed a lot of it, even though, to me, it generally feels a bit special to watch such specific themed films, here dealing with spideys… as the "obstacle" and "villain" to overcome. But I'm happy to say you succeeded in this field 100%.

It reads very smooth and is a qualified pattern for a short movie with some fine cgi spiders, not to forget all those other vermins.

It dragged a bit and could be 2-3 pages shorter at least since you'll get it all across anyway.

Good characterization. There's some dialogue to cut but nothing of big importance for now.

It's pretty balanced material and a very skillful presentation of you. It works for me. Well done.

Good characterization and a writer with skill on display here. I liked Heidi and Leo.

Unfortunately the build up takes way too long. If this was a feature with a long set of encounters with a supernatural spider, then yeah, this would be perfect. For a short, you need to start as late as possible.

As it was, when the action did kick in it was good but felt lacking. You could have upped the horror by having the spider a bit supernatural. It could start off appearing to be a normal spider but shows more signs of intelligence, aggressiveness and abnormal abilities as the story progressed.

It could have laid eggs in Leo's back and have them burst out of the welt for example. There could be previous victims webbed up in the house, as someone else already suggested. There's plenty of options here.

This is the second story in this OWC based on this short nursery rhyme which surprises me as there's so little to go on.  

A decent effort. Not a rec but probably a consider from me.

-Mark

So it appears that Leo and Heidi have decided to vacation in the path of a category 4 hurricane. It goes without saying, they deserve everything that happens to them.

There was a promising premise, but the pacing and structure fails it. Basically you've got two fairly insufferable characters doing nothing significant for a majority of the script and then boom, everything happens at once. For this to work, I think one of them has to get bit pretty early, they think nothing of it, but as time goes by and the effects get worse and worse they start to realize one of them needs real medical attention, they're trapped by the storm, and there's at least one very deadly spider still on the loose.

So this could actually be quite good, but it needs to take full advantage of everything it might have going for it.

You have a great premise. The executive is lacking especially the pacing and characters. What I'm about to say is gonna be pretty harsh if it's not what you intended... but it feels like you were going for the kind of horror where the people are so awful we can't wait to see them die. I'm not trying to be mean or sarcastic. I'm genuinely convinced that's what you were going for.

In the driver’s seat, a preppy boat shoe enthusiast, LEO, 23

His equally prissy blonde girlfriend, HEIDI, 22,

You're definitely in on the joke here. You have to be... you're painting the guy right off the bat as an asshole, right?

A CLOUD OF DUST engulfs her.  She freaks, coughs, drama-queens it to max levels.

Okay, I think I've defended myself enough in my assumption that you were purposefully going for unsympathetic characters. If you weren't, that's not the end of the world, but from now on I'm going with that assumption...


The problem with unsympathetic characters in this kind of story is we're literally stuck with them. It's eight pages of watching two people interact who we hate before the "horror" starts. They're just not interesting.

One is a prissy drama queen. The other is some weird preppy/hipster mix of awfulness. And they don't evolve or reveal themselves to be more complex than we originally thought. I think you gotta show us another side of them, build up the appeal over time so when shit hits the fan we actually care what happens.

I think you might have been trying to do that with the whole not killing the centipede thing. But it's handled in a way where I'm leaning towards that being an effort to make Leo look worse.

I would suggest instead of him saying "Nah, I don't kill living things", which doesn't actually make sense, just have him carefully scoop up the caterpillar. He lets it run along his hand as he describes some cool, unique things about caterpillars. Then Heidi can say "Well, I kinda wanna murder it less now".

Now Leo suddenly seems knowledgeable, inquisitive, and unwilling to kill a bug. We're seeing a different side of him without it being forced on us in some heavy-handed way. Then you just need to find a way to show a different side of Heidi too. Once we actually like them, bad stuff happening will actually matter.

Im thinking maybe you could have the spider bite the guy early in the story. Then you could have the girl deal with the spider and looking for the medicine for her husband in this stormy weather.

Also you could have some backstory going - he is a vegetarian and she is not for example - just a suggestion - to spice things up a bit.

I do think it needs more so that the dialog doesnt sound matter-of-factly and characters have more depth to it. Said that, I still was interested to see what happened to her after his death. Too bad it ended too soon after that.

SPOILERS

Well written and entertaining, this could be a successful, very scary film.  The dialogue is funny and fast moving, contrasting the couple's bleak situation nicely.  

The clear image of Leo's first wound gives the story a jolt, right when needed, and Heidi's combined manic / heroic attempts to save him and herself are exciting and, I think, unexpected.

This could be an excellent film, creepy, frightening and likely to linger in the mind.

This is a consider for me for sure.

The writing was good, made the story just flow along and despite the only thing really happening is Leo getting bit by a spider, it was an interesting story. I like the situation you placed Heidi in, dark room, no way of communicating to the outside world to save her husband or boyfriend (some are calling him husband in their reviews and you also have Heidi say it was their anniversary, but she also says she was his girlfriend, so not sure which) and there's a spider lurking around intent on killing them, so screwed.

Good job on this.

I liked it, but you could definitely have done more to amp up the horror.

Maybe, like others have said, make the spider supernatural. Maybe couple that with making him a full-on tarantula. I think the visual would be quite strong. If Jaws had been a piranha, would the film (or its villain) be as iconic? What if Cujo were a Chihuahua? What if Christine were a Hot Wheels car? See where I'm getting?

In addition to a supernatural spider, make Leo act weird/scary, have him speak in weird tongues and demonic voices. Or just kill him off early. Any of these would ramp up the tension.

In one of your action lines, "it's" should be "its."

Other than that, not a whole lot wrong.

Consider. A-

Just saw this news item. This could've been your spider:

Man captures video of enormous spider carrying away mouse in home

Quoted Text COPPABELLA, Australia -- Jason Womal said he was getting ready to go to work when his neighbor asked him, "You want to see something cool?" The [...] man enthusiastically said yes and ended up recording video of an enormous huntsman spider carrying away an even bigger mouse in the house next door.

I'm kicking huntsman out of my place on a weekly basis, they generally like to hang out in the shower which always makes for a fun surprise.

Gotta love Australia!

Notes:
Not sure MEANWHILE is a proper slug time element.  Too bad because your first couple of paragraphs were pretty good.  Fix this.  Another little issue (not that it really stopped me – except to write it here) that the Radio Meteorologist should be at least mentioned in the description previous.  Like what you did with the Newscaster on page 4.  It’s obvious what’s going on, but make sure you find out what the actual way to set that up.  I would think a parenthetical and just Meteorologist on the dialogue would work.  Moving on…  

They might be better off sleeping in the car.  This is a great line, but I would have had one of the characters speaking it.  It really doesn’t read as good in the description.

He bounces his eyebrows provocatively.  You had this on page 4 and 6!  No no!

And that’s it.  Yep.  I like it.  So far, it’s written the best – to me.  Not really a comedy horror, and the horror is mild.  Doesn’t matter.  I wasn’t looking for buckets of blood to win the challenge for me.  It’s well written, dialogue is good, not many mistakes and ends good.  Sure, I saw the end coming a mile away, but it works.  Good job!

Met Challenge?: Yes
Horror: Mild, but yes.
Overall: Highly Recommend