The Hunted by Lance Patrick - Horror - James and his friends were terrified enough when some hill billies took them prisoner, but now there's something else after them all… 116 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hi all, anyone got five minutes to spare?
Would really appreciate some feedback,
thanks Lance

Hi Lance,

Thought I’d give this a go, again; realizing I read some of this when you first posted it. I think, and this is just opinion of course, that you may not be getting any feedback, simply because page one of this script paints incredibly disturbing imagery in the reader’s mind (at least, it did for me)… so much to the extent that I stopped reading after the first few pages.

An opening like this is typically congruent to a ‘teaser’ within a horror movie; where you immediately toss the viewer a bone of what’s to come, then, pull back and begin building a story of how those characters got into their situation of dread. This just seemed to roll on with the introduction of several characters that you simply describe with gender and age. Then we have characters called Sick Boy, Baby Boy, Dirty Boy but, no difference in contrast of their speech or actions… I got lost on what was transpiring quickly, sorry to say.

You seem to dig Horror. There’s a scare-fest challenge happening on the board right now, where several members have posted horror scripts for feedback. If you jump in there with some reads and input, you just might receive some in return for this script, no promises, just saying… best of luck.

Hi Canis, Thanks for giving it a try, yes it was meant to be quite nasty in the beginning. I then wondered, maybe the start was to nasty, and judging by your reaction it is ;-( I was hoping for someone like Rob Zombie to get hold of it, hehe.

Sick Boy, Dirty Boy and Baby Boy are hill billie, in bred type characters, they are similar as they're brothers and sisters. But they do have differences, Baby Boy is in fact a girl, she wants to be respected, feared more like her brother Sick Boy.

Sick Boy, is crazy, he is a complete whacko, and Dirty Boy is a bit on the dopey side, always laughing at silly things.

I wondered about just doing away with their early bits and start off with the actual teenagers.

Anyway, thanks again for giving it a try,

best Lance

Gave the first few pages a view.  I see that you're going for shock with that opening scene, but as written, it reads far more juvenile than shocking -- like a teenager telling a dirty joke when his parents aren't around.  It's clumsy, crass and overly vulgar, not because it needs to be, but because it can be.  And "can be" isn't a good enough reason to open your movie with a gratuitously graphic scene of two inbred hillbillies tag-fucking a corpse.  Even Rob Zombie would look at this and say "Yeah, that's a little overboard."  You've turned your reader off before they've even made it to the second page.  That's not good.

There's a difference between effective shock and utter gratuity.  Learn the difference and apply it to your writing.  Unless, of course, you're TRYING to be the next Jorg Buttgereit, in which case you might want to consider that most people who read this post will have to google who the hell Jorg Buttgereit is.

Good luck.  Keep writing.

- Lon

Hi Lon,
thanks for your input.

Funny thing is, the first four scenes were not in the original script, it was only when I was in Cannes 2014, an American film distributor said add something nasty, shocking at the beginning, so I thought I would to try to please them.

I'm going to change it back to how it was,

best regards, Lance

Took in the first 20.

Peeps have already commented on the opening and I share their views.

So, I've got the opening gruesome scene, followed by a woman getting her throat slashed and then a man having his ear devoured before his predictable demise. The problem I having is that I don't care about any of these victims because I don't know them and as such, it just seems like an opening series of shocking scenes for shock sakes.

I didn't get a sense of a story here. Just events. Hope that makes sense.