Whazzupers everyone! My name is Garth Ginsburg, and I’m a reader here at the Killer Shorts Competition. I read 166 scripts this time around, and I’m here to give you my annual report from the front lines!
A few weeks before we announce the quarterfinalists, our wonderful contest director Alison asks us to submit a list of our favorite scripts. The stuff we rated highly and, if any exist, some scripts that rated a little low but we want to fight for anyway. This year’s list is the longest one I’ve ever submitted.
Writers are a cynical mental illness prone bunch. Presumably, some of you read that and thought, “Whatever, Garth. It’s probably that long because of the formatting. Also, you’re fat and you have red hair.” First of all, why are you so mean!? Second, even if I turned in a simple bullet point list, it would still be unusually long by my standards, for I am known to be grumpy and occasionally wumpy.
All of this is to say that, quality wise, this was the best year I’ve had at Killer Shorts. The number of great scripts was much higher, the mediocre ones were noticeably less mediocre, and I’m pretty sure I can count the number of train wrecks I read on one hand. I don’t know if my fellow readers had the same experience, but it was sunshine and rainbows in my little corner of this competition. And since this year was as exceptional as it was, I feel comfortable getting into some hyper-specifics this time around.
We’re really getting in the shit this year. Get your boots on.
We Need to Say Something New About the Internet (Or, At Least, We Need to Do Something Other Than Killing Content Makers)
At the end of last year’s article in the bullet points, I recommended you all write more scripts about the internet. I need to qualify that one a little bit.
I actually read a fair number of scripts about the internet every year I’ve worked for this competition. Sometimes it’s the main focus and sometimes it’s an ancillary detail or a quick little plot mechanic. Either way, the internet plays a role in a lot, if not most, of the scripts I read.
The problem, however, is that most of them take the same approach. Specifically, the vast majority of them involve the killing of influencers and wannabe internet personalities.
Ghosthunters on YouTube meeting bloody ends in a haunted building. Beauty influencers rendered ugly by a supernatural force before their gruesome demise. A serial killer showing up in a streamer’s chat before the inevitable home invasion and butchering. You get the idea. People make X content on the internet and meet Y death. A cosmic punishment for seeking fame and attention on the internet.
It’s not that you have to stop writing these scripts. My issue is that I think we need a much more variety in how we address the internet.
Let’s start by admitting something to ourselves: Nobody is above seeking validation on social media. Some of the scripts I read are aware of that fact and engage with social media as such. However, the vast majority of what I read is essentially, “HA HA HA isn’t this person stupid because they’re on social media????” with content and a tone that suggests the writer is above this behavior. They’re not, and if they say otherwise, they’re lying.
Let’s set aside the fact that you’re seeking the same kind of validation by submitting your script to a competition in the hope that it’s deemed “the best”. It’s not vapid to want people to like you. Think of your most boomer relative. They may go on about how stupid Instagram and TikTok are, but the moment they get a like or two on their Facebook photo or LinkedIn post, watch as their pupils dilate and that little switch flips on in their heads.
But let’s set the hypocrisy aside. We’re almost halfway through the 2020s. Pointing out the mindlessness of social media is not as profound as you think it is. After all, people have been making the same observation for well over a decade now, and it was arguably just as shallow a thought in 2015 as it is now in 2025.
Moreover, there are much bigger fish to fry. I can rattle off a huge list of internet traits that scare me much more than the idea of us becoming zombies to shallow social media content. Your kid’s probably being called every slur in the book by a bunch of older strangers in the video games they play. Sports betting has been virtually unregulated since a 2018 court decision, and now it’s likely that someone you care about is losing their money and time to a gambling app. Meanwhile, someone else you love is being radicalized by right-wing psychopaths, manosphere grifters, and accused sexual predators.
Morally bankrupt plutocrats. The endless doomscroll. Silk Road (or whatever the current iteration of that is at the moment). I could go on. You know I can. There’s probably a whole slew of internet horrors I don’t even know about that you do.
Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t write about the internet. You absolutely should, and you probably have to. What I’m saying is that you should hit more worthy targets. Or at least different ones.
I’ll get you started: Who’s more worthy of your wrath? A random beauty streamer or Elon Musk? (Hint: It’s Elon Musk, the soulless scrotum faced dumbass.)
You Need to Have An Actual Point If You Want to Do The Monkey’s Paw
The Monkey’s Paw, for those of you who don’t know, is a famous short story from the early 1900s written by W. W. Jacobs. A family gets a cursed monkey’s paw that grants wishes, but always at the wisher’s expense. Skeptical, they wish for £200. Soon after, their son dies in a horrific machine accident at the factory, and as recompense, the company that owns the factory gives the family, you guessed it, £200.
Things devolve further and blah blah blah you get it. You get a wish-granting object, you wish for a thing, you get the thing, and then a horrible fate finds you for being selfish or using the object for harm. The only reason I felt the need to explain it was because my therapist had never heard of it.
I usually encounter a handful of these every year, and a lot of them commit a fatal error. They don’t have anything to say.
There’s a simple message to The Monkey’s Paw. Prioritize what you need over what you want and don’t play god. It’s not too hard to think of variations of this either. You use that device to get revenge on someone who did you wrong, but the power takes over and you become a monster. Moral: Don’t be cruel. You give yourself infinite wealth at the expense of your relationships as you descend into douchebaggery. Moral: Wealth erodes your values. You wish for a new car and somebody immediately smashes into it. Moral: Think about what you do before you do it.
Without a point, your story doesn’t amount to anything other than Guy finds Monkey’s Paw, chaos happens, Guy dies. The end.
The easy way around this is to give your character more meat. If Guy is just a random guy with the bare minimum of set-up who finds the Monkey’s Paw and asks for a bunch of random shit, who cares? However, if Jane uses the Monkey’s Paw to get her annoying co-worker fired but is rattled with guilt after the co-worker has a mental breakdown, that’s something we can sink our teeth into. It’s relatable, and it makes a point about what we’re willing to do to one another for the sake of our jobs.
I know “substance comes from character” sounds like obvious advice, and it is. But you’d be shocked by how many of these I’ve encountered over my years at Killer Shorts. And hey, sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves of the basics.
One-Pagers Need to Tell a Full Story
Normally I only dip a toe into the one-pagers. It’s not that I don’t think they’re “real” scripts or anything like that. It’s mostly that I find them hard to judge within the parameters of what I’m given to determine my ratings. After all, how can you score dialogue when you’re turning in a one-page script where talking should probably be avoided for the sake of space? Also they don’t pay as much.
However, I had an unusually hectic 2024, so I wound up taking way more one-pagers than I normally do. Now I have much more respect for them than I already did, and I have a better understanding of which ones work and which ones don’t. Mainly, what separates the one-pagers that advance from the ones that don’t is that they tell complete stories. Or at least they feel like they do.
Most of the one-pagers I read feel more like scenes than they do stories. A character gets introduced, something happens to them, and then it ends. They go for a scare and a laugh instead of a narrative.
Believe me, I understand the impulse. It’s one page. How can you tell a meaningful story in that time? But it can be done.
These aren’t vast complex stories or anything like that, but they still manage to take the general principles of narrative structure and make them work. A guy drinks beer on the couch in front of the TV, a monster crawls out of the screen, the guy kills it with his beer bottle, and then the guy abandons his TV and goes outside Not really. But there’s still a semblance of an arc, and that’s not nothing.
The trick is to graft that structure onto something hyper-specific. Most of the ones that stuck out to me were the ones that took the most basic mundane parts of everyday existence and turned them horrifying. Sadly I can’t give you actual examples, but let me try to make some up.
Did you ever do that thing when you were a kid when you used a garden hose to make a rainbow in the mist? What if something else was there instead? What if someone pays an inordinate price for throwing their jury summons in the trash? You know that weird little tick you do when you’re alone and you think nobody’s watching? What if someone saw it? (Mine is that I occasionally narrate what I’m doing in a James Hetfield impression.) Feel free to steal these ideas or make up your own, but you get the idea. The more specific the better.
The one-pagers are deceptively difficult. You can even argue that they’re harder than regular short scripts because of how little conceptual and literal space you have to write a satisfying narrative. They’re not for the faint of heart. But this is also a space you can flex your skills, or at least give yourself a decent narrative workout. It’s just a matter of taking everything you know and grinding it down to its bare essence. How well do you really know your structure?
Please Write More Scripts About Horrible Men Getting Their Genitals (Literally or Symbolically) Mutilated
STOP LAUGHING! I HAVE AN ACTUAL POINT TO MAKE! I SWEAR!
Early on in this year’s competition, I read a script in which something rather horrible befalls a shitty man’s genitals. (For consideration reasons, I can’t give details.) I encounter one of these every once in a while, but they’re usually pretty few and far between, and this was a particularly funny and cathartic example of this subgenre that I’m sure we can all have a lot of fun trying to name. I gave it a good score, and I moved on.
Shortly after that, I encountered another one. Even though it had a completely different point and was told from a much different perspective, it had the same effect on me as the first one. Then I encountered another. And then another. And then a few more after that.
If there’s one or two of these scripts, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But what does it mean if there’s enough of them to be considered a trend? True, it could mean that the laws of probability decided to have some fun with me this year. But I don’t think that’s the case. It says, to me, that there’s something in the air. Something we’re all feeling.
You probably don’t need to think too hard about what that something might be, given the last ten or so years of news. As I write this, there’s a gelatinous orange blob skulking around the White House who was found guilty in civil court of sexual abuse and appears seven times in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs.
I’m a straight cis white male and when I take that context into account, even I want to see some dicks get crushed.
So yes, please write more scripts in which the worst things happen to the worst kind of men. But moreover, use this medium, let alone the horror genre, as a baton to beat what you don’t like about the world into submission. As someone who does this on a fairly regular basis in my own work, believe me, it will make you feel better. It’ll make me feel better too because I can absolutely tell when you were having fun or if you wrote something you found cathartic. The feeling just shines through.
Forces you can’t control are making your life worse, and there’s no sign that it’s going to stop. So get your revenge! Write a script about crushing a shitty man’s balls! Or write a script where a nazi gets torn to pieces by gremlins! Or how about a script where a CEO gets impaled by a poltergeist? Name the poltergeist Luigi for all I care.
I can’t guarantee you’ll write a good script if you tap into this side of yourself. But I can guarantee that you’ll find an energy in the act of writing it, and when you find it, don’t worry. I’ll feel it in your work.
Change the Classic Mythology, Even If It’s Just One Detail
I’ve made variations on this point before. In the first article I wrote, I talked about how you can stand out just by writing a script that doesn’t take place in the usual horror settings. Your cabins in the woods or your haunted houses or whatever. Last year, I begged you guys to change a detail of the standard exorcism story. The religion or the procedure. Something.
Basically what I’m saying in this section is the latter part, but instead of just exorcisms, the entirety of the horror genre.
I’ve been working for this competition for a few years now, and thus you can imagine that I’ve read more than my fair share of scripts about the worship of Satan. Be it some teens summoning the devil or someone trying to curse their enemies, it’s the same procedure every time. You draw the pentagram, you light the candles, you get on your knees and so on and so forth. It’s either that or the Necronomicon. Or a book legally distinct from the Necronomicon but is, functionally, the Necronomicon.
This was the first year I saw anyone do something different.
Unfortunately, I’m professionally bound to not give out too many details. All I’ll say is that it involved music, a dance, some unique equipment, and an outdoor location. In my head, this one little change elevated this script from one I was enjoying well enough to one I ended up putting in that Favorite Scripts document I talked about earlier.
Of course, it had more going on than just changing that one detail. But when I read it, I knew I was reading work from a writer with a point of view. A writer who would rather invent new mythology and lore than regurgitate the horror movies they’ve seen in the past. And it’s not just that they changed it, but it was how they changed it as well. The description of the dance was beautiful, you could practically hear the music, and there were a lot of other details that made the scene much more tangible and impactful. It felt like only this writer could have written it.
You’ve probably heard plenty about establishing your voice. This is the perfect opportunity to do so. We’ve summoned Satan with pentagrams and chants. How else can you do it?
A Few Quick Bullet Points
- Another trend I saw a lot of this year was horror scenarios that turned out to be sexual roleplay. The knife wielding home invader turns out to be the woman’s husband or something like that. You were a horny lot this year!
- This is probably deserving of its own section, but there was an epidemic of over-describing this year. Going on about every little detail in a room and stuff like that. I understand your desire to show how descriptive and detail oriented you can be. The problem with this approach is that it robs me as a reader of the opportunity to inject my own imagination. And that’s when said descriptions aren’t too busy being boring and frivolous.
- Another trend: A person seems nice and normal, and then at some point, they drop a “Hail Satan!” I feel like I should discourage this, but honestly, I feel like there’s a little bit more gas in this tank.
- I can tell when you cut your script off before the actual ending for the sake of the page count. You can always tell when a story doesn’t feel complete. Also, I’m watching you.
- I didn’t see a whole lot of cabins in the woods this year. Granted, I got out of my way to not pick them to read, but I didn’t see that many to pass up in the first place. Keep that up!
- And speaking of keeping things up, I meant it when I said that this was the best year I’ve had at this competition thus far, and that’s thanks to you guys and your scripts. So keep on writing and keep up the good work!
Images by Shagun Damadia, Lua Morales, Julia Maior, Wesual Click, Joy Marino, and Максим Власенко
