Hello, my name is Garth, and I was a reader for the Killer Shorts contest. Of the 952(!) scripts submitted for this year’s competition, I personally read 164 of them. Rounded up, that’s about 20%. Though every script was read by at least two readers, and 20% is a fairly small number, there’s a small chance I read your script and I may be the reason you didn’t make it into the quarterfinals. If you’re one of those writers, you may have some anger and sadness in need of displacing. I will gladly soak up all your bad vibes, bile, and general shitposting in the comments.
I kid, of course, and I don’t mean to make fun of your pain. Whether it be from a prestigious feature length competition or Killer Shorts, rejection stings. It doesn’t even matter if you saw it coming. The discouragement and the disappointment you may be feeling is real, and you have my absolute sympathy.
So how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again? I don’t know for sure. But I offer you this article in the hopes that it may help you with not only this competition, but many others as well.
There are, of course, basic pieces of advice that you’ve probably heard a million times before. Come up with an original idea. Make sure there’s effective use of structure. Check your spelling and your grammar. All of these pieces of advice are true, and will remain so until the end of time.
However, I want to get a little more specific. I read plenty of uninspired typo laden disasters, but those were greatly outnumbered by scripts that weren’t and didn’t advance anyway. In fact, I’d describe most of the scripts I read as competent, but middle-of-the-road. It may not seem like it, but I find that oddly encouraging, because now we can get our hands dirty.
The Specific Script Formula I Ran Into Over and Over Again. (Or: Consider What Your Competition May Be Doing Better Than You)
Going into this competition, I worried about clichés. Horror, for many reasons, has a reputation for repeating the same tropes and formulas over and over again. Some of these reasons are justified and some of them aren’t. But when you open the floodgates, you get a flood, and I expected a wave of masked killers and final girls.
However, the thing I saw the most had little to do with the gripes people like me bring up when they want to dunk on horror. It wasn’t vampires or zombies or haunted houses. (Though, to be clear, I did run into those clichés a lot and we’ll get to some of that in a the next section.)
The thing I saw the most was the following formula. In my head, I started calling them Punchline Scripts. The formula:
- Protagonist enters a situation they do not know to be dangerous.
- Protagonist slowly realizes they’re in a dangerous situation.
- The source of said danger swiftly kills Protagonist and the script ends.
Billy enters the frat house he was partying in last night in search of his wallet. He finds it, but then he sees a bunch of satanic writing on the wall. Right as he sees the circle of dead animals and starts to panic, the monster jumps out and kills him. The end.
Margaret goes to her first meeting of the local neighborhood watch. She has a fun time getting to know everybody, but then everyone’s behavior gets increasingly strange. Just as she realizes it’s a cult, they wheel out the sacrificial stone and someone plunges a knife into her chest. The end.
Flappy enters a cabin in the woods with his friends. They all drink a bunch of beers and have a bunch of sex. Just as one of them notices all the dead bodies in the basement, Syd Field jumps out of the shadows and beats everybody to death with a copy of The Foundations of Screenwriting. The end.
Setup when we enter the location. Setup when things get weird. Punchline when the death happens.
So what’s wrong with this script?
In a vacuum, nothing. You may find someone who’ll back this kind of short, or go out and make it yourself, and it may even be great! However, if you desire to advance in or win a screenplay contest, you have to come to terms with the fact that these scripts don’t really contain stories so much as sequences or scenes. There’s setup and there’s payoff. But that’s literally it. On top of this, you’re also competing against scripts that have fully fleshed out narratives and character arcs. The kinds of scripts that bring a lot more to the table.
Punchline Scripts are not bad as a rule. However, if I have a decent Punchline Script, and I also have a regular script with a complete narrative, I’m scoring that second script higher because it made more of an effort to earn my investment. (Also, given the page limit, that second script is simply more impressive in and of itself.)
Some people see the word “horror” and think that the scares are all that matter. They aren’t. Anyone can throw in a scare at the end and call it a day. If you want to advance, it’s about what else you can to do.
Location (Or: How To Make Your Script Stand Out Quickly With Minimal Effort)
Last year, contest director Alison Parker and fellow contest reader/Screenwriters Network moderator Fred Pelzer put out an extremely helpful episode of The Screenwriters Network Podcast about the submissions they read that year. One of the many important points they bring up is how often they saw the same locations. Your typical haunted mansions and spooky forests.
I think it’s a point that bares repeating because I ran into the same settings over and over and over again.
The readers in this competition used Coverfly to pick what we were going to read, and we all got to see the loglines you guys wrote for your scripts. (We also need to talk about loglines at some point, but that’s for another article.) Every morning, I’d wake up, I’d scroll through what was available, I’d snag all the twenty five pagers because they pay the most (suck it, other readers!), and if I saw a script that wasn’t set in a location I’ve seen a million times before, the chances of me picking it would skyrocket.
I can’t tell you how many haunted victorian houses I saw. Or suburban neighborhoods. Or basements or summer camps or cemeteries. I even read more than a few Cabin in the Woods scripts, which was particularly disheartening considering the existence of Cabin in the Woods. Even more disheartening is the fact that Fred made this very observation in the podcast, and here I am, making it again because it still applies.
It’s not that your script is inherently bad if it takes place in a location I’ve seen before. I read plenty of genuinely great haunted house shorts and effective basement scenes. In fact, I’m sure plenty of horror purists would argue that there’s value in tradition, and that these locations communicate a specific meaning to fellow horror fans.
There’s certainly a valid argument or two to be made in favor of traditional horror. However, you can’t assume that readers or judges are going to share the same values as you. Some project a lot of meaning onto the pillars of the horror genre. I don’t. I want something new.
Just by putting a little more thought into your setting, you’ll stand out from a sizable number of your peers. Of course, a new location doesn’t guarantee a quality script. But when I saw a setting that hasn’t been done to death, I knew that there was at least a possibility that I was about to read something unique. A possibility that didn’t cross my mind whenever I saw another farm house or abandoned theme park.
Invest As Much Effort Into Your Characters As Your Concept or Plot. Maybe Even More So.
The troubling trend I saw the most was the formula I laid out in the first section. The deemphasizing of character in the vast majority of scripts I read was a close second.
Look. You only had twenty five pages, which isn’t a whole lot of time to establish a concept, tell a complete story, and do all that screenplay stuff you can do when you have more time. It’s understandable that something gets shortchanged, and it’s also understandable why many choose that something to be character. Concepts are big and sexy. Plot is what moves everything forward. Characters, on the surface, are just there, and since this is a horror competition, they’re more than likely not going to make it out alive anyway.
However, at the risk of sounding condescending, remember that what you’re writing is hypothetically going to be a movie. Nine times out of ten, what your audience is going to be watching on screen are human beings.
Allow me to put on my pretentious unearned screenwriting professor’s hat.
In an ideal world, you’d find a way to balance concept, plot, character, pacing, voice, and all the ingredients that make up a great script. But in this case, you have twenty five pages, and most feature length scripts can’t even balance everything they need to. So what should you emphasize? Let me make an argument of why it should be character.
Concept is cool. It may get your foot in the door. But few things disappoint a reader more than an awesome concept dashed by poor execution or an inability to meet its potential. Concept can bring your audience in. But concept alone won’t keep them. Maybe you’re not as good as you think you are, and concept can be your downfall if you raise expectations too high.
Plot is vital, but it’s important to remember why plot exists in the first place. Sure, it moves everything along. But it also exists for the sake of a protagonist, and it moves along because characters make decisions. Even if you’re using a dreaded passive protagonist, plot is still happening to a human being.
Pacing keeps your audience engaged, voice sets you apart, and X screenwriting buzzword does Y screenwriting buzzword.
Characters make the audience care. Say what you will about the Marvel movies. But if they didn’t convince the audience to care about those heroes, they never would’ve mattered.
When it comes to horror, you’re dealing with a genre that’s infamous for the disposability of its characters. What better way is there to stand out than by swimming against that particular tide?
If You’re Going to Do Horror Parody or Horror Comedy, You Also Have To Tell a Good Story
I know this may seem like a silly or unimportant topic to bring up. But I actually read a lot of horror comedy! Like a lot of horror comedy. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say that a little under a quarter of the scripts I read were either outright horror comedies or contained some sort of comedic element to tell its story.
This is by no means a complaint. A fair number of these scripts were actually pretty good, and after reading dreary horror script after dreary horror script, a change of pace was always welcome. For the love of god, keep the horror comedy coming!
The issue, however, is that while a lot of these scripts were good, few of them were special.
Whether or not these scripts had good premises or whether or not they were funny isn’t really the issue. (Okay, they’re both important, but they’re not what I’m talking about!) The real issue is that most of these scripts didn’t really bother with anything other than the premise. They would reveal their one joke, milk it for all its worth, and then it would end. No real sense of story. No character work. Just a single premise stretched past its breaking point.
Now, let’s pretend the joke is incredibly funny. (And hey, they were a lot of the time!) It doesn’t really matter because when you compare a one joke script to a work of horror comedy that puts in the effort to mine its characters for laughs or tell a story that actually evolves, the one joke script will always seem lesser by default.
Remember, you’re in a competition. It’s not just about whether or not your script is any good. It’s also about what other writers are doing as well. Your script may be hilarious, but script competitions by definition are about the ability to tell effective stories. You have to bring it there too.
My Favorite Script. (Or: What I Realized I Was Looking For the Whole Time)
Of the four “rules” I’ve discussed above, my favorite script I read for this competition goes against three of them. (For various contest related reasons, I shouldn’t say which specific script I’m talking about. But join The Screenwriters Network, and once the winners are announced, I’ll probably be shouting about it there from the digital rooftops.)
It’s not a Punchline Script. However, it takes place in a setting we’ve seen in many horror films before, its characters are homogeneous by design, and it’s a horror comedy script that essentially only has one joke. At face value, I should’ve hated it. Yet, of the 164 pieces of coverage I wrote, it’s one of the scripts I scored the highest.
There are, of course, qualifiers that should be respected when it comes to this script. Mainly that the location and homogeneity had a point and the script was so short that it couldn’t drive its one joke into the ground even if it wanted to. (In other words, don’t just ignore everything I’ve said!)
But in order to explain why this script worked so much for me, let’s get pretentious and ask ourselves some age old questions. Why do we art? What’s the point of art? Why did I study screenwriting instead of getting a business degree, learning how to fix air conditioners, starting a repair company, and retiring at a reasonable age?
Of course, there isn’t one simple answer to these questions, and I didn’t spend four years buried in books just to tell them all to you for nothing. (You lazy fucks.) However, the most important one is, simply put, emotion. Catharsis and breakthrough, be it from crying at a depressing indie drama or screaming at the haunted doll tearing apart the co-ed. We’re all human beings, and we need to take our emotions out for a walk. We need connection, and art provides.
As of the time I’m writing this, I still don’t know who wrote my favorite script. Yet, I feel like I learned something valuable about them. I read their script and I saw their ability to interpret the world around them, reminding me that what I was reading was written by a tangible human being.
The only thing I learned about the writers who turned in yet another home invasion script or demonic possession story is that they’ve seen a horror movie before.
Without getting into specifics, the script in question is about the intersection of racial politics and the language we often use to communicate on social media. (I read a few of these, by the way.) I’m not saying you have to get political or talk about social issues in order to earn the affection of your reader, nor am I saying that you have to take everything I’ve said in this article as law. But I am saying that this medium exists in order for you to express yourself, and anyone can just regurgitate scenes they’ve watched in other horror movies. If you want to advance, or at least stand out, you have to make your script about something.
A Few Quick Closing Points
- Once again, spelling and grammar matter. I know it’s petty to get dinged for it and in an ideal world, all that should matter is your storytelling. But if your script is filled with typos and formatting errors and we send it to our panel of judges, we would look foolish! So check thine spelling. If only because we told you to. (And there are assuredly grammar and spelling mistakes in this very article, so feel free to point out my hypocrisy in the comments.)
- Another issue I ran into over and over again: Clarity. Get feedback and make sure your writing is as clear as you think it is in your head. Having to reread the same scenes over and over again in order to understand what was going on put me in a bad mood, which you don’t want if I’m reading your work.
- I read a lot of BDSM related stuff. Hey, no judgements here! You horndogs, you.
- There’s a worrisome trend I’m seeing. Whereas traditionally, a writer capitalizes an OBJECT that’s important, many writers have started separating those objects into their own lines. Now, I didn’t dock anyone any points for doing that. But know that if you have been doing this, you are, in fact, a bad person and you need to stop.
- Another formula I saw: Timid protagonist encounters horror scenario, then protagonist comes out of it alive, cured of their timidness. This one’s still fine so long as there’s a correlation between what the protagonist is timid about and what they encounter in said scenario. In other words, if you have an awkward protagonist, then something random happens to them and now they’re confident, you fucked up.
- Final positive note! I meant what I said at the beginning that I barely ran into scripts that were complete disasters. That doesn’t sound like much, but the same can’t be said for companies I’ve done professional coverage for. Fantastic work, you guys! Even if you didn’t advance, don’t get discouraged. You’re doing better than you think you are.
Photo credits:
Forest: Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash
Lego: Photo by Myat Lone on Unsplash
Crawling hands: Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash
