Which battle?
I'm writing a new screen-play. Its the film I've always wanted to write really: an elegant, funny, scary portmanteau horror film. I have a title - Witch Bottle, I have a wraparound story to tie the individual stories together (portmanteau or anthology films contain three or four separate stories) and my thinking was to adapt three of my short stories and I'd have a ready-made film.
It doesn't work like that. Screenplays are very different beasts from short stories. The first story I'm using is in the first person and unless it has a ropey film noir feel that won't fly. Obviously then you can't use half of the language - film is visual medium - so you need to work around it. Certain jokes don't translate to the medium, or at least certain effects don't, and often different situations or characters. With this film being a portmanteau you want linking themes to run through the various stories like metal through a bank note - despite the fact that there should be varying tones between the different tales. I think there is a misconception about horror films: they should never be unremittingly dark. There's nothing that kills a horror film stone dead quicker than unremitting gloom. Those films are ponderous, terse and boring, I don't care how many jump scares you put into them. Or blue filters. And people screaming in the darkness and bumping into things on a black screen is no substitute for good writing.
Look at my favourite horror film, Robert Wise's "The Haunting" (his next film would be "The Sound of Music" - look at the range). Based on Shirley Jackson's flinty contes cruels of the same name. Its a haunted house film. Though its clear from the very start that the house itself is evil - it traps ghosts and binds them to it and it is greedy. It will not be satisfied. The house's next victim is Nell* (an agreeably unpleasant Julie Harris) a clairvoyant looking for a way out of her non existence. She's not much of a laugh. But the other inhabitants of the house are a riot, reeking of jaded sophistication: Clare Bloom's boho-chic Theo is knowing and cool and Russ Tamblyn's Luke is louche and horny with surprising depths. But its Richard Johnson's Dr Markway who has the most fun, positively smacking his lips throughout the opening montage of the history of Hell House. And he retains this detached and ironic world view throughout despite the fearsome pounding on obscenely bulging doors and the disappearance of his wife. And you need it. Because it gives the film shape. These are rounded, interesting characters and they're brilliantly played. And if you're going to be fighting malevolent architecture you better have real human beings doing it. You care about the characters in this film despite, and this is another big thing, the fact that none of them are exactly "likeable". They aren't very nice people - even Nell is spiky and brittle - but they get scared none-the-less. We project our imperfect selves on them. These people are not paragons or monsters they are like us and they are in peril.
With this script the characters are often self-involved and isolated - the modern metropolitan malaise - but they don't deserve what they get. Arguably the nicest character ends up in the worst predicament.** But on the way they have human interactions - you know them by what they say or they don't say or how they interact with people. They aren't characterised by their job titles or by wearing cargo pants and a vest top or by shouting angrily into a field telephone. They aren't predestined by their hair colour. Even the silliest of them is supposed to be a real human being acting in a recognisably human fashion in the face of outlandish events.
That's the idea anyway. I have a quarter of it done as a first draft. So there's is a long way to go yet. But I have a feeling that it might be really, really good.
*er...spoilers.
** er...spoilers.
I tried to watch the TV version of Hell House but, despite liking the set-up and the first episode, it quickly became very dull. But still head and shoulders above the film re-make which was fucking awful.
It doesn't work like that. Screenplays are very different beasts from short stories. The first story I'm using is in the first person and unless it has a ropey film noir feel that won't fly. Obviously then you can't use half of the language - film is visual medium - so you need to work around it. Certain jokes don't translate to the medium, or at least certain effects don't, and often different situations or characters. With this film being a portmanteau you want linking themes to run through the various stories like metal through a bank note - despite the fact that there should be varying tones between the different tales. I think there is a misconception about horror films: they should never be unremittingly dark. There's nothing that kills a horror film stone dead quicker than unremitting gloom. Those films are ponderous, terse and boring, I don't care how many jump scares you put into them. Or blue filters. And people screaming in the darkness and bumping into things on a black screen is no substitute for good writing.
Look at my favourite horror film, Robert Wise's "The Haunting" (his next film would be "The Sound of Music" - look at the range). Based on Shirley Jackson's flinty contes cruels of the same name. Its a haunted house film. Though its clear from the very start that the house itself is evil - it traps ghosts and binds them to it and it is greedy. It will not be satisfied. The house's next victim is Nell* (an agreeably unpleasant Julie Harris) a clairvoyant looking for a way out of her non existence. She's not much of a laugh. But the other inhabitants of the house are a riot, reeking of jaded sophistication: Clare Bloom's boho-chic Theo is knowing and cool and Russ Tamblyn's Luke is louche and horny with surprising depths. But its Richard Johnson's Dr Markway who has the most fun, positively smacking his lips throughout the opening montage of the history of Hell House. And he retains this detached and ironic world view throughout despite the fearsome pounding on obscenely bulging doors and the disappearance of his wife. And you need it. Because it gives the film shape. These are rounded, interesting characters and they're brilliantly played. And if you're going to be fighting malevolent architecture you better have real human beings doing it. You care about the characters in this film despite, and this is another big thing, the fact that none of them are exactly "likeable". They aren't very nice people - even Nell is spiky and brittle - but they get scared none-the-less. We project our imperfect selves on them. These people are not paragons or monsters they are like us and they are in peril.
With this script the characters are often self-involved and isolated - the modern metropolitan malaise - but they don't deserve what they get. Arguably the nicest character ends up in the worst predicament.** But on the way they have human interactions - you know them by what they say or they don't say or how they interact with people. They aren't characterised by their job titles or by wearing cargo pants and a vest top or by shouting angrily into a field telephone. They aren't predestined by their hair colour. Even the silliest of them is supposed to be a real human being acting in a recognisably human fashion in the face of outlandish events.
That's the idea anyway. I have a quarter of it done as a first draft. So there's is a long way to go yet. But I have a feeling that it might be really, really good.
*er...spoilers.
** er...spoilers.
I tried to watch the TV version of Hell House but, despite liking the set-up and the first episode, it quickly became very dull. But still head and shoulders above the film re-make which was fucking awful.
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