Category: Horror

            And I suck at self-promotion.

            But that’s all a bit besides the point.  I didn’t want to blather on about crossing that line this week.  I wanted to talk about crossing lines.

            Some people think a genre story has to be pure.  A horror story should be nothing but suspense and scares and gore.  Every moment of a drama should be serious and weighty.  Comedies should be non-stop laughs—there shouldn’t be a moment where something inherently funny isn’t happening on the page or the screen..

            The thing is, those “pure” stories are all boring as hell.  The horror ones stop being scary.  The drama becomes melodrama.  The comedy becomes painful. 

            The reason for this is a lack of variety.  An idea I’ve mentioned before is that the tension levels in a story should rise as the story progresses.  It’s great to begin my story with the action dialed up to nine, but it doesn’t really leave me anywhere to go.  If my novel or screenplay has everything dialed up to nine, what I’ve really got is a monotone story.

            Likewise, if every point on my story graph is the same point—say unspeakable horror or maybe uber-cool action—then what I now have is a homogenous script.  Flipping pages is like cutting into a block of cheese.  Every part is just like every other part.  Case in point…

            unspeakable horror

            Unspeakable Horror

            Unspeakable Horror

            UNSPEAKABLE HORROR

            Even when I’m escalating things, getting the same point over and over and over again becomes silly pretty quick. 

            Consider most of the good stories you’ve read or seen.  There’s a lot of comedy in Jaws.  Ernie Cline’s cyber-fantasy tale Ready Player One has some moments of serious suspense.  Raiders of the Lost Ark has a wonderful love story in it.  Dan Abnett’s sci-fi action novel Embeddedhas a pretty enthusiastic sex scene.  Ghostbustersactually gets a bit scary at points.  The characters in the new Hobbit movie break out into song.  Twice.

            That being said, I don’t think any of us would call Jaws a comedy, and Embedded is hardly a porno.  Raiders has that love story and a couple really good laughs, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would call it a romantic comedy.  And The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journeyis definitely not a musical.  We all realize that little dips and swings into what would qualify as another genre doesn’t invalidate a story.

            If anything, they usually strengthen it.

            The secret to all storytelling is characters, and the best characters are going to act like real people.  They’ll tell jokes at the wrong time.  Some of them will think about love and sex when they should be paying attention in board meetings, and others will fret about those board meetings at moments they should be thinking about love and sex.  A few of them might even be stressed about scratching the paint on Dad’s car when they should really be worried about the axe murderer lumbering up behind them.  

            One of the most dramatic moments in The Empire Strikes Back is when they’re about to test the carbon-freezing on Han Solo.  For all intents, he’s walking to his execution.  He knows it, his friends know it, we know it.  Even if he survives– he’s gone.  Leia knows this and finally admits her true feelings… and Han responds with a wiseass comment.  We all giggle and then there’s a horrible blast of steam as Han’s turned into a piece of collectible wall art.

            Y’see, Timmy, if my stories and characters lack this kind of range they’re going to come across as very flat and tedious.  If I can’t have a moment of laughter, a bit of flirting, or a non-sequitor distracted thought, my characters are going to feel like puppets rather than people.  Much like a chef uses a few different flavors to bring out the main tastes of a meal, a writer wants to sprinkle in a few moments that step out of the genre to make the characters and the material much more powerful.

            So don’t be scared to stretch a toe over those lines now and then.

            I know I said I was going to talk about structure, but that’s kind of a huge set of post so I think I might save it until the new year and take a bit of stress out of my holidays.  So next time, I’m  probably just going to say something quick about heroes.

            Until then, go write.

            Here’s one more huge interview with a pro to tide you over until I get my act back together.  This time it’s David Self, the screenwriter behind Thirteen Days, Road to Perdition, and The Haunting, among other films.  Last I heard, he was working on the adaptation of the God of War videogame. 

            I got to chat with David for an hour or so about working on The Wolfman, the big-budget reimagining of the classic Universal Monster movie.  It was definitley a passion project for him (as you’ll see), and he was a lot of fun to speak with.  Alas, monster movies don’t do that well these days because too many people go in expecting horror and then blame the film for these expectations.

            A few points I’ve mentioned before.  I’m the one in bold, asking the questions.  Also, a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.  A long line of dashes (————-) means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article.  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply David Self endorsed any of the ideas here on the ranty blog.  It’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar I’ve said.  And by the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here (although I did cut out one big one).  If you haven’t seen the film yet, check it out.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this discussion.

            Also, this is one of the rare cases where I didn’t get to see the fim before my interview (considering I was generally doing interviews two or three months before the films were released).  My questions are based off one of David’s earlier drafts I got to read, so you’ll see some back and forth as we establish what does and doesn’t happen in the movie, and why some changes were made.

            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

That’s just IMDb (laughs).  I haven’t been working on Deathlok in quite a long time.  I did a rewrite on Deathlok.

I guess I actively try to avoid boredom.  I want to find new intellectual arenas to challenge myself in.  I try to find projects that are different, have a different hue to them, work in different genres.  I make an effort to do that.  That’s my short answer, and I guess people buy it. (laughs)

This came to me from a good friend of mine, a producer, Scott Stuber.  I worked with Scott a long time ago.  He brought me actually three scripts.  Andy’s script, a script  by Paul Attanasio, and one Mark Romanek himself had been working on.  Kind of in the fall of 2007, just before the strike.  Actually, August, late summer.

At that point Andy had done what was the main draft.  Then they’d hired Paul to do a rewrite.  He got about halfway through and didn’t continue.  Mark Romanek started to work on it himself.  Paul, I think, was working at Mark’s direction at that time, and Mark got halfway through the script as well.  So they had two half-scripts and Andy’s script. When I came in I really wanted to work off Andy’s script because it was the most coherent and consistent one.  It was a complete script so it was the easiest to start from.

Oh, yeah.  I love the original.  The original film is a landmark.  It was my dad’s favorite film and I used to watch it with him when I was a kid and knew it well.  So there was a little trepidation in going back and trying to come up with a 2010 version of it.

Andy had really introduced a lot of the new elements that are in our version of the film.  In terms of the father-son dynamic and also, well… (David and I talked about a bunch of spoilerish stuff here that I’m not going to repeat for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet)  …That’s a major change from the original, obviously.  That idea was an idea Andy introduced.  Going back to your question— that was dramatically the biggest adjustment.

I think one of the things… In keeping with the original, Andy did well preserving the werewolf lore that the original film introduced to our sense of werewolves.  Changing at the full moon, being bitten.  Some of the rules we take for granted now.  Silver bullets killing werewolves.  There were a couple older films… you’d have to do your filmography… that this film all pulled together.  Those elements Andy was very particular in preserving, which I think was really important.

        
Among those things that was challenging is that the whole transforming at the full moon really limits…is a real structural issue that we struggled with for a long time.  How to make the plot advance quickly and turn our characters into a werewolf quickly when you’re dealing with this rule of having the full moon.

Exactly (chuckles).  So by nature, the earlier drafts of the script had a very extended amount of time before you got to see Benicio del Toro turn into the wolfman.  That was really the largest issue that I was brought in to solve–how to speed things up a bit.  It was still a very challenging thing, given the rules of our film.  That was the largest note that I had to contend with coming into it.

I generally like to outline, and I try to do the outline in one sitting, so it feels organic, to one moment and impulse.  The length of it can vary from a page to ten pages, depending on how much detail I’m seeing right off the bat in my head.  I just try to catch the organic impulse of the movie in one moment.  And then it mutates from there.

Yeah, this is a very different process.  It’s a film that is sort of a flashing green light to go.  There’s a lot more collaboration.  You’re working with a director, a producer, a studio, that all have things they need to achieve to get to where they’re confortable making the film.

Benecio was attached and Mark Romanek was attached.  They attached Tony and Emily Blunt after the draft I did in November.  And Hugo Weaving.  Those guys all came on after.  Although Benicio was just sort of… he wasn’t actively involved in development at that point, he was just waiting for us to do our job. ———–  I turned in my draft the night before the strike started and that was what they cast off of.  And then I was out on the lines

I’ve become more nocturnal with the advent of four of my children in the past couple years. Prior to that I was more of a workday type of guy.  I sort of now have a patched together day, where I work half of the day-day, and then after supper in the eveneing, after the kids go to bed, I have another work period where I tend to be pretty productive.  It was different when I was younger.

More of a scene or sequence objective I set for myself.  Not so much a page count.  One of the other things I like to do… I get slower as I get closer to the end of the script, because basically I read the script from page one again every day before I start writing again, so I can get everything in my head. It helps me with consistencey issues and voice issues.  I don’t have as much reading to do on day two or three, but when I’m getting down to the end I’m spending an hour and a half reading befoe I start writing new stuff.

Several scenes, like the sequence in the asylum, I just loved those.  There were pieces of Andrew’s writing that I just loved that I just cut and pasted those into the script I was writing.  I would tweak a word or two just so it made sense with what came around it.  I did start with an empty script when I started rewriting, but I had his sitting next to me the whole time as a reference.

Yeah.  It’s interesting, the character Andy —–  along was a haunted guy who had this sort of gothic, dark back story that preceded the film and becomes uncovered during the course of the film.  So he definitely structured that sort of psychological drama in that mode.  It was an important decision.  It’ll be interesting to see how it translates in the final version of the film, but the notion was this was a guy who had lost himself in theater and burned himself out.  He was a guy waiting to be saved.

That was Andy.  He was a guy who was haunted, who lost himself, was estranged from his family and has to come to home.  He’s taken on the least manly profession (laughs) in contrast to his father, this big-game hunter, depraved nobility kind of guy.

Yeah, we had several different versions of that.  I think it was challenging because——  A lot of that changed because of the physicality of the location that we had to work with.  There were a couple different versions which we had worked out, given the contingencies of the set.  This is the one Joe settled on at the end of the day.

Yeah, that version hasn’t made it into the final film.  We had a notion that this was not just an old guy, but there was this sort of implication that the creepy old guy could be Satan passing the cane along.  It didn’t make it (laugh), he just has the cane in the current film.  I thought it was just a good idea, it’s just his from the start now.  With the 2010 kicker of it being a sword.——I definitely tried to find a few places of connection for little spiritual totems of the original.

Yeah (laughs).  Aberline was introduced in Paul’s draft as a pursuing character that then we fleshed out.  He chose the name Aberline.  I didn’t really connect that with that notion when I first read it, but then I looked up the name and said ‘Oh, this is the guy from In Hell!’ (laughs)  We thought that was a fun grace note to have. 

——-No.  I mean, Paul didn’t bring it up that he’d been involved in the Ripper case previously.  We added that dimension to it.

(laughs).  No, he didn’t.  Not the script.  Benny is sort of… the process in independent films is a little bit different than this sort of film.  He didn’t rewrite anything but we had lots of conversations about his dialogue.  He certainly wanted to plumb his lines and stuff like that.  Not rewriting per se, but he had a lot of ‘Could I say it this way…?’  He’s a real professional.

I think as soon as you see Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are both in this film… (laughs).  I think the audience gets some satisfaction about having their suspiciions confirmed.  I think his sense of betrayal is a good thing. Rather than it just being (chuckles) Bela Legosi, just some guy who randomly bites him.  I thought this was a good, meaningful melodrama.

Knowing that you’re going to be outed?  (chuckles).  Yes and no.  I think it’d be much harder to pull off a Sixth Sense-style film these days that really depended upon that surprise.  I think that would be very difficult to pull off now.  On the other hand, if you’re creating enough engagement and suspense in the moment, you can know the outcome of a film.  Something like Thirteen Days.  You’re sitting in the theater so you know the world hasn’t blown up.  But you can create tensions and suspense, and if you’re doing your job, in the moment people will forget that fact.  ——–

—That’s the magic of it, that you can suspend disbelief there.  Watching something that’s well-told you can forget that you already know certain aspects of it.  There’s something anthropologically gratifyying about that to me.  The yarn-weaving and the storytelling is the social, fun experience, not the knowledge itself.

Two weeks back I asked for ideas, and one fellow (stand up and wave, Matthew) suggested the idea of approaching God, or any god, in a story. How can you do it without annoying readers while still doing justice to your chosen almighty?

And then, by yet another odd coincidence, on one of my favorite message boards, a few of us were recently batting around the film The Adjustment Bureau, which, in the big picture, is about… well, guess.

First off, a few grammar and spelling points. If we’re talking about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic deity, it’s always God. Capital G. This also holds if you choose to call him the Lord. It doesn’t matter if you or your character are an atheist or agnostic or whatever—this isn’t a religious point, it’s just standard, accepted spelling. This deity is considered the definitive article and as such his (if I may be so presumptuous) name is always capitalized. It’s a proper noun. The same goes for the Bible. If you’re referring to the religious text that encompasses the old and new testament, it’s the Bible. You only use lower case when you’re speaking about a generic book of absolute fact, like if I tell you that Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is my bible.

And, really, if you’re going to write about Biblical-era tales, check out the MLA Handbook, because there are a bunch of unique grammar and spelling rules that apply to these names.

All of which leads to point two. I’m not talking specifically about God in this week’s rant, because a lot of the folks reading this are just as interested in Greek gods, Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Chinese demons, and cosmic entities from beyond time. But when it comes to stories, they all deal with a lot of the same issues.

Now, speaking of definitive articles, I’d like to start with an analogy…

In Danse Macabre, King tells a wonderful story about hearing William F. Nolan (the writer behind Logan’s Run and the legendary Trilogy of Terror films) talk at a convention. Nolan explained horror in terms of a closet at the end of the hall in a creepy, old house. Maybe the hero or heroine can hear something bumping around in there from anywhere in the house, and every now and then it thumps as whatever it is in there knocks an item off a hanger or tips a box off a shelf. As he or she gets closer, perhaps they can hear it scratching on the inside of the closet door. Endless scratching, scratching, scratching…

Finally, despite all our silent urgings, the character reaches out, turns the knob, and yanks open the door to reveal a ten-foot tall cockroach!!!

Thing is, even with the screams and the hissing and the mood music blaring, it’s kind of a relief to see that oversized bug. A ten-foot cockroach is pretty scary, no question about it, but a twenty-foot cockroach… man, I don’t know about you but that’d make me wet my pants pretty quick. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. Once I know what X is, I can imagine a scarier Y and X is reduced by comparison.

In the same way that naming the unknown horror lessens it, deities are lessened by defining them. When a writer tries to explain or show the scope of a god’s power, more often than not they’re really just establishing the god’s limits. If you tell me your god burns with the light of a hundred suns, I can say mine burns with the light of a thousand. If yours is a thousand feet tall and moves mountains, mine is ten-thousand feet tall and moves continents. The more the writer tries to show me, the easier it is for me to imagine something bigger and better (or nastier).

A great example of this is The Omen. No, the original. We shall not mention the remake here. Without giving away too much (although, why don’t you know this story already?), The Omen is about a diplomat who adopts a little boy. The boy, Damien, might be the Antichrist. I say “might” because… well, the movie actually makes you wonder. There are definitely people who think he’s the Antichrist. There sure are a lot of accidents and disturbing events that circle around the little boy. But the thing is… he never does anything. His eyes never glow, he never speaks in a deep, stentorian voice, he doesn’t shoot flames or lightning from his hands. Damien comes across as nigh-omnipotent because it seems completely effortless for him to get to anyone, anywhere—and that what makes him all the more terrifying. Because he doesn’t actively do anything, how’s anyone supposed to stop him? And what will happen when he does start being active?

Y’see, Timmy, defining something in any way automatically minimizes it, because the moment it’s been defined we can think of something bigger. Think of the little kid who yells, “infinity” and immediately gets countered with “infinity-plus-one!”

That’s why it’s always best to leave such omnipotent beings in the shadows rather than dragging them out into the light.  By their very nature, they’re vast, undefinable beings.  Thus, the moment they get any sort of definition they’re being lessened.

So, here’s a few quick thoughts for including a deity in your story.

Don’t—The simplest thing to do. Is a personal appearance really required for this story to work? The members of Congress have a big effect on my life, but I’ve never seen a single one of them in person. Heck, the only messages I’ve gotten from them have been spam emails and robocalls. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t there influencing aspects of my existence, and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be impressed if one of their aides gave me a call to chat about something. Which leads nicely to…

Minions—Gods of any type are impossible to fight, so including them on either side of the story equation really unbalances things. But I believe someone could beat cultists or demons or maybe even an angel. These are the beings my characters should be encountering. Remember, you can almost never get to the CEO because there’s a wall of flunkies, advisors, junior execs, and bodyguards in the way.

Silence is Golden—They used this one way back in It’s A Wonderful Life, when Clarence the angel would have one-sided conversations with the sky. Neil Gaiman did it in both The Sandman and the wonderful Good Omens (with Terry Prachett). Kevin Smith did it in Dogma. Mere mortals can’t hear the voice of God and expect to survive, so the Lord speaks through a number of mediums… or not at all. Keep in mind, to pull this off—especially the one sided conversation—your dialogue needs to be sharp and you can’t fall back on clumsy devices like repeating everything the silent person says just to make it clear what your god hates.

Comedy—People are a lot more willing to accept divine intervention (of one kind or another) if it has a comedy element. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because when the writer’s not taking the matter seriously, it’s hard for people to have serious complaints. That’s why George Burns and Christopher Moore get away with mocking the man upstairs and The Last Temptation of Christ gets months of picketing. But this tone has to spread through your whole story. You can’t have your deity be the only source of comedy, because then you’re mocking him or her in the bad way.

Minimal Miracles—D’you ever hear the old saying about being so tough you don’t need to fight to prove it? More to the point, have you ever watched a movie where the bad-ass hero just fights and fights and fights and fights and fights? It gets boring, no matter how often he wins. Your omnipotent beings shouldn’t be expressing their power just to prove they can, because that power will start to get boring and take all the challenge out of the story one way or another. If everybody who dies gets brought back to life, what are people even fighting for?

Simply put… gods are the ultimate “less is more” when it comes to writing. The more a god—or demon, or cosmic entity—gets defined, the easier it is to name god-plus-one.

Next week… well, I’m going to miss next week. I’m one of the guests at ZomBCon up in Seattle. But when I come back, I’m sure I’ll have all sorts of scary and horrific things to talk about.

Until then, go write.