A Screenwriter's Journey 2: Beware the Dortches!

Okay, so I've got a title, a genre, a very basic idea and a few notes. I'm clearly not ready to start writing yet. There's nothing to write so far. Lots more brainstorming to go before writing begins. I don't generally do a formal outline like you would in school. I do some kind of outlining, but that comes later in the process. Now we need more ideas.

Where do they come from?

In the last diary, I said that ideas can come at any time from anywhere. But that doesn't mean those ideas are relevant to the script I'm writing. So I need more ideas and I don't have time to wait on them. Not if I want to finish THIS screenplay. So my next step is to generate more ideas. And the way to get started on that process is to look over the notes I already have.

Looking over the notes I already have shows I have a few things already decided even though I haven't written it down yet. From those notes, I have:

-This is a horror movie in the style of Blumhouse. It's meant to be fun, violent, scary, creepy and emotional. 

-The Dortches are a family that run a haunted house off the beaten track. At least two of the members are really large men.

-As the story starts, this is the fourth annual haunted house for the Dortches. Later in the story will include the fifth annual haunted house.

-The fourth annual haunted house was pretty bad, but the Dortches keep telling people to come back for the fifth anniversary, which will be big.

-The fifth annual haunted house is a lie. It's an actual haunted house where the Dortches will murder people.

-The locals are rude and dismissive to the Dortches.

-One of the characters is a girl who had a bad experience with a haunted house as a kid.

Okay, to start that's all I have. But most of these things immediately lead to other ideas. Let's look a little closer at each of those lines and the new ideas that come out of them.

It's also important to stress at this point that ALL notes are tentative. No idea is so good that it can't be eliminated later on if it serves the story. Everything in the script must serve the story or it doesn't belong. These ideas all seem relevant now, but some of them might not be. That is super important to keep in mind with screenwriting as once you sell a script, it no longer belongs to you. After you get that check, they can do anything they want to it. Knowing that in advance means that screenwriters can't be precious about ideas. No screenplay that was ever turned into a movie was shot solely on the first draft. And few movies have ever been made where other people didn't shoehorn their ideas into the product before it hits the screen. Hollywood has problems.

So, looking at these notes to generate more ideas, keeping in mind that no idea is permanent. Yet.

"This is a horror movie in the style of Blumhouse. It's meant to be fun, violent, scary, creepy and emotional."

This one provides a lot of information about the tone, length, budget and overall style of the film. It's trying to appeal to fans of that type of movie. This one doesn't give any detailed ideas, it's more about how to execute the writing of those ideas.

"The Dortches are a family that run a haunted house off the beaten track. At least two of the members are really large men."

This one is important for character and setting (with a hint at plot). The Dortches are established as the villains. They live away from other people. They run a haunted house.

This leads to a few questions that jump to new content ideas. If we have a haunted house, what's in it? What does it look like? For that, I'll actually do a little bit of research to find out about the state of the neighborhood haunted house and what types of scares they have. That will also lead to one of the key things in a horror movie, the kills. The design of the haunted house will lead to the kills and vice versa.

The Dortches live off the beaten path and they're murderers. A family of murderers. This suggests that I have to fill out the family with various members. Part of the key to working in Hollywood screenwriting is that producers want you to give them completely familiar things that have a new or original twist on them. They largely aren't looking for complete re-inventions of genre or film, they're interested in the evolution of those things, which is a slow process. There are a lot of horror movies about families that live off the beaten path and kill "normal" people. So I have to do something different with the family.

Most of my writing deals with diverse casts and subverting prior tropes with characters that are women, people of color and LGBTQ. This doesn't mean that all of these characters are or should be heroic or "good guys." They should, at a minimum, hint the diversity of people within that group. This leads me to the idea that I want to make the Dortches a matriarchal family. There is no father or grandfather at the head of the family. There's a mother figure. And all the positions of power will be held by women. Evil women. The two big males will serve as muscle, but they won't be smart or in charge.

This then leads to who are the Dortches going to be facing off against. I have some ideas for that, but they'll take some more development, so I'll come back to them.

"As the story starts, this is the fourth annual haunted house for the Dortches. Later in the story will include the fifth annual haunted house."

This cements the plot and locations. Most of the film will take place at the Dortches’ haunted house. They'll go once at the beginning of the story, where it's largely uneventful. They'll complain about how bad it is and the Dortches will tell them to come back next year and it'll be awesome. This is basically the "inciting incident." Going back to the Dortches house for the fifth anniversary is the protagonist's entry into the story of this screenplay.

"The fourth annual haunted house was pretty bad, but the Dortches keep telling people to come back for the fifth anniversary, which will be big."

The fourth annual haunted house is subpar and not scary. But maybe there's a door to the "scary path" that the characters can't take because it's closed. But it'll be open next year. The house isn't a big hit, but people are intrigued by the extra scary door and "wait till next year."

"The fifth annual haunted house is a lie. It's an actual haunted house where the Dortches will murder people."

Here's the story conflict. The Dortches are going to kill (or try to kill) the protagonist(s).

"The locals are rude and dismissive to the Dortches."

One of the big problems with weak horror movies is that the villains have no motivation or weak motivation. They just kill. That's not good enough. Good villains do things for reasons. For human reasons. And just "being evil" isn't a real human thing. Evil is don't in the name of something. Money. Power. Sex. Survival. That the locals hate the Dortches and mistreat them is a big motivator for them to kill (accepting that they are the type that would kill).

This has been done so often it's a cliche, though, so I want to take it further. One of the Dortches is a girl that goes to the same school as the kids who are the protagonists. The group of protagonists are high school juniors at the beginning of the story and go into their senior year in the second act. The Dortch daughter that goes to school will be picked on and made fun of by the protagonists, who will be a diverse set of popular kids. But I don't want to repeat Carrie and other films like it, so I want to make the Dortch girl mean and insulting without being over the top. The popular kids making fun of her should largely be doing so over legitimate things. The girl won't care, though, she'll tell her family about it and exact revenge upon them.

"One of the characters is a girl who had a bad experience with a haunted house as a kid."

This is an individual motivation of one of the protagonists. What bad experience could you have in one of those places as a kid? You could get lost, but that's been done before (even by Blumhouse). The second thing I thought of was that there could've been inappropriate touching of this kid by "actors" in the haunted house. It's a dangerous subject to address, and I will never write an explicit rape scene, so I'll have to find a way to present this that doesn't traumatize victims (beyond the trauma that ANY horror movie would provide) , but is still scary and disturbing. This will likely be one of the harder parts of the script to write well.

Even before this brainstorm, there were actually a few ideas set in stone. They have to be. You can't start writing until you know what you're writing about. So the basic premise of the family and the fake haunted house that turns real, those things have to be locked in now, because otherwise, I can't write the rest of the script. The rest of these ideas will be fleshed out and either expanded or eliminated.

So, that's the next part, figuring out what other ideas and things I need to figure out. Locations, characters, motivations, unique kills.