A Screenwriter's Journey 4: Characters & Blue People

First, my friend Aubri sent me some articles about a family that, because of a really rare disorder, have blue skin. That or something like it is perfect. I wanted the rest of the people in the story to look down on the Dortches with contempt, disgust and fear (with the last one growing over time), but I wanted to keep it complex. So the town makes fun of the people who outsiders with a skin condition. The family reacts negatively. Society treats them even worse. They snap and want revenge. That's the longer plot arc that starts years before this story. This story is the climax of that lifetime arc.

The other thing is I really wanted to dig into the main characters. The protagonist and his/her group of friends. I haven't decided on the protagonist yet, because that will come out of the character development. It will most likely be (or at least appear to be) the person with the bad experience in a haunted house that I had written about previously. They'll have a natural fear of going to this place the first time, and will be lulled into going the second time because the first time wasn't that scary. Although, at this point, I think I may make that person a fake protagonist, in the tradition of movies like Psycho and Hostel. When making a horror movie, you HAVE to have nods to your influences. It's required by genre fans.

But I don't know who that is yet, because I haven't figured out the main characters. So I'm doing that right now.

The underlying theme of this movie is class-based, in my thinking. It's not as frequently used in horror movies these days as are things like gender and race and disability. I think the best movie of 2019 was Parasite, which is very explicitly about class. I want this movie to travel in that realm.

That's built in with the Dortches family being poor and more rural and having the skin condition leading to conflict with the rest of the area, which I'm thinking is going to be a wealthy suburb of an unnamed medium/big city and the Dortches live past the suburbs as it gets more rural.

So it's already suburbs vs. country and wealthy vs. poor. Those are the underlying conflicts, but, too many of these movies layer the conflicts in ways that dilute the class critique. And I have to be careful, because this now starts to head in the direction of the themes of "Get Out." Love the hell out of that movie, but don't want to copy it.

I think the solution here is to make the richer kids be diverse as fuck. They're seniors in high school. They're the popular kids. And they look like a Benneton ad. Diverse in terms of race, equal in terms of gender, all from wealthy families, so healthy and nicely-dressed. Because they are a diverse group, though, they aren't as dismissive of different people as their parents are. So while they will definitely have problems with the Dortches and being mean to them, it'll be like in Carrie where all the teens were really mean to Carrie except the one couple who tried to help them out. All of these kids except maybe one or two will be that kind of condescending but caring mean?

So I had previously decided that the main group was going to consist of 6. There will be some other named characters from the school who will also serve as potential victims at the Haunted House.

Of the six, I wanted to avoid the trope of "the final girl" or the ending where it's a couple, so the survivors at the end will be two people, one male and one female, but not a couple, so one of them will be LG and the other won't. Zero chance of this being a couple. BUT each will have other love interests through the story.

I picture this place being Northern, because I want it relatively cold for the Haunted House so that there's nothing in this film that hints at nudity or sex (although flirting and romance and love will be touched upon). So the break down of the characters will likely be something like this:

2 black characters
2 Asian characters (but drastically different parts of Asia)
2 white characters
3 female, 3 male

2 LGBT (but these two aren't a couple, they'll each date other people outside the group)

The very specific diversity of this group is to emphasize that people from any group can be raised to be bad on issues of class and that privilege can be developed by anyone based on how they are raised. Everybody can be an asshole when it comes to class.

And I want each kid to be happy and successful at something that is normally NOT attributed to their race or gender. So one of the boys is Asian and is a football star at a skill position. He'll be straight because of the common stereotype in film of the closeted gay football player. He gets good grades, but not good enough for his parents.

The straight white girl will be a really tall, conventionally pretty basketball player. A center, so closer to 6' tall. Maybe like a white Lisa Leslie. She also likes theater and does the school play. Her hovering mother approves of everything but is overbearing.

The straight black girl is student body president and has gotten into Harvard based on her grades and leadership skills. She also does school plays, but isn't as good at that as she is at politics. Her single father is super supportive.

The gay black boy is awkward and shy. He has a steady boyfriend, but his boyfriend is in the closet, which causes problems. He has amazing grades, is openly gay and is an accomplished rapper who has made the unofficial "school song" and video to support his friends on sports and other teams. But he is timid and easily embarrassed, even by praise, off stage. He is the straight black girl's brother.

The lesbian Asian girl is on the debate team with the straight black girl. She has a crush on the straight black girl. She also runs track and field.

The white boy is a very attractive nerd. He's the treasurer in student government, is another star on the debate team and plays soccer. He also loves horror movies.

Okay, that's what I came up with in this brainstorming session. So I think I have a start on the characters. And as I started writing them up I got to start to feel characters in different ways. I'm thinking that the gay boy is definitely going to survive. I'm not sure beyond that yet. I might even let three survive because these characters are going to be relatively well-built up in the movie. But then again, the more built up they are, they more the deaths have consequences, so maybe it should only be two.

That's not to figure out for now, though...