A Screenwriter's Journey #9: Smart House

Okay, big time jump forward. The first eight entries in this series were originally sent out by e-mail as I wrote “Beware the Dortches.” They weren’t published here until after I finished that screenplay. But while they were publishing, I kept writing. First I finished an adaptation of the “Alpha Flight” comics and an experimental, almost no-dialog sci fi script called “Shark Road.” I’m about two thirds of the way through “Planet B,” my next feature, but I took a break from that over the last week or so to write my second short film. It’s called “Smart House.”

But what the hell is a short film?

I’m only just now coming to the point where I have an idea what short films are. They really don’t follow the same rules as features. They don’t share most of the structures and many of the tools of writing a feature don’t work here, or lose impact because they aren’t given time to develop.

It’s super hard for a short film to be about characters. You can do a lot of things with ONE character or one relationship, but beyond that, you just don’t have time.

And plot is really hard to pull off in a short, too. You just don’t have time. Especially when the only good plot is one that is based on characters and you have to establish those characters before a plot becomes interesting. You just don’t have the time.

So what are short films about? They certainly have to have some characters and you could do a film that focuses really specifically on a character’s daily life or one really quick moment that serves as an important point in their life. You could certainly do a slice-of-life kinda thing that points to some bigger truth.

You could also go more intellectual and use it as a way to comment on society or on film or on some other specific subject. A quick impression that makes you think about bigger things. A doorway to learn more or examine things more thoughtfully.

Or you could could lean more towards a quick-but-clever plot device. This is what I did with my first short film, “Wish I’d Never Met You,” which is currently in post-production. I had a producer who likes my writing request a short script she could shoot quickly and inexpensively. I had an idea that I had been toying with about the victim of a hitman who was caught in a time loop and had starting developing it originally as a text-based game. But the idea hadn’t really worked out as a game, so it had been lying around waiting for another avenue. I wrote it as a short in a day or two and the time-loop plot device fully created the plot and structure, so I didn’t really have to consider what to write.

I’d been looking for a good idea to develop into a short, but I hadn’t thought out what that meant like I just did in this post. I was still loose on the very idea of what a short could be. I knew I wanted it to be one of the types of short films that comments on society and such, but didn’t have an idea at first.

And then I thought back to my most prolific fiction writing period before 2019 and it turned out to be a two-year period in the early 2000s where I wrote more than 30 short stories. And the short stories that I liked the most and wrote about were largely horror and sci fi that was influenced by the likes of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, EC Comics (Tales From the Crypt, etc.), various horror anthology movies/shows (Masters of Horror, TFtC, Tales From the Hood, etc.) and the DC horror titles of the 60s-80s (House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, Unexpected, etc.). So many of these stories were based on the ironic twist or a horrific take on karma. People who did bad things got their just desserts in horrific ways.

I’ve always loved those kinda stories. And they’re making a comeback with shows like Black Mirror and the Creepshow revival. So that’s where I landed for short films, that I want to write them in that vein. They don’t all have to be horror or sci fi, but they would have that kind of structure. You give a brief setup of the character(s) that are important, you put them in a singular situation that involves conflict and you get them out of it or you don’t. Short films don’t have as strong a need to have happy endings, so this form does lend itself more towards sci fi/horror, which is fine, since that’s what I tend to write.

I always have a ton of ideas right before I go to bed. If they’re good enough, I’ll write them down, and sometimes they develop into something really good. That’s what happened this time. I had a near-dreamlike thought, just an image, of a smart house that somehow became aware and killed its owners. That’s where “Smart House” started.

It’s a short, so it basically came down to developing that premise and writing it. I won’t spoil too many of the details, since I already gave away the ending, but here are a few thoughts that influenced the story.

-If the house is a “smart house” that has the potential to kill people, how would it do that? What form would its killing ability take?

-Who are the family? Do they deserve to be killed? Will anyone care if they are killed? Is anyone else killed?

-What is the smart house’s motivation to kill? And this one I’ll actually answer, because it’s the basic premise of the story, the family goes on vacation and gets stuck away from home for a long period because of COVID. When they come back, the house doesn’t recognize them and thinks they are a threat.

-But why would the house think they are a threat? Race is the obvious answer. It’s both very much of the moment and tied into COVID, but it’s easily tied in with technology, too. The stories of how facial recognition software designed by white people can’t recognize black people provide a pretty pointed cause that helps fully develop the theme of the film.

I didn’t start with a theme of race, but as I developed it logically and in context of the real world, that’s where the story took me. Once I got going, it just immediately felt like that was the obvious way to take the story forward and tie it in to the two biggest things going on in the news right now.

Once I answered those questions, the film basically wrote itself. I needed to establish the family, so I had them interacting over breakfast as they pack to go on vacation. Then they leave and the rest of the story develops in their absence before they return. I knew the ending, so I had to make sure to include all the details that would make that ending work and write them in a fashion that feels organic, like, “of course that’s the way things happened.” That cause led to that effect, that action led to that reaction.

In all, it worked out to be about 20 pages. I’m not sure how to pitch short films yet, so I’ll have to work on that, because this one is pretty good, I think. Could also work as an episode of a horror anthology series, too, although it may be a little short for an hour-long show.

Anyway, that’s for another day, but you can read “Smart House” now.