Slasher
Considering the obsessive deconstruction of the genre, slasher movies are remarkably simple. You have a disparate group of young people, mostly teenagers or college students, and a psychotic killer who borders on mythical picking them off one by one. I won’t deny the powerful subtext permeating these movies, but did we really need the dozens of movies from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to last year’s (admittedly brilliant) Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon to beat us over the head with the feminism, the gynophobia, the antiheroes, the monsters, the Ahabs? Do we need people to delineate true slasher films from pseudo-slasher offshoots like splatter films and torture porn? Why does it matter?
Frankly, it doesn’t matter much to me now, but it probably would if I ever attempted to write a slasher script. That’s the problem with genre work: you have to understand the genre, even if your goal is to subvert or satirize… In ancient times, when I majored in music, I had a theory professor who would teach us things like symphonic form. He’d map out the structure of a symphony and then say, “Okay, now, here’s Beethoven’s third symphony — and here’s how he broke all the rules.” One day, a classmate asked, “How come we’re studying the perfect form of all this stuff, but all the memorable composers broke the rules?” His answer was a cliché, but a valid one: “You have to know the rules before you can break them.”
Which is exactly the problem with a little script I read the other day. Based on its title, I hoped it would be a remake of Bert I. Gordon’s moody 1960 Vertigo-wannabe, Tormented (or, as its lobby poster calls it, Tormented… By the She-Ghost of Haunted Island). The notorious B.I.G. made some terrible films, but this ranks as one of his least offensive, with a rational story, decent acting, and surprising psychological depth. It’s just sunk by things like a disembodied head on a wet bar, but the elements for a good remake are there. I don’t object to remakes, honestly; I just work under the theory that skilled filmmakers should redo pieces of crap with potential (like Ocean’s Eleven).
To my surprise, in this sad world of hollow remakes of and sequels to successful films, this script was an original work. It made a valiant effort to conform to the slasher genre, but it was definitely a project full of rule-breaking written by someone who didn’t understand the rules. It takes the rather bizarre tack of following a group of bullies — who, through teamwork, drive a student to suicide — without imbuing any of them with a shred of sympathy. The suicide victim rises from the dead to take his revenge, and suddenly we’re expected to… Well, I was never exactly sure. By the end, the writer shows his intention to create an “antihero” vibe from the killer…yet he spends about half the script trying to keep the killer’s identity a mystery. So who the hell are we rooting for here? The story opens with the funeral of the suicide victim/zombie killer, so we never get the chance to get to know him and, therefore, root for him.
The writer fails to understand the idea that we have to either sympathize with the characters’ plight or empathize with why they’re so unsympathetic. Did that make any sense? Let me put it another way: if we don’t understand why they’re a bunch of fucknuts, nobody’s going to care when they die. If nobody cares about the victims or the killer, what’s the point of watching the movie? I felt like a more interesting approach would be to play on the perceptual problems. Remember that Buffy episode, “Earshot”? (For those who don’t: an encounter with some unusual demons leaves her hearing the thoughts of everyone around her. There’s a whole subplot about these thoughts overwhelming her, blah blah, but the important thing is she overhears one students (apparent) intention to gun everyone down. She has to stop him, but in the end she realizes he’s going to kill himself (with a sniper rifle…in the school bell tower — yeah, not one of their most well-thought-out twists), and she has a whole monologue that basically makes him realize it’s not that nobody likes him, it’s that nobody cares. Everyone is too wrapped up in their own shit to pay any attention.) That’s what I wish this script had been like: this kid kills himself because he feels he’s being tormented (hence the title), but when we get to know these kids…we realize he’s wrong. What he perceived as cruelty was just nobody giving a damn about him.
So there you go, two solutions: either show us more of the killer before he offs himself so we can get behind his spree, or make the kids less malicious and more apathetic to this kid they’ve supposedly bullied. But, see, it’s hard to come up with solutions like that when you don’t quite grasp the genre.
If anything failed the genre test, I figured the remake of The House on Sorority Row would fit the bill. For reasons unknown, Mark Rosman’s 1983 original has become somewhat of a revisionist classic. Here’s the problem: it’s fucking terrible. You know how you watch old, low-budget slasher movies and you cringe or laugh at the awkward pacing, terrible acting, and terrible gore effects? This flick is a laughfest, not a shockfest, but as I mentioned, it falls under my favorite category of remakes: remakes of crap by competent professionals. I’m not wrong in assuming a director known mostly for Budweiser commercials is a competent professional, am I?
This script actually disregards the original’s plot in favor of a clever, funny riff on the slasher genre. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever read, but its economical character development, quick pacing, and inventive plotting made it more fun than I expected. One of the key things the writers utilize is the setting. About 75% of the story takes place in the sorority house, and the writers do a great job of establishing the space and using it effectively. It has some major problems near the end — including a laugh-out-loud stupid “set the stage of a sequel” stinger — but nothing that can’t be fixed in the editing room.
The plot this time around revolves around a bizarre but clever scenario: annoyed by a sleazy nerd (brother of one of the sorority sisters), the girls play a prank on him by making him think he killed the girl he was trying to roofie. They drive out to the middle of nowhere to dismember the “corpse” and toss the parts into an old mineshaft. Just when our heroine — reluctant to go along with the prank to begin with — convinces her sisters to admit the prank, the grief-stricken and panicking impales her with a tire iron, killing her for real. They freak out and decide to go ahead with their prank plan for real.
Cut to: graduation day, one year later. That’s when the slashing begins, and as the sisters’ numbers dwindle, they slowly piece together who’s killing them (mainly because by the end, there aren’t many left to accuse) and why. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s loaded with clever dialogue and a great use of both the setting and the ol’ common household items. The only thing I object to is overuse of a fire axe — I know most Greek groups live in rickety, old houses, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fire axe anywhere but an apartment or office building. Otherwise, the whole thing just hums along and, barring some unforeseen horrible performances or incompetent production, could turn out to be the best non-Behind the Mask slasher movie in years.
Why does an original idea fail where a remake of a terrible movie succeeds? These writers clearly understood not only the conventions of the slasher genre but have a good idea of what’s preceded them; they’re reinventing the wheel by putting a digital clock in it or something. On the other hand, Tormented tries hard to twist tradition without fully grasping what makes slasher movies effective, or how to make unlikable characters compelling enough to watch.
Posted by Stan on November 19, 2008 10:44 PM | Permalink | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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