Script Review: Clive Barker’s Dread by Anthony DiBlasi
[In lieu of actual content, for the next several weeks I will present, at least, one review of an upcoming film each week. These are scripts that I’ve been paid money to read, and many of them contain watermarking, identification numbers, password-protection, and other ways of tracking what company it was sent to; because of this and my desire to keep my job, I will not offer downloads for ANY of the scripts I review here. Don’t bother asking.]
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions, but I did tell myself, “Make an effort to blog more in 2010.” Careful readers will know how well that’s going so far. I’ve just been swamped, and unlike the last time I anticipated a swampy future, I didn’t stockpile a bunch of boring script reviews to autopost so I could ignore my blog. Instead, I’m making do with the hallmark of the blogosphere: infrequent posts of dubious quality. I’m starting with the promised script review of Clive Barker’s Dread, a movie that came out on the 29th for an extremely limited engagement as part of the fourth annual After Dark Horrorfest (as I understand it, after the theatrical engagements it’ll be shuffled onto DVD fairly quickly).
Before I get to that, though, I’d like to toss out a cautious recommendation for Adam Green’s Frozen, which opened over the weekend. As usual, I haven’t actually seen the movie. However, I did read the script awhile back and was blown away — except for the part where the third act was missing. Not like it was a complete, 120-page script that simply, structurally, lacked a third act. This was a 70-page script that ended with TO BE CONTINUED… right as it geared up for the third act. What a tease! So maybe the third act is a disaster, but the first two acts are as solid as the frozen urine that soils the characters. Might be worth checking out, despite the limited release, minimal promotion, and middling reviews.
On to Dread…
Let’s start with the twist ending that I don’t want to ruin for those of you who might actually take the time to see this (don’t worry, I’m just going to draw an analogy to a movie you’ve seen). Longtime readers know that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of twist endings. I don’t get angry at every movie that has a twist ending — but I do have a problem with twist endings that either come out of nowhere or are too telegraphed. Twist endings require a delicate balance of elements in order to achieve an “inevitable but unpredictable” moment of surprise, instead of a frustrating mindfuck or an eye-rollingly obvious moment.
Dread suffers from a twist ending that’s obvious from, I dunno, page 20 or so. See, it opens with a flashback sequence in which a family comes home, unaware a killer is in their house. The lone survivor is a young boy, who may or may not grow up to be one of the main characters. The way the script is structured, though, it’s clear early who the young boy has grown up to be, yet it wants us to believe this is a great, unsolvable mystery. Finally getting to that analogy, it’s like if Psycho opened with a scene of young Norman killing his mother. Except for that one addition, everything else is exactly the same — first trying to make us think it’s some kind of thriller about stolen money, then trying to make us think the killer is Norman’s mother before the big twist that she’s long dead and Norman is dressing up like her and murdering people. Would you be happy about a movie that reveals its own big twist in the first scene but still tries to make a suspenseful mystery around it?
Dread even has the semi-subtle genre switch that Psycho has. Ignoring that opening scene, it starts out as a straightforward dramedy about college students struggling to move toward adulthood. Then, it shifts into a sort of bland combo of psychological thriller and torture porn fest. The story follows Stephen and Quaid, a pair of college students who form an awkward friendship in a boring ethics class. The first act isn’t much more than pretentious philosophizing from the two of them, which I bought into because the endless pretentious philosophizing I both endured and espoused during my first two years of college. It’s not terribly compelling, but at least it’s believable. We find out the most relevant information about the characters: Stephen is an introverted nerdy type who’s tethered to routine. Quaid is also pretty nerdy, but he’s more extroverted and pompous about it. Stephen is quietly in awe of Quaid’s misguided confidence, and that sets up the early conflict: Stephen wants to be more like Quaid but can’t figure out how to make it happen.
Quaid catches on to this and decides to teach him, starting with a prank. After a night of drinking, Quaid walks Stephen to his modest suburban home. While Quaid fixes himself a drink, he sends Stephen upstairs to his room to grab a DVD. In it, he finds a husband and wife sleeping. They wake, terrified to see someone in their house. They don’t know Quaid. Naturally, Stephen panics and runs. Quaid follows, amused. He explains this was a psychological experiment on both of them: when Stephen’s afraid, he simply reacts — that’s something he needs to harness to get what he wants. Meanwhile, the couple will spend years in sheer terror as a result of two harmless idiots breaking into their house. Quaid’s pleased with himself, but Stephen starts to see the cracks in his personality’s façade.
Nevertheless, they team up with Zooey (a hot girl from their ethics class) on a class project that seeks to study the long-term effects fear has on people. Stephen and Zooey just want to interview subjects about their greatest fears, but Quaid is obsessed with taking the research to the next level. He begins playing terror-inducing pranks on the other two, which escalate to horror-movie proportions in the third act. Can you guess who the little boy was in the opening scene? Can you?!
Dread has a number of third act problems beyond the twist that isn’t a twist. I don’t want to get into them with too much specificity because of spoilers, although maybe I shouldn’t care because the movie’s already on DVD in the U.K. and is out in theatres here. But I do care, so no spoilers. The main thing is that the script pusses out on completing Stephen’s character arc. Remember, he’s the one who spends most of the script afraid to go after what he wants. Stephen doesn’t overcome this — in fact, the script brings in a red-herring character to do the things Stephen is too wimpy to do himself. This really undermines the script, but it’s clear the writer was more interested in a nihilistic torture porn ending than allowing the character to finally stand up for himself.
That leads me to one of the more interesting aspects of the script, though. It portrays Stephen as the protagonist because, well, it follows him around and leaves Quaid an unmysterious mystery. And, of course, Quaid is the antagonist because he’s nuts, right? Well, think about the protagonist-antagonist relationship, which in its simplest form is defined thusly: a protagonist has a goal that he struggles to achieve, mainly because the antagonist hurls obstacles in his way. In Dread, Stephen has some weak, ineffectual goals (mainly, wanting to get laid), but it’s Quaid who has the real goal: he’s hellbent on “experimenting” on innocent people. Stephen inhibits Quaid’s goal by being a total puss.
It’s an interesting reversal of expectations that would have been made much more interesting if the writer hadn’t tried so hard to make Quaid an enigma. If the writer had laid Quaid’s backstory out in the first act, let his behavior start escalating in the second act, the trajectory from “weird, semi-depressed nerd” to “psychopath” wouldn’t feel so rushed. Building a mystery out of whether or not Quaid’s really crazy, followed by building a mystery out of why he’s crazy, doesn’t do much for the story, and it does literally nothing with the themes about how fear can either cripple a person or force them into action. As mentioned, Stephen the scaredy cat is never really compelled into action, but it’s not his fear that prevents him — it’s the machinations of the writing, which lets the character down. Maybe the writer, ironically, was too afraid to have his “hero” sac up and kill the “villain,” because that’d make him just as bad, right? (Hint: wrong.)
Because Quaid is the true protagonist of the story, it simply feels like his character doesn’t have the proper development. Whatever the protagonist/antagonist relationship, the script focuses on Stephen as the main character. Keeping the point of view with Stephen limits our understanding of Quaid, and the audience’s inability to empathize with whatever Quaid’s going through is the source of all the script’s problems. When the writer finally reveals the essential information late in the game — well, as mentioned, it’s no surprise, which makes it all the more frustrating that he spends so much time trying to hide it. Quaid will never be the true hero of the story, but his character drives the narrative. Obfuscating his personality does the script no favors — in fact, it’s the script’s fatal flaw.
I will reserve judgment, though. Producer/writer/director Anthony DiBlasi has had varying success bringing other Barker stories to the big screen (by which I mean the giant plasma TV on which you watch your favorite direct-to-video content), ranging from the meh The Plague to the pretty good Midnight Meat Train. I have no doubt DiBlasi remains faithful to the source material, which contains a lot of Barker’s trademark grim atmosphere and unsettling imagery, but like many of the adaptations I’ve reviewed, it’s the sort of thing that probably works better as a short story than a film.
Posted by Stan on February 9, 2010 3:13 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Reviews | Digg It
Post a Comment
Powered by Ajax Comments