SCRIPTSHARK

Type of Material: Screenplay Title: FROM HELL I CAME

Number of Pages: 105 Author: postmortem

Submitted By: Circa: Present

Submitted To: Location: Ozarks

Analyst: AM Genre: Thriller

LOG LINE: An escaped convict is assisted by a deranged and vicious killer with a vendetta against the local sheriff that goes back 30 years, to the murders of his family.

	Excellent	Good	Fair	Poor	Budget
Idea			X
Story Line			X		High
Characterization			X		Medium
Dialogue			X		Low	X
Production Value			X

THE SHARK GRID:

MECHANICS	Excellent	Solid	Needs Work	Re-Think	N/A
Action lines clearly and concisely manifest visual action and literal context.		X
Scenes avoid the problem of continuing beyond optimal length.			X
Spelling, grammar, and proofreading.		X
Page count.		X
The script’s physical presentation.		X
Dialogue.			X
The script effectively manifests a compelling theme and adheres to it throughout the story.			X

CHARACTER	Excellent	Solid	Needs Work	Re-Think	N/A
The protagonist clearly manifests both internal and external goals.			X
The protagonist has consistent opposition to his/her goals.			X
The protagonist is sympathetic and/or engages our emotional investment.			X
The protagonist clearly changes / has an arc.			X
The supporting characters are unique and add value to the story.			X
All of the characters are authentic to their backgrounds.			X
The script has an effective antagonistic force, direct or indirect.			X

STRUCTURE:	Excellent	Solid	Needs Work	Re-Think	N/A
The script has a strong structural foundation that serves the story, classic three-act structure or otherwise.			X
Plots and subplots work together.			X
The set-up is concise, and effective.			X
The story has well-designed reversals.			X
Transitions are effective and appropriate to the story.			X
Every scene has relevance.			X
The story includes an effective dramatic climax / payoff.			X
The setup is resolved effectively.			X
A catalytic situation drives the plot.			X
Dramatic conflict and tension build across scenes, throughout the plot.			X

MARKET VALUE	Excellent	Solid	Needs Work	Re-Think	N/A
Originality / freshness.			X
The story has a clearly defined target audience.			X
The story clearly has mass audience (universal) appeal.			X
The story includes a conceptual “hook” that could potentially be used to effectively market the film.			X

PRODUCTION VALUE	Excellent	Solid	Needs Work	Re-Think	N/A
The lead character is castable / has star appeal.			X
The visual arena of the script is stimulating.			X
The project has International appeal.			X

COMMENTS:

FROM HELL I CAME is another script that demonstrates some strong writing proficiency, but unfortunately didn’t have a plot that captivated the reader, or characters that one was inclined to root for. The script opens with an exciting chase sequence that immediately drew the reader in, but after that Sherra and McGavin’s initial encounter, it felt like the script hit a lull until deep in the second act. There are a lot of scenes with the cops as they arrive at the woods and start their search, but nothing that really advances the story. Many of the Sherra and McGavin scenes also seem slowly paced and it’s not until McGavin encounters and kills some of the search party that things really start to get rolling again.

Characters don’t always have to be likable in the sense that they are morally good people, but they do need to be appealing to an audience – either in a “love to hate” sort of way, or even just being flawed by sympathetic. In any event, an audience needs someone to root for, and the real trick of FROM HELL I CAME is that by the end of the script, none of the characters seem worthy of any kind of redemption.

In what might be a symptom of this problem, this reader found it difficult to pinpoint just who the protagonist of the story was intended to be. Sherra is the escaped felon whose manhunt ends up provoking most of the story, so she’d be a logical protagonist, but for the fact that she’s rarely the one advancing the story. By the third act, the main conflict seems to be Varnell vs. McGavin, with Sheera little more than a bystander. The script initially seems to be taking some steps to make Sheera sympathetic. In flashback we see that she was raped in prison and she’s appropriately horrified by the murders that McGavin commits. Since she’s just seen how brutal a killer he is, it’s a bit surprising she follows him rather than trying to run off on her own. Maybe she just figures that if he was going to kill her, he’d have done it already.

McGavin doesn’t really work as the protagonist either. He might have a sympathetic backstory about his family being killed and his brother betraying him, but he doesn’t have much of an arc in the script. Even so, if we were to say that his arc is that he’s out for revenge, it forces us to ask why he’s apparently been waiting around for nearly thirty-five years to do so. Upon reflection, that really is one of the biggest flaws of the script. Why has he apparently been dormant for twenty years only to flare up now?

Since the cops tell the urban legend of McGavin, it seems we’re supposed to assume he’s killed people out there before. If it was anyone other than a cop who passed along this story, this reader wouldn’t nitpick this too much. Since Creed is in law enforcement, shouldn’t he know if anyone was really killed out there? And if someone did turn up dead in the woods, why were there no attempts by law enforcement to track down and bring in McGavin for those murders? His dialogue tries to have it both ways, intimating that the cops couldn’t pin the murders on McGavin, and then claiming it’s “just a bedtime story.” So if these murders really happened, who did he kill? It seems like cops would have been the target of his revenge, and if nothing else, Varnell would have known why. Since he had no trouble covering up the murders of his nephew and his sister-in-law, it’s surprising he wouldn’t have just authorized his men to kill McGavin. Considering the cops of the time probably would have known the full backstory, it’s hard to buy him getting away just because they couldn’t pin anything on him. If the cops were that crooked, they’d have either killed him or found a way to make a false charge stick. Bottom line – Creed’s bedtime story does more harm than good here.

The script also makes it pretty hard to feel sorry for McGavin when he kills Bailey, who thus far has been nothing but a friend to him for over 35 years. He even tells Sherra that McGavin is his “truest friend.” When McGavin kills him, it’s a sad moment because it makes the character completely irredeemable, no matter what his backstory was. It’s a shocking moment, but it’s also one that ensures that the audience will never be sympathetic to him again. Because of this, it’s hard to know who the audience should be rooting for when McGavin comes face-to-face with his brother again. The script sets up a scenario where both of these characters are so reprehensible that the audience wouldn’t be heartbroken if both of them ended up dead.

This reader found the backstory between Varnell and McGavin to be a little implausible. It was definitely a surprise to discover the two were related, but once the reader got over that shock, he couldn’t quite believe that Varnell would have helped cover up the rape and murder of his own family members. We never learn if there was any grand motivation for these rapes and murders, and Varnell’s only justification for helping cover-up the truth was “It would’ve destroyed everything I’d sacrificed for.” He’s not given good enough motivation for the cover-up. How does protecting crooked cops help him at all? We never see the rest of the flashback after the rapist aims the gun at McGavin, but obviously McGavin survived. Did he kill those rapists? If so, what does Varnell have to gain by hiding the truth? (On top of that, he does a pretty poor job of hiding the truth. Though his official finding of the cause of death was “Accidental Shooting” all one has to do is turn the report to the next page to find the real truth. At the very least, why wouldn’t he have destroyed the coroner’s report if he was so concerned about concealing what really happened.)

After all that, it should at least have been McGavin who killed his brother. Instead, Sherra is the one who delivers the killshot. Both this and the fact that she killed Knight a few scenes earlier pretty much cemented her as irredeemable. This reader just didn’t like that she ended up being a killer for seemingly no reason. Even if it’s arguably in self-defense when she kills Knight, the Varnell murder is excessive. It felt like the writers were trying to make her sympathetic in the beginning, but this reader fears that by the end, the audience is going to be angry they were ever manipulated into taking her side.

Knight is yet another potentially good character ruined through weak writing. Early on, it feels like the audience could at least count on her to be the moral center of the story. Then, towards the third act, a split-second of overzealousness causes her to kill an innocent hunter. It’s clearly an accident, but this reader was disturbed how little remorse she showed. She’s numb, and described as walking like a zombie, but this accidental murder doesn’t seem to have any real point beyond the shock value. It doesn’t add much to Knight’s character arc. All it does is turn the audience against her because she goes along with the lie that McGavin killed the hunter. It would have worked better if she was the one “good” character in the film and somehow was the one to bring in Varnell and McGavin. Doing this would then also keep Sherra redeemable if she doesn’t kill Knight and Varnell, and perhaps Knight might let her go after learning of how she suffered in prison. (Alternately, you could have Varnell kill her, as a way of keeping a lid on the misdeeds of his men.)

The bottom line on this script is that every one of the characters turned out to be irredeemable in some way, and at the end, there was no one left whom the audience would root for. The plot twists verged on implausible, and there’s a long stretch in the middle where the pacing lagged. The script had a promising start, but little else beyond that.