Why are the ramblings insane?

Because treatments drive you insane. Everyone differs in opinion on treatments and below is just my take on them. Therefore if you’re going to read just once article on treatments I suggest you read this terrific post by Terry Rossio and ignore what I’ve written below.

Death to treatments!

Lets get this straight from the start… no one likes treatments. Writers hate writing them, producers hate reading them. Therefore why the hell does anyone write them?

Okay lets back track first by explaining what a treatment is:

A treatment is a prose document that sells your story.

Reading a screenplay can take a good chunk of time therefore some producers prefer to read a treatment first (as it’s shorter) to see if your story is interesting enough to invest their time in reading your script. Alternatively I have been asked in the past to write a treatment first and have then been commissioned to write a screenplay afterwards.

With New Year’s Evil I decided to write the treatment before writing the screenplay – my view was that seeing as I would at some point to be asked to produce a treatment after finishing the screenplay, I might as well write one first as part of the development process instead of an outline.

However I still kind of technically did an outline anyway because I wrote a description of each scene onto a bunch of index cards first to help structure the treatment.

Some writers don’t like to plan out their screenplays in advance – the Farrelly Brothers don’t do it because they believe they kill your creativity. And for a comedy screenplay they might be right – but from previous experience, I would say it’s essential for you to plan out your horror screenplay.

I once started writing a feature called You Can Run. It was about a group of cross-country runners who were being hunted by a sniper. I never outlined or wrote a treatment before starting the screenplay which meant by page 20 I had killed almost all the characters already. For a horror, that’s not good. So for me the main purpose of writing a treatment for NYE was as a blue-print to write the screenplay.

If writing screenplays is like doing homework then writing a treatment is like when your homework is algebraic equations. They’re not fun to write. They they are incredibly dry because they don’t have cool lines of dialogue nor can you really go into the kind of detail where your action scenes can truly come alive. That’s not to say you can’t write a treatment that sizzles but compared to the screenplay they are just the support act and no one really wants to see the support act.

The length of a treatment can vary considerably – mine tend to be three to five pages long (NYE was five pages long) however they can be much, much longer. I’m working on a project a the moment where the producers eventually want a 30 page treatment from me. James Cameron writes even longer treatments – the treatment for The Terminator was over 40 pages. I think if you’re going to write a 40 page treatment you might as well just invest that time in producing the screenplay but Cameron has Oscars – I do not.

So to summarise I hate treatments.

Top Five Heart Ripping Out Movie Scenes

5. Apocalypto

Unpleasant, gruesome, disturbing, but enough about Mel Gibson.

4. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

There were times when I was watching this movie I wished I could rip my own heart out.

3.  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

They simply don’t make family movies like this anymore.

2. From Dusk Till Dawn

A case of lead poisoning. Snarf.

1. Dumb & Dumber

Disembowelment has never been so funny.

A few weeks ago myself, NYE director S. J. Evans and film makers James Plumb and Dave Beynon conducted a Skype interview with horror journalist AndyErupts about the recent explosion of horror movies being made in Wales.

The result was a no-holds barred discussion that was too much horror awesomeness for one post to handle so here is Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.

I doth my cap to AndyErupts for transcribing our epic conversation and, even more amazing , some how making sense of my ramblings.

After coming up with the premise of New Year’s Evil my first job was to decide on my characters. Or to put another way… who was I going to kill? More importantly… how many was I going to kill?

I decided to create eight characters – one killer and seven potential victims. Why seven? I always knew this would be a low-budget horror and thought it would lead to a reasonable kill count while still remaining affordable.

I have an extremely linear mind. Consequently I can’t start writing even an outline until I have the names of my characters in place. Names can be tricky to come up with however you know when you’ve got the right name for your character because it just “fits”.

Being a film fan I like to sneak film-references into my scripts and stealing from Final Destination franchise (their characters all share surnames with famous horror directors) – I named my couples after horror directors and their scream queens. So we have Jamie (Lee Curtis) & John (Carpenter), Grace (Kelly) & Alf(red Hitchcock), Heather (Langenkamp) & Wes (Craven)  plus Sean (Cunningham – because he’s not associated with a particular actress).

In an early draft of the script Grace was actually Janet (Leigh) – but a friend, quite rightly, pointed out that the name was too similar to Jamie so I changed it to avoid possible confusion.

The hardest name though to come up with was for our killer – I can understand now why Carpenter referred to Michael Myers in the Halloween screenplay as just The Shape. My solution was to work backwards and come up with the killer’s appearance first and then came up with a name to suit. Consequently as it’s fixed to the design of the character I’m not going to divulge it here but… I think it works.

The age of the gang I decided would be early-twenties because in real-life that tends to be the age of friends who would hire a cottage for New Year. Also any older and I think you’re going to struggle to attract your target audience or end up with Couples Retreat – and nobody wants that! But what about the characters themselves?

The key to good characters in a horror is to make the audience emotionally invested in them as if they don’t care if they get killed then there’s no suspense. The characters in New Year’s Evil are influenced by some of the standard character tropes in horror movies but I’ve tried to make them interesting by exploring the relationship dynamics of each couple. It’s that that really powers most of the action in the story. Well that and the decapitations.

Yes, Team Evil’s very own SJ  is a very busy man – he’s just signed on for writing/director duties for a remake of the classic sixties horror The City of the Dead. He’s developing the film with Adam Stephen Kelly who may be better known to some of you under his Ain’t It Cool moniker, Britgeek.

The full story can be found here.

Bravo SJ, you are my guru of gruesomeness.

A film poster is critical to the successful marketing of a movie but it can also be so much more than that. Just like a good movie, a film poster has the power to transport the viewer to another world – capable of thrilling them, making them laugh and even scaring them.

We would like to invite artists from the online community to help us with our film by creating the poster for New Year’s Evil. Currently in pre-production, New Year’s Evil is a feature-length horror film that will commence a crowdfunding campaign in March before shooting in the summer of 2012.

The art will be used to promote the film throughout every stage of development, at film festivals and as the cover for the DVD release.

COMPETITION RULES & REQUIREMENTS

December 31st. Seven friends, a remote cottage and a psychopath. This New Year’s Eve party is going to be killer!

• Only one poster submission per entrant
• The deadline for submissions is the 20th February 2012.
• To enter please send entries as a jpeg to newyearsevilmovie@gmail.com
• To be kind to our inbox, please could all entries be 72dpi (1MB max) however the final image needs to be available at 300 dpi and either A1 841 x 594mm or  A0, which is 1189 x 841mm. Sorry but if the winning entry can’t be provided at a good enough quality then the prize will go to a runner-up.
• All submissions will be put on our Facebook Page upon where they can be given a ‘like’ by the public. The five posters with the most ‘likes’ will go to the judging panel who will select the winner based on its artistic merit and how well it captures the movie’s concept – so please study our website.
• The judges’ decision will be final.
• The competition winner will be announced on 29th February.
• The Winner (plus guest) will be invited to the premiere for the film (excluding travel & accommodation) (or if they cannot make that, an exclusive online premiere), a copy of the shooting script, an invitation to the wrap-party, Special Thanks on the film, an IMDB credit and a DVD of the film.
• The winning artist will retain copyright images over their design.

the broken mirror shard.

Thanks to everyone who took part! I’ll now be redrafting the script to reflect your decision. I suspect that seven years’ bad luck is going to be the least of the victim’s worries.

25 words is the industry standard length for what’s called an elevator pitch – if you got stuck in a lift (sorry but I can’t use “elevator” again – I’m British) with Steven Spielberg it should be possible to pitch your movie within the time of that journey to the bearded genius.

A lot of horrors involve young people going to creepy houses in the middle of nowhere so I tried to come up with an original and realistic reason for them to be there. Then I remembered a friend who’d spent New Year’s Eve with friends in a cottage and so I came up with this pitch :

It’ s December 31st and six friends celebrate in a remote cottage… but a serial killer  is gate-crashing the party! Will anyone survive into the New Year?

The “ clever”  title then followed easy enough – however I admit if I had known at the time there was already an 80s movie called New Year’s Evil I would have opted for something different like “New Year’s Evisceration”. Not that sharing a title with other movies hurts – Crash, Gladiator, Twilight etc…

In the end, NYE wasn’t the one I entered – I went instead for this pitch for another horror, Generation aXe:

When teenagers start being murdered on their sixteenth birthday, a small town realises they’re dealing with a serial killer with an axe to grind.

I really like the Generation aXe idea but I’ve never taken it further than the log-line. Although I did recently refine it for another completion (Didn’t win that one either) so that the pitch now included details about the protagonist:

When teenagers start being murdered on their 16th birthday, a cheerleader must stop a killer with an axe to grind.

The reason I chose to write the screenplay for NYE was because I knew, of the two ideas, this would be the easiest to make – it could be done on a low-budget because of the small number of characters and needed only the one location.

But I am fond of Generation aXe and, like most things in horror, I doubt it will stay dead forever.

One vote, numerous gruesome possibilities.

This prop will be our killer’s implement of impalement!

Their device of death!!

Their tool of terror!!!

Or in less euphemistic terms – their weapon.

Why are we asking you guys to vote? Well for starters it’s another way for Team Evil to engage and interact with you, our lovely future audience…

Oh… and when writing the script it may have totally slipped my mind.

Only when a friend read the script and commented that the killer kept using different methods to dispatch the characters that I realised my mistake… all the great slasher movie killers are synonymous with a particular weapon.

Yet the choice behind a weapon in a slasher movie isn’t just about how much blood-splatter it can make – it can also be an extension of the killer’s personality. It should fit them like a glove – and in Freddy Krueger’s case literally. Yet Freddy with a chainsaw wouldn’t work – it’s too crude and cumbersome – but it perfectly suits the character of Leatherface.

Although we’re keeping the look of the killer under wraps – the five weapons on offer would be a match for the killer’s “persona”.

So what are you waiting for?

Get on our Facebook page and vote for your weapon of choice!