So, for this year’s 48 Hour Film Project entry, I got to be lead scriptwriter.  Since we drew Horror as our genre, I spent the 20 minute car ride from The Des Moines Art Center to the team leader’s house coming up with the story skeleton that combined two things I find scary in horror films: murderous hillbillies and ghosts. At our destination, I led the film team through the process of fleshing out the story with names, characters and plot points. Finally, around 10pm I started writing the script (under the watchful eyes of the Script Supervisor) and finished around 4am.

It was, for all intents and purposes, my first complete script intended for production.  Although I can see a hundred ways it could be improved, I was pretty happy with it.  I felt it had a nice inciting incident, a reasonable climax and represented a more or less complete story.

Of course, then I happened upon a comment where someone referred to the dialogue as “utter shit.” Now I feel compelled to write more scripts to prove I can do better.

In either case, this is the script that I locked and printed at 5:32am on Saturday, July 30, 2011:  The Door Script in PDF format.

And here is the film that was produced from it: