What I've been doing lately

I know it's been a while. For the one or two of you who maybe care, this is what I've been doing over the past few weeks:

I finished a preliminary draft for a horror movie called Walks Like A Man. If you're interested, it was inspired by one of my own songs of the same title--you can hear it by visiting my ReverbNation page. Feel free to listen to any other tunes while you're there.

Anyway, the story in my little song is a part of the bigger story I'm trying to tell in the script, and actually I'm pretty excited about it. More excited now, actually, than I was when I began this project.

Why, you may ask? Because the final image in the movie came to me yesterday while I was sitting here struggling with the rewrite.

In horror movies the ending is all important. Think about the horror movies that disappointed you. Think about your reaction when the end credits rolled. That's it? That's all? That's my most common reaction to a movie that I wind up not caring for. It's because, in the end, there is no lasting image, no impression, nothing at all to haunt you after the movie is over.

This is something a lot of newer horror movies struggle with. I've seen some where the movie just . . . stopped. There was no attempt at any kind of ending. My guess is the writer is hoping to finish the story with a sequel, but unless you've got a deal in pocket already for something like that, chances are you won't ever get it made.

Why?

Because the audience for the first movie was disappointed.

Why?

Because of the ending. Or lack thereof.

Or we are left with an image of the monster/serial killer/whatever who is not actually dead, though our cast went through a great deal of trouble killing him/her/it and thought they had succeeded. This may have worked for Halloween but it probably won't work for many other films. Don't assume that you have reached that level. I certainly don't.

The ending has to make sense in the context of the story you just told, but it also should reveal that the horror is still ongoing--maybe there's a dimension to the creature or person or whatever that was hinted at in the film but nobody paid enough attention to it and now it's allowing the story to continue.

So, it has to make sense. It can't just come completely out of the blue. It also has to be surprising, or horrifying. You can make do with satisfying but that's the least preferable of the alternatives--see Jordan Peele's otherwise excellent Get Out.

Anyway, all that is a way of saying that the image my little script will leave the audience with excites me and encourages me to hone this baby down to a razor's edge. The image I'm working on makes sense in the context of the movie, but now the plan is to get it to make even more sense, make it even more significant. Even more horrifying.

Yes. This is why we do what we do, ain't it?