Campfire Musings

I was sitting around a campfire with my dad and brother one night and my dad said ''what stories are left to tell?'' The answer is simple. The writer's perspective gives us a unique story. Watch Halloween and Judith was the throw away whore character at the beginning. Play Dead by Dead Daylight and see the in memorium in the 1965 yearbook and we see a daughter and sister was butchered by a maniac, and she became more real and tangible.

These movies are about sex and death. There needs to be a touch of sex. I was told this by an actual producer and to me, I want the characters to be the important thing. I am not going to throw the mom in the shower to satisfy your perversity.

I worked on an independant script, a concept given to me by an indie producer and I remember this producer telling me this crap and I just thought I don't want to write stories like that. I did put a sex scene into a later screenplay that I wrote for myself and not the studio, and they changed my script all up, and now it is an action horror instead of about a family growing stronger through this great horror with a killer gorilla.

Which is fine, it was that studio's concept, do what you want, but my idea and what those who changed in my screenplay all around made was an entirely different movie. The lesson I learned was write your own story and do not try to meet someone else's silly ass standard just to work for a movie studio.

Both me and the studio are better off making scripts the way we want to and not pidgeon holing ourselves to fit someone else's vision. I want to write stories my way because quite frankly I like the way I tell my own stories. If I wanted to write a slasher movie like Halloween with copy and paste story beats my characters would be generic. I love Halloween but I also enjoyed Halloween 2018 because it was funnier than the original and had more heart than the first and felt like a true continuation of the original.

There were plenty of homages but without it having its own thing going, it would have been a rehash of the original. Lili Taylor said, ''I don't usually cry at horror movies.'' But she did at the end of The Conjuring, why? Because it was scary and had heart. Had it been some retread of other haunted house movies we might have had pot smoking and the characters would have been assholes. Instead we had a family we gave a damn about and we cared about the Warrens as well.

I mean if you don't believe me about the writer and their perspective changing a story, I came up with a story idea the other day called Christmas Cabin. Both stories would feature elves and Mrs. Claus, but one would be a traditonal Christmas story and the other would be Evil Dead at Christmas, complete with Elf possession and murder.

WHy? I took the same setting and characters and put a twist on it that changed the story completely. Just like we all have seen traditional haunted house stories but picture two demons haunting a house but the one demon makes fun of the other because all he does with his demon powers is move around a planchette or open doors and break glasses.

Now we have a spoof. The writer's unique voice and perspective and style make each story uniquely theirs.