Welcome back, my Scream Writers. This week’s article was originally going to cover another screenplay—one that I will leave unnamed. However, when I had found myself making up excuses to avoid reading what I had planned—that is, when I realized that eight days had passed and I had read less than ten pages—I knew it was time to shift focus. There was something about this screenplay that was holding me back from entering into it enjoyably. But what was it? Sure, the script had an opening that didn’t contribute to the overall story, but within the horror genre that isn’t always a script killer. The problem was not that it had a needless opening but rather that the opening and the subsequent scenes immediately following moved so slowly across the page;To put it another way, the screenplay didn’t take it’s pacing into account.
Pacing can kill a screenplay before the story had even gotten out of the gate. Not only does the length of time it takes to read each of your pages affect the reader but using familiar, comfortable, and “safe” images will also change the reader’s willingness to indulge in those moments where the pace slackens. To demonstrate the power of pacing and invoking new images, I’ve decided to focus on the opening of Evil Dead (2013), as it also features a needless opening scene but one that features wonderful pacing and evocative visuals.
Written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Mendez, Evil Dead is a remake of The Evil Dead (1981) that transports the story into the current decade. We are introduced to a crew of characters who are staying at a cabin in the woods for a weekend and who one by one get possessed by evil. But before we’re introduced to our main character, we are first brought into this world through a pre-credit scene that takes up four pages and 5/8ths of a fifth. This opening scene is classic horror movie foreplay: we’re introduced to a character whose only purpose to die at the hands of even more people who don’t make it past the title card. It’s irrelevant to the larger story, it’s only purpose an attempt to hook the reader. So why does it work here but not in the previous manuscript?
Alvarez & Mendez both understand that the pacing of the film is of tantamount importance and as such, they never let the script slow down for a second. In the first five pages that make up the opening, there is only a single paragraph of action that lasts for more than three lines. These short bullets of action drive the eye forward at breakneck speed; as a result, we’re through the opening so quickly that it’s hard to take offensive at the inclusion of the pre-credit scene. But it’s not just this scene that chugs along – it isn’t until page ten that we get another action paragraph over three lines.
The opening scene doesn’t just demonstrate great pacing – it is an example of the pacing of the rest of the screenplay, it sets the tone of what’s to come but also just how brutally fast it is going to come too.
The pace of your screenplay is important to understand, not just because you want to get it passed studio or contest readers, but because understanding and controlling pace is one of the key tools we can use to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. Evil Dead demonstrates its understanding of this tool powerfully within this opening scene. However, controlled pacing doesn’t make up for an uninventive story and it’s here, in combination with its pacing, that Evil Dead shines.
Being a remake, the audience for the film is already assumed ahead of time—in fact, it is this previous audience that traditionally leads studios/producers to the remake in the first place. It becomes important—in all stories but tenfold more so with remakes—to avoid simply repeating the beats and images of the original. In fact, Evil Dead suffers the most when it is directly harkening back to its predecessor with lines like “For God’s sake, what happened to her eyes?”
While the above briefly demonstrates its pacing—as well as highlighting the change in the possessed girl through the juxtaposition of capitalization with lowercase, which gives the scene a certain force of power about it—it also doesn’t actually present a new image for us: we’ve seen the deadities of The Evil Dead before; We’ve heard the voice of hell speak through a young girl in The Exorcist (1973). Ultimately, this passage demonstrates the filmmakers influence from these previous films but doesn’t particularly make it stand out.
That is until the next line:
“She screams like a rabid hyena, salivating black blood.“
Now that is something new. Is not a surprise that she screams. She is being set on fire and purified of the evil within her, after all. But that she screams like “a rabid hyena”? First, these of “rabid” and “hyena” are evocative words that carry connotations of rage, sickness, violence, and points towards the scavenger-like animality of the demonic possessors themselves (something that is heavily present throughout the screenplay more so than the finan film). And, here’s a question, what does that scream sound like to you? It sounds like a fresh hellscape that I’ve never explored and it’s conveyed through the choice of two keywords that present a new angle to the demonic proceedings.
By keeping the action paragraphs short and straight forward, through the combination of refreshing prose & images, Evil Dead stands as a fantastic example of breakneck horror—of understanding that not only is pace important to keep the reader glued to the page but that unless you are saying something fresh and new or, rather, in a fresh new way, then even the best pacing in the world can still be for naught.
