An excerpt from my script review for The 2017 Bloodlist Script: The Swallow which will be available 06/16/25:
2.) Plot Stability
For me, the idea of a sentient “monster” in the form of these blobs of mud is interesting, particularly when you introduce the idea that they only sprout up after the rain.
The script as is, is far from perfect, and here are two suggestions that would strengthen it.
The Cast
We spent a grueling first third of the script with this unlikable group of characters that are stale stereotypes that feel more Disney or Nickelodeon teen show than horror film.
Remember, this isn’t the 80s or 90s anymore, and writers should be more creative in how they write their characters.
Did the setting and “bad guy” work in this story? Yes, but we deserved a better cast.
Some ideas to kick around for a rewrite would be either…
- Having a group that is forced to go to this location for some sort of personal reason, and maybe only two or three characters to make it more intimate.
- If you want the “meat for the grinder” route with lots of deaths, consider making one of the characters a plant, in that they’ve tricked the other ones there knowing what the outcome will be.
If it’s the first one, maybe one of the characters had an older brother or sister who went missing there recently and a small fellowship goes in to find out what happened.
This way we’re given characters we empathize with, and not a young group only looking to get drunk or stoned.
The problem with the current cast is I didn’t really care when they died. In fact I was actually happy when Rich and Fitz finally were done in so I didn’t have to read anymore “dude speak” via their dialogue entries.
Giving the revised group an unexplained reason to break through that fence gives us a mystery right off the bat which gets us wondering about the “why” instead of having to suffer through the annoying teen drama.
Should you decide on the second group, wanting gruesome kill after gruesome kill to the creature, try to avoid the annoying stereotypes, and employ the “hidden motives” of a character that’s not who they seem, sprinkling hints to the characters and your audience that something is off about them.
Maybe the person is a secret EPA agent there to study firsthand what happens to humans and find out more about what this “mud” truly is.
Or perhaps the character is just an overly religious zealot and this creature is their “god”.
Whatever you do, layer more tension in there other than two couples that aren’t that great together and a younger sister with a crush on one of them.
The Weather
It may sound silly, but from what I gathered as I read, this mud only shows up when it rains and gets the earth wet.
That’s really important.
The initial storm was good, but I began to wonder if it continued to rain throughout the rest of the story, or if whatever storm came initially was enough to awake this thing from its slumber.
My suggestion?
Be very clear about the weather, and the more it rains the more these sentient pockets of mud bubble to the surface, endangering our characters and limiting their escape.
And I’m talking this kind of levels of rain.
It’s great that the characters get lost, and the forest seems to shift, but there needs to be more of a clear cause on how that’s happening.
What did work…
First, the story opens right at the woods, and the group hiking in. That’s good, and one of my arguments about The Watchers is that it takes too long getting us into the forest.
After that, there’s a lot of good “mystery” built into the script…
Why is this giant fence here?
What’s with all the “scorched earth” in random areas?
Where’d the group’s gear go, and why are they getting lost so easy?
Is there someone watching from the mounted camera Ziggy finds?
Stuff like this is required for both thrillers and horrors, so it worked well.
Another thing was making the “mud” sentient and needing to feed.
Not only did that hurt the characters, like burning Rich as he was stuck, but it also gave the creature the ability to taunt the other characters it viewed as prey.
One specific instance, and a great example of making a mountain out of a molehill, was Fitz trying to retrieve the car keys from Rich’s mangled hand. It’s only a few feet away, but Fitz can’t set even a single foot inside the mud or else he risks suffering the same fate as Kim and Rich.
The one small criticism I had, and I know there needed to be some sort of “scare” from the dead bodies, is it didn’t make sense how Kim and Rich could “scream” when they surfaced covered in mud. The mud didn’t seem to make noises at other times, so is it possible to have their corpses or the mud do something else that’s equally terrifying but makes more sense?
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