An excerpt from Reals’ script review for The Last Voyage of the Demeter which will be available 08/14/23:
What Worked
Clemens – I liked Clemens as our main character – we don’t spend too much time on introductions, which is good, as we want to get right into the vampire action!
But I do like some of the lines that Clemens gets, such as:
CLEMENS (CONT’D)
I’m an experienced seaman. I studied
navigation and mathematics.
WOJCHEK
Knowledge from books, eh? Tell me
this, what did a sailor ever learn
from a book that did him an ounce of
good when he was lost at sea?
Having made his point, Wojchek proceeds down the line.
CLEMENS
Astronomy, Sir.
Wojchek comes to a stop. Eliot smiles behind him.
CLEMENS (CONT’D)
The study of the stars. A sailor who
knows the heavens is never lost.
Small moments like this make your characters stand out and tell the audience a lot with a little.
Strong Beginning – By Page 14 we are already setting off on the Demeter, which is good! That 14 pages includes our opening flash-forward, and a bit of setup, but we still get underway quickly.
Character Descriptions – We have a lot of characters to introduce on the ship, but I like that we didn’t spend whole paragraphs describing them, and that the descriptions were unique and individualized for each person.
A couple of quick examples from Page 20:
Next to him, JOSEPH. The only clean thing he’s wearing is the gold cross around his neck. PETROFSKY a brute of a man, tattooed on every possible space of his body.
Creepy Build-Up – I liked several of the spooky scenes early on in the voyage. They are enough to let us know that something is wrong, but never so direct as to tell us exactly what is going on.
Of course, if you’ve seen the trailer, or poster, or if you are a fan of Dracula lore, you may already know exactly what is on the ship with them.
However, even so, the writer still builds suspense effectively in our opening.
Contained – I really appreciated that almost everything in the script takes place aboard the ship. An isolated ship can be a creepy location, where tensions are bound to rise, and if you add in a monster slowly picking the unsuspecting crew off one-by-one – that’s a recipe for horror perfection!
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