 Horror ScreenplaysThis is my all time favorite genre. Fantasy, science-fiction, but I love horror the most.I've gotten some great scripts from a fantastic site... www.movie-page.com. It's run very well, with some great info, scripts and fantastic links to other great sites. The first script is from my all time favorite horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing. Hailed as the best remake ever made, the film is far beyond that graceful salutation. It's a film that brought together some incredible actors, a brilliant director and an incredible special effects team that made one of the scariest movie of the 1980's. Taken from the John W. Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There?", Bill Lancaster fashioned a script with great characters, humor and scares. Though, we have to be honest and say that he handed the script over to a man who knew horror, like his own mind. Another great script, this time written by Carpenter and Debra Hill, was the huge 1978 hit Halloween, one of the first low budget horror films to become a mainstream hit over night. It encompassed everything the horror genre was looking for... a picture that would bring all eyes on the slasher/stalker/creepy movies. Halloween revolutionized the horror industry. John Carpenter's Official Site is located here, for all those followers. John Carpenter has wowed us, continually, since his first film Dark Star, co-written with Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon. Alien, directed by another brilliant director Ridley Scott, was another of the scariest films of the 1980's. It's production won an Oscar, along with H.R. Giger winning for best production art. H.R. Giger's Official Site is located here. Another horror director, who has (at times) equaled the respect given to Carpenter, is Wes Craven. Craven also started with low budget horror films, but none of them garnered the respect that Halloween did. Films such as Last House on the Left, Stranger in Our House, The Hills Have Eyes... all of them were cult classics, fantastically scary movies... but it was A Nightmare on Elm Street that really showed the world what was going on inside Craven's mind. He had a few other hits as the years went on, but most of them were viewed by followers of his type of horror, and not taken too seriously by critics and mainstream movie-goers. A string of Freddy movies were attributed to him, even though he had nothing to do with the majority of them, save creating the character. Films like The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, The People Under the Stairs and Vampire in Brooklyn were scraping the surface with movie-goers, some of them gaining new audiences, others frustrating the Craven followers. Craven then found a script that put him back on top... from an unknown screenwriter who's first script would start a bidding war in Hollywood. Kevin Williamson wrote Scary Movie in 1994/1995, certainly not knowing that the publics take on Scream would be a HUGE landslide the horror industry hadn't seen since 1979 (Halloween). I will say that the Scream movies are very well crafted, well written... and I did enjoy I Know What You Did Last Summer... but everything else Williamson has touched is pretty crappy. Dawson's Creek, The Faculty (a blatant rip-off of Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and The Thing), Teaching Mrs. Tingle... these are really bad films/television. It's the lot of writers lives when they write something incredible... the money, the fame, it ruins their ability to create. This can be said of much of Hollywood... it's the Tarantino syndrome. Clive Barker is a writer. For a long time. Theater, novels... he branched into film in 1973 with Salome, then went on to The Forbidden, Underworld and his first cult hit, Rawhead Rex, based on a story of his from Books of Blood, a fantastic series of short stories that have spawned comic books and television series. It wasn't until 1987 that he created what has become one of the greatest horror characters ever. Pinhead from Hellraiser. Taken from his novella The Hellbound Heart, this script encompasses everything a writer/director wants to create. The film is a personal vision taken to the nth degree with a type of horror the mainstream audience was not used to. The film launched his career as THE horror writer, surpassing (in some minds) Steven King. Hellraiser spawned three other films, a very popular comic book from Epic and a cult following that is as strong as ever. Barker went on to write other novels, including Cabal which turned into Nightbreed that Barker wrote and directed. This is one of those overlooked films that people first wrote off as cheesy. I think it's another testament to Barker showing us a side of horror we'd never seen before, and I dig it a lot. Barker, in 1995, then gave us a fantastic horror film with Quantum Leap star Scott Bakula, Lord of Illusions. This is a fantastic movie taken from the short story The Last Illusion (which is also located in the novel Cabal). It's got a fantastic cast, including Kevin J. O'Connor and (growl) Famke Janssen. This was an incredible film, with many subtle layers, plot contexts and fantastic characters. The last horror writer I'm going to talk about is the fantastic Sam Raimi. As a college thesis, he created The Evil Dead, which became an underground cult classic, virtually over night. The film was a testament to low-budget horror, and with a great cast, including the great Bruce Campbell, they went on to create one of the best horror series around. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn is one of the funniest, bloodiest horror films around, centralizing on anti-hero Ash (Campbell). It's everything a funny horror film should be. The film actually comes off as a re-make to part I, kind of. It's difficult to make heads or tails as to exactly what Raimi was trying to do, chronologically with the two films... But that doesn't represent a problem to the third act of this series, Army of Darkness, which Sam wrote with his brother Ivan Raimi. This is a comic book brought to life (though not based on a comic). Raimi had already wrote and directed his comic book homage Darkman, a great 'dark' film, which segued into the comedy/horror of Darkness perfectly. Raimi is a hero to comic book lovers, especially now that he's working on Spider-Man... he's the one director I can think of who I'm glad is on the project, and will give it the depth and style it deserves. His other films are a representation of his loose style and interpretation of sequential imagery. The Quick and the Dead official site. All of the scripts are in PDF format - Enjoy them. They are not for sale, they are for educational purposes ONLY. John Painz
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