No offense to anyone who is reading this, but what is it about vampires and zombies that seems to get the juices flowing for novice screenwriters?!
I used to work at a studio and it seemed like half of the (unsolicited and therefore returned*) screenplays had either vampires or zombies or both.
I never understood this…and I am not talking just a phase in the 90’s, this has been going on for a long time.
If vampire/zombie films were half as poplular as the number of unsolicited submissions sent to studios, they would make millions. However, most of those films, if they are ever made, are low budget schlock that is lucky to make half its money back.
Seriously, what is it about vampire and/or zombie films that seems to be the big thing in screenplays for first time writers?
(* do NOT send in unsolicited screenplays to studios. Waste of postage. Legally they are not even allowed glance at the script and it will be sent back to you unread. If you want to submit something, you need to get an agent.)
Maybe they give scriptwriters an excuse to have their characters kill other people without the consequence of having taken human lives. Seems more like a character development copout than anything else.
Never knew it was common, but the first screenplay I ever wrote was a comedy zombie script. In my case it was because I knew a guy who worked at a schlocky production house that did crappy straight-to-video horror, and they needed a zombie script so I figured it would have a chance to get read.
I did find it was really easy to write, so maybe it’s not that an abnormally large number of zombie scripts get started, but that an abnormally large number of them get finished.
I once went to a Indie movie trade show convention here in NYC. I too was surprised to see horror crap that people made or wanted to make. But even more pervasive were the violent shoot-em-up, Pulp Fictionish scripts and films.
I came away shaking my head, thinking, “Just a bunch of young guys masturbating on celluloid. Get me outta here.”
It’s a running joke in my film class that every student film must involve holding a handgun sideways against someone’s head. It’s gotten to the point that we’re slipping in clips from Tarantino movies at the end of other wise totally non-violent (or even non-narrative) films, just to meet the “requirement.”
Anyway, I would guess that the prevalence of zombie and vampire films stems chiefly from the cheapness and ease of make-up for those sorts of monsters. Rotting flesh make-up is pretty simple to do, and vampire make-up even more so. The writing is also pretty easy, as most of these films are basically cliche tinkertoys. When was the last time you saw something really original in a movie about walking corpses? Plus, with zombies, you don’t have to worry much about the dialogue. (“What’s my motivation here?” “Well, you really, really want brains…”)
In addition to cheap make-up and not too much dialog, there’s also the advantage of have a convenient ready-made backstory. Everyone already knows what zombies are and what they do, so all you have to do is have a character shout “zombies!” and you’ve just saved yourself the trouble of having to write an explanation of what the monster is, what it wants, and how to kill it. Same for vampires.
As i read this post, i realized you have something. alot of the great filmmakers of horror had their first films as vampires or zombies…romero, cronenberg, even speilberg did a low budget amatuer zombielike film.
As for me I’ve been writing for a few years and one of my first scripts was a vampire film what i decided to do though was watch all the others and see WHAT NOT TO DO. I finished it and it got a good buzz but who knows…so now i’m writing the novel of it and creating a whole new universe with characters that can branch out.
As a film student, i’ve noticed that most horror scripts and films are looked down on…like its not true film. I think if people just thought the story out and not write it to show scantily clad women with fangs and people lumbering around even a novice writer can make a vampire or zombie movie work.
I think it’s because it gives you a ready-made interesting character and situation.
It’s really, really, really difficult to make a character interesting when that character is basically like everyone else. Hence the proliferation of indy movies based around a “quirky” character and his/her “quirky” ensemble of friends. If they aren’t quirky, novice writers have no idea what to do with their characters.
A vampire, now, is something that everyone knows but no one is. Vampires are scary, damned, sexy, violent, unaging, with a proscribed set of limitations and strengths. No need to develop the character if you don’t want to, and it creates automatic sympathy for whatever human the vamp is up against.
Same for zombies, minus the sexy factor. Although that I would like to see: the zombie that draws women like moths to flame. Lots of jokes about “eating her out”, etc. Heh heh heh.
In Danse Macabre, Steven King made the point that a lot of name brand directors, screenwriters, actors, and got started with cheesy horror movies because they can be made cheaply, and because the horror audience is used to being served crapola, even a poor horror movie has a decent chance of turning a profit.
I don’t write screenplays, but I have had three vampire stories published (one which has earned me quite a lot of money over the years). I like vampires because you can write interesting variations on the theme. For instance:
In “Curse of the Undead,” I postulated that being a vampire isn’t all that different from being a human, except you had to eat liver (lots of blood) and use a good sunscreen.
In “Bela,” I wrote about what happened when Bela, a washed-up, drug-addicted actor famous for playing Dracula, meets up with a real vampire.
I’ve also published a story about Frankenstein; it’s called “Patron” and is available from free download here.
In a nutshell, any “stereotype” is fairly easy to write since all the traits and habits and mannerisms all come pre-fabricated and generally everyone knows enough about them for their imaginations to fill in any gaps in the detail. A vampire or other well known monster can be written as a blantant sterotype without anyone complaining of racism. Monsters are actually the hardest roles to play RIGHT as opposed to the killing machines they usually get shown as since it’s harder to clearly emote under latex and makeup.
The requirements of what constitutes a “good” movie are generally pretty low for most horror fans…and those requirements have gotten even lower and lower with the current onslaught of Hollywood horror movies. It used to be that a horror film had to be imaginative, suspensful, well-acted, and fairly believable in its logic to work well…now, shit, as long as there’s some action and some decent CGI, people are willing to accept it as entertainment.
So I think a lot of novice writers/filmmakers see a chance to break into film with material that won’t be scrutinized as much as other subjects might be. There’s definately a lot of vampire-movie fans out there (in fact, the vampire fan could almost be classified as a wholly separate subset of the horror fan population) and more than a few zombie movie fans, so there’s a guarenteed audience.
And this audience is pretty much willing to give any new film a chance…I’m a zombie movie fan myself, and while I thought the idea of making a movie out of RESIDENT EVIL to be probably the dumbest idea since making a movie out of SUPER MARIO BROS, I still went to see the movie with an open mind.
Of course, the movie sucked, and that’s the problem that these screenwriters don’t realize when they’re pecking away: it’s actually pretty difficult, cinematically, to make zombies threatening or scary in the audience’s minds. Most of the time they just lurch around like winos, and it takes good directing and careful editing to really make it work.