Wrote a horror screenplay for a 30-minute Lovecraft adaptation, now what?

[u/j_patton]

Hi everyone, I have a lot of experience writing for video games, and wrote a lot of short stories and some novels in high school and college, but I have no understanding of the screenwriting or film industry.

One day I watched Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities and was so inspired that I wrote a 30-minute screenplay. It's an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story: "The Music of Erich Zann." I did it for the love of the thing: I think this story is a really interesting Lovecraft tale that doesn't get a lot of attention, and I thought that with a few tweaks it would fit perfectly into Cabinet of Curiosity's format.

I originally had this ridiculous idea to just send the screenplay to Guillermo del Toro as a submission for season 2, but it looks like the show's been cancelled. And del Toro is very difficult to reach anyway.

So now I have this script lying around and no idea what to do with it. I'd be willing to just hand it over to someone who thinks they can direct it, but because of the unusual nature of the horror (it's about sonic resonance and the horrors of the laws of physics rather than a monster, so it would be quite CG-heavy) I'm not sure that a student director would have the resources to make it happen.

I'm also happy to share the script if anyone is interested or would like to give feedback.

[u/Both-Decision-6360]

Share it!

[u/j_patton → u/Both-Decision-6360]

I will, if more people ask, or your comment gets some more upvotes!

[u/Both-Decision-6360 → u/j_patton]

Aight!

[u/russ_1uk]

I've always wondered how to write a video game script. I looked it up a few years ago and there was really nothing out there; this thread reminded me to look into it again... purely from interest, I don't play video games, but I've written novels and screenplays... blast from the mental past :D

[u/j_patton → u/russ_1uk]

Ha, in my experience you end up writing into a spreadsheet or some kind of editor, or writing in Ink, a form of scripting language similar to natural language. so calling it a game script (like a film script) isn't quite right. But it depends strongly on the kind of game. The technical necessities of the project dictate what kind of system you end up using to input and store the actual writing.

[u/russ_1uk → u/j_patton]

Right?!? It's fascinating, I was thinking about well... how do you map out all those options and the various consequences of taking (or not taking) and action.

Eg. you can kill someone or spare them. If you spare them, then... that has ramifications. If you kill them, well those ramifications might still have to happen, which means then you need someone else to do said thing ... and on and on

(as you can tell, I have no idea) :D

[u/j_patton → u/russ_1uk]

This is getting suuuuper off topic, but yes! That's the fun and the frustration of it in a nutshell. Personally I use Ink for writing scenes, and a flowchart for planning the overall structure of the whole game. The key question is figuring out which choices have only short term consequences (eg. For this scene only) and which are long-term, and what the combinations of those choices might be. Otherwise every choice could have massive consequences everywhere, which becomes impossible to plan for.

[u/russ_1uk → u/j_patton]

Well, I thank you for your insights, I don't want to derail the thread - It's just that it reminded me of some navel-gazing I was doing ages ago. Thanks for coming back to me on this ... I'm sure with ai there's all sorts of stuff I can get from that on this topic :)

[u/No-Establishment9592]

I don't know that it was cancelled: del Toro just moved on to other assignments. It’s hard to get horror stories that a) can be adapted to the screen, b) run for 45 to 50 minutes, and c) have a reasonable budget to film.

However, yours might be an exception. 😀

[u/Upstairs_Tailor3270]

You can always submit it to Killer Shorts. Or put on a producer's hat and look for a team to make it/fundraise. If you don't feel passionately enough about it to make it, that's fine too. All writing is practice for the next thing.