Even after the devastating realization that I had lost the file of the screenplay I had been working on for Dig Down when my barely year old laptop crashed, I didn’t let that deter me from continuing to work on scripts. While I couldn’t bring myself to start over from scratch with Dig Down right away, I was able to focus my energy on converting my second book, Lock the Doors into a script.
After completing the conversion, and a couple rounds of polish, I actually felt that this turn of events may have actually been an odd blessing in disguise. The reason for this admittedly bizarre point of view was because I had been attending free webinars on screenwriting, and one of them had to do with writing a horror franchise. The webinar started off with the statement that Hollywood studios were actually always in the market for horror because they were cheap to produce (a big reason why there’s 10 Friday the 13th films).
Lock the Doors could absolutely be made a shoe string budget because its slasher DNA – isolated cabin in the woods, a small group of friends that get picked off one by one, and a silent hulking killer. Lock the Doors was my love letter to the genre, and also a unique take on it because it flipped the genre on its head and told the story from the killer’s point of view.
While I’m admittedly anal retentive and want everything done in the proper order, I did feel that working to get my books produced into movies out of order may have been more beneficial in the long run. Studios would be more willing to take a chance on my story if the cost was low enough (even with rampant inflation, I feel you could make it for around a million, maybe even less, the cabin is the only major expense I can see).
I also felt the bar for success would be very low. I’d be a first time screenwriter, and if my script was made into a movie, I now had a film on my resume, and hopefully some decent buzz and returns to go with it, I would have an easier time pitching my next screenplay.
There was still one last hang up…I wasn’t really a screenwriter.
Even as an author, I worked with an editor to make my stories as good as they could possibly be. But I didn’t know anyone who edited scripts, or even where to look. So when I found a screenplay contest devoted to horror, AND it provided feedback and scoring, I jumped at the opportunity.
I’ll share more on that experience…next time.