If I’ve resurrected the Least Read Blog, that means I have to resurrect Freaky Fun Friday, a series I had started on my original blog. It was a tragic victim of my extended hiatus. Well, new blog, new chance to keep telling that story.
But rather than dive right into the story, I thought we’d do a “rerun” for a while. Starting today (and then continuing every Friday…hopefully), we’ll have the old installments of the story. When we get caught up, we’ll start into the uncharted territory.
To begin, let’s review where this idea came from:
When I was in college, I tried my hand at writing screenplays. I wrote a grand total of three. One was a knock off of The Boys from Brazil, where a creepy cult cloned their dead founder not once but twice (and the second time, turned him into a girl. Don’t ask. It made sense at the time). The second was a mash up of “Romeo and Juliet” and Enemy Mine (out of the three, this one is the one I’m still proud of). The third was an abysmal romantic “comedy” about an angel sent to date a guy and make him more of a catch for women. Seriously.
Anyway, I eventually returned to the world of “serious literature,” i.e. stories of superheroes fighting zombies, because I figured I didn’t know the first thing about selling a screenplay, let alone filming one. But that doesn’t mean that my brain has given up on coming up with movie ideas.
It happens every now and then. Not often, but recently, I’ve been beset by ideas for a new movie.
More specifically, a horror movie.
This really surprises me. I’m not a fan of horror usually. I’m a little squeamish when it comes to slasher stuff. But I do make an exception for a certain kind of horror movie: found footage movies.
I don’t know why, but for some reason, I love movies that pretend to be footage from real events. My younger brother and I once had a great deal of fun dissecting a made-for-TV movie called Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. I’m probably one of the few people who actually enjoyed The Blair Witch Project, even if the ending did make it impossible for me to enter my own basement for a week. I’ve watched the Paranormal Activity movies and I especially loved Trollhunter (seriously, go watch that movie now!) and Chronicle (which, granted, wasn’t a horror movie).
Anyway, the point is, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the idea for a found footage horror movie rattling around in my brain. And here’s the thing, folks. While I’ve written three screenplays, I have no idea how to write a found footage one. Even if I did, I still don’t have any idea how to produce it (although I’ll admit I briefly toyed with the idea of taking it to Kickstarter to see what would happen). But I can’t seem to exorcise this idea.
So that’s what I’m doing. Over the next few weeks, on Fridays, I’ll be telling you the story of this found footage idea. A lot of it is extremely rough. Big chunks of it are completely nonexistent right now. I’ve got a beginning, some scraps of stuff for the middle, and an ending. But I need to share this so it’ll leave me alone.
Buckle in, folks. I can’t promise that it’ll be scary, but I’m willing to bet it might be a little fun. See you next week for the first installment of this still untitled found footage horror film.