Go Slower Squiggles

Hello, friends!  It is I, Fabrizio Giullare, your favourite author.  Since I last spoke to you there has been a major development in my career: I've gone into writing movie scripts.  Yes, you read that right, and I'm so pleased about it.  Though, I'm not surprised; it was only a matter of time before someone recognised the genius of pieces such as Little Plants and Fluff and Corkscrew Bandana Dancers.  It did take them longer than I'd anticipated, mind you.

What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror.  Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names.  The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.

So this left me with something of a dilemma.  I've never watched any horror films either.  So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good.  I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD.  I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.

I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale.  Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.

For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this.  My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall.  It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me.  Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.

Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic.  Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions?  I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation.  That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around.  It's one of my favourite writer's tools.

Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything.  I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.

All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it.  I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.

Happy writing!