Screenwriting : My Top 10 Films of 2014 & What They Can Teach to Screenwriters by Danny Manus

Great choices Danny, especially #10 - did you know you can buy the popup book now?

I was JUST talking to my friend about if there was a real book or not! I haven't looked it up yet, but there is NO WAY it's as intricate as the one in the movie! Now I have to go look!

The film's producers are having it hand made, will be avaiable in the summer, mine's on pre-order ;-) More details here - http://thebabadook.com/ but looks like they've stopped taking orders after getting 6200 pre-orders. I'll post pics n stuff of mine when it arrives.

I envy you!!!! How much was it? I would love to see the pop up of her strangling the dog. I was wondering if they added in CGI or what. It looks like it was all hand made and just creative editing.

It was $80, not exactly cheap but hopefully it'll be faithful to the film version... I suspect some CGI may have been used but not too much, felt very physical - well to me anyway.

Any Babadook naysayers out there? I agree that the movie was creepy as hell, but I thought the screenplay was a total muddle. Am I alone in this?

It was written and directed by the same person. Personally, I don't even think to read those kind of scripts because the writer/director can write it however the hell they want.

Yeah, I didn't read the physical script. I just meant the screenplay as rendered in the movie. And, yes, she can write it however she wants, but personally I thought she wrote it badly. :) One man's opinion, of course. It was a particular disappointment because I have a toddler and get to sneak out to a current movie only once every 2 or 3 months. So I choose carefully. I really wanted to love it, and was bummed that I didn't.

@kerry, ah you didn't like the story. What about it? I guess all I really need from a horror is to creep me out. The storyline doesn't need to be that compelling, but I felt as though this one was. "Where did you get that book?" "on the shelf " was the only explanation of the origins of the book. I absolutely ADORED that! I thought the editing was freaking phenomenal too. Especially in like the first 15 minutes. And the way the kid would freak out. Perfect. Lol. @Lisa It was a pop up of her strangling the dog.

@JP, it's been a few months, so I'm fuzzy on the details. I recall that I did NOT like that the book was just found on the shelf. I felt like the story lacked a strong inciting incident... not to be all text-booky about it, but what a good inciting incident gives you is a feeling that this story just HAD to happen RIGHT NOW. It's a sense of urgency and inevitability. And in Babadook it was just like... oh, and, hey, here's this book that's been lying around the house for years. There was no sense of it as a foreign invader, or as a dark force bubbling up from inside one of the characters... it just kind of turned up randomly. Then I didn't like the shifting protagonists. First the Mom is the protagonist, as she's saddled with this troubled kid. Then around the half way point I guess she's possessed by the Babadook and now the kid's character changes to make him the focus of sympathy. In theory I'd be fine with swapping protagonists, but in this film in felt pretty arbitrary. There's this idea of "don't let the Babadook in", and if the mom had DONE SOMETHING to get herself possessed, maybe found herself drawn to the dark book, read it, indulged in some escape fantasy, and THEN she'd become possessed? Okay, then the story is coming from a character decision. Instead it's just, again, arbitrary. She's a harried mom, she reads some book, she becomes possessed, now she's a crazy mom. The story and character aren't interacting with one another. And then of course there's the problem we often see in horror movies with not enough story to tell: random creepy stuff happens. I recall something with cockroaches. Freaky, yeah, but what's it all about? It's just filler. Also, there were some loose ends. There's a scene where (I think) the kid eats ice cream and it makes the mother's tooth hurt. What was that about? Metaphor? Or an undeveloped story thread. It felt half-baked. Danny, in his brief review, said he didn't like the last 10 minutes. Not to put words in his mouth, but I suspect what he was actually detecting was that the story simply didn't hang together. An ending should feel like the inevitable consequence of everything that came before. Not just a thing that happened after the last thing that happened. But that's just one guy's opinion. I've only seen it once, so maybe I missed some hidden brilliance. In a good horror story, you feel like the storyteller is taking your hand and leading you down a path of terrors toward a specific place that's shocking/satisfying/mind-blowing/whatever. Babadook felt to me more like an unguided ramble through an (admittedly frightening) Halloween haunted house. Not campfire worthy, in this viewer's opinion.

@Kerry we all read films differently and have different view of how they work. For me I want the characters in a story, Horror or otherwise, to lead me though the story, if the hand of the author is too obvious I get taken out of it a little. In the Babadook, in my opinion, the characters feel very beieveable and Amelia's desperation with Sam, and depression, seem very authentic and drive the narrative. In modern horror we normally have 2D characters and I think we get real characters here. There's also the reading of this film that is that the Babadook actually Amelia's invention, including the creation of the book, and that it's her loosing grasp on reality due to her unresolved grief, blaming Sam etc. The ending and her feeding the Babadook is her taking control of her grief, not losing it entirely, but controlling it. For me best Horror film of last year, but that's just my opinion.

@Anthony, yeah, that's kind of what I WANTED it to be about... I just missed the signposts for that interpretation. If they were there, it was muddy for this viewer. And I'm telling you, I wanted to love this movie. Really. It just ultimately didn't hold up for me. @Lisa, I hear you about different ways we approach movies. I'm working on honing my screenwriting skills, so I do tend to reverse engineer everything I see. I actually find it to be a great use of my time, but if I couldn't learn anything by doing that, yeah, I wouldn't bother either.

@Kerry, vive la difference ;-)

I'm truly impressed that The Babadook made such an impression - it was made here in Adelaide, I'm not into horror so haven't seen it - it tied with Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner as best picture here recently - Essie Davis is a highly regarded actress here in the land of Oz - written and directed by Jennifer Kent, she also won the Best Director award here - the idea of creating The Book is a stroke of marketing genius, love it.

I watched about 1/2 the movies on your list so far and I have to say they are all good for different reasons. The Imitation Game was good because it was so subtle and understated in its politics. As to 'Gone Girl' it was interesting because it was original and totally unexpected, which at least in my personal experience is what an original fictional story has to be in order an outsider to get a chance. That said, I didn't read the book either but I thought that the author had a deep grasp of pop culture and had daring original dialogue. Specifically * She had a man call a woman the 'C' word, which to my knowledge is a huge industry no-no. * Ahem, as a heterosexual male who saw that supporting female character in the music video 'Blurred Lines', I must say that if I were in the shoes of a wife who saw my husband with that woman..I'd think exactly what that wife said.

You can call a woman a c*nt if the story calls for it. Heck, you can call anyone that if the situation calls for it. British and Irish scripts use it every other word. Some women don't like the word so it's used seldomly. But it's certainly not a rule.

Interesting, don't you think, Lisa, the different interpretations of vulgarity.

It's a strong word, so used in some scripts it has a powerful impact... e.g. Kickass, and adds dramatic (or comedic) impact. But as Danny mentioned, in the UK/Ireland, in certains areas and circumstances it is common place. E.g. go to see a football (that's soccer) match at West Ham Utd, and you will hear it every 5th word, though they tend to pronounce it 'cant' with an elongation of the 'a' sound... so if I saw a film set in that area, dealing with those people, that didn;t use that word I'd feel it lack authenticity (kids films excluded). The fact that it's in Gone Girl, proves that it's not a 'no, no', It was also used in Wolf of Wall Street 3 times, so more rarity than banned.

I think it should be used sparingly and thought it was appropriate in Kickass.

@ Lisa - great movie, though that Top 10 of Scottish films should include both http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1924394/?ref_=nv_sr_1 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1450321/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 the latter also enjoys a fair few cusses ;-)

Thank you ever so much for the list! Wonderful choices and insigths.