Screenwriting : Sometimes Death is Necessary For Evolution by Len Archibald

Forgive the morbid (and eye-popping) title, but just a little nugget I would like to share-more of a lesson I have learned over the years.

I on my third draft of a horror screenplay flavored with influences of Get Out, Midsommar and The Howling and while I felt I’ve a good handle on the plot, thematic elements, world-building and character interactions, something still had been nagging at me RE: pacing. The screenplay clocks in at exactly 90 pages-but still didn’t feel like it was hitting the level I wanted.

I had a realization that one of my characters was sort of “there”. I loved him. I thought he brought a lot of levity to the story and was a lot of fun. But facts is facts: he really didn’t add much. So I killed him.

Not even in a literal sense where he got a death scene. No, I erased him from the screenplay completely. Because his existence was actually a hinderance. He said lines of dialogue that got in the way. He was the focal point of scenes that slowed down the pace. He pulled away from the thematic elements of the story.

Once I freed my story from this character, so many more possibilities opened up and it allowed me to restructure pacing, re-contextualize character relationships and motivations and even fix dialogue where it felt certain characters said things I always believed they wouldn’t say.

So this serves as a reminder for all of us-sometimes, even when we LOOOOVE certain characters, we can’t be SO in love with them that we can’t be objective enough to realize that at moments for your story to evolve, the death of a character is necessary.