In a good year for horror here at WriteMovies, the 3rd Place Script is a classic haunted house story. With a gripping plot and a fantastic lead character, HAVENWOOD by Jai Brandon gave us all the spooks, thrills, and excitement we could have possibly hoped for!
Le nombre de suites et de remakes continue de grimper en flèche, comme le prouvent les ventes de scénarios des mois de septembre et d’octobre, telles que rapportées par le site Script Pipeline… Et il y a d’autres choses intéressantes à noter.
Cliquez ici si vous souhaitez voir le rapport complet du mois de septembre ou cliquez ici pour celui d’octobre. Et si vous pensez avoir un scénario plus original que tout ce que vous voyez ici, envoyez nous le et participez à un de nos concours ici!
The standard deadline for our Romance and Comedy Award has just passed, and now the standard deadline for the WriteMovies Winter 2020 Screenwriting Contest is just one week away!
You’ve got until the end of Sunday January 12th if you want to enter the competition at the lower price rate of $39 for screenplays, stageplays, and TV pilots, or $49 for books and video game scripts. And there are a lot of good reasons to enter…
The Grand Prize for the contest is $2000 – plus valuable script development from our professional analysts and guaranteed pitching to industry. Take a look at our Wall of Fame 2019 – we’re already hard at work with all our winners from last year on developing their scripts. This is your chance to join them!
And don’t forget that you can also get free entry to the contest when you buy a script report from us. Get invaluable feedback on your work from top experts; all of our reports follow industry-standard formats, and are designed to give you honest, constructive feedback on your work. Get Studio Coverage for just $99 or more comprehensive Development Notes for $149!
So don’t delay. Click here to submit to the WriteMovies Winter 2020 Screenwriting Contest today and start your writing journey with us!
Happy New Year from everyone here at WriteMovies! The first deadline approaches for our latest genre award – the Romance and Comedy Award 2020 – with just a couple of days left for you to enter at the standard price!
At standard entry for this contest, you can submit a screenplay, stageplay, or TV pilot for just $39, or a book or video game script for $49. But you’ll have to move fast – the standard deadline is this Sunday, January 5th!
The successor to our first two genre prizes – the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award 2019 and the Horror Award 2019 – the Romance and Comedy Award is here to celebrate more great writing. We’ll accept scripts that belong to either genre, or which are romantic-comedies.
And don’t forget that in addition to some great prizes, including development notes to help enhance your work and guaranteed pitching to industry, you’ll also get FREE, automatic entry to the Winter 2020 Screenwriting Contest too. The winner of our Horror Award 2019 also took the Grand Prize of $2000 in our Fall 2019 Screenwriting Contest – so give yourself the same chance and enter today!
We can’t wait to see what you’ve got for us. Submit by the end of Sunday January 5th for standard entry – but if you’re not completely ready yet, don’t worry. The final deadline is February 9th, so there’s still time.
Click here to visit the contest page and submit your work. We can’t wait to see what scripts you’ve got for us!
It’s been a great year for us here at WriteMovies, with three successful contests – Winter, Spring, and Fall – producing a lot of great scripts! We’ve also been very proud of our first two genre awards to celebrate great writing: the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award and the Horror Award.
We’re already hard at work with our winners on developing their scripts and getting them out there to the industry, but today we look back at our contests and reveal our full Wall of Fame for 2019.
Here’s a reminder of our Grand Prize winning scripts…
And a special shout out to the first ever winner of our Sci-Fi and Fantasy Award, too: THE TIME-TRAP by Mark Flood! To describe this script as a thrilling ride would be an understatement; it kept us gripped from the first page to the last.
If you’d like the chance to see your name on next year’s wall, submit to our Winter 2020 Contest and Rom-Com Award today – just one week until the Standard Deadline!
Every year without fail, there’s a question that I can’t seem to answer. To this day, it remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in the world of cinema: is THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS a Halloween film or a Christmas film?
To some, it’s obvious. “It’s both, isn’t it?” they say. This stop-motion animated classic (usually associated with Tim Burton, although actually directed by Henry Selick) tells the story of Jack Skellington, Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, who grows bored of his usual holiday and decides to take over Christmas instead – so of course it’s both.
I’ll admit that this answer may be right, but it doesn’t help because it doesn’t tell me when I should be watching the film. Do I watch it at Halloween or Christmas, or at some strange midpoint on November 27th? Which set of celebrations should it be a part of?
This year felt like the year to try to resolve the issue. With WriteMovies running our first ever Horror Award and announcing the winner on Halloween, we’ve read lots of scripts and watched lots of films that made us think about the Pumpkin King’s holiday, whether they be scary and violent or more light-hearted like THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
And after some thought, I think I’ve finally figured it out. I think I’ve finally found an answer to the question…
Because I genuinely believe now that it’s a Christmas film.
Even writing that out now, it still looks strange to see. After all, this is the film that still, 25 years since it’s release, is most emblematic of Tim Burton’s visual style – a style that has been embraced by goths, outcasts, and lovers of the weird and spooky ever since.
It’s a film which has a skeleton as its main character, which opens on shots of ghosts and pumpkins, and which sees Santa Claus (or “Sandy Claws”, as the residents of Halloween Town call him) kidnapped by a misbehaving gang of trick-or-treaters. To call it a Christmas film therefore sounds strange even to my own ears.
But I’ve decided that it is – because thematically, it shares much more with Christmas films than anything else. Fundamentally, it’s the message a film conveys that determines where it belongs. Christmas films generally have a focus on family and community, and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is just the same.
After all his (mis)adventures, at the end of the film Jack comes to realize the folly of his mistakes. By turning his back on his friends and the town that loves him, disaster has followed. It’s only by returning to where he belongs, embracing his community, and accepting the love of the ragdoll Sally that he finds happiness again.
Nobody would ever accuse THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS of being a horror film, but I believe this shows that it’s not even a Halloween film either. It belongs firmly to the realm of Christmas, and that’s why I’ll be watching it as part of my holiday celebrations this year.
Of course, give it another twelve months… and I’ll probably change my mind again.
From all of us here at WriteMovies, a very Merry Christmas. Oh, and I supposed a Happy (belated) Halloween, too!
The number of reboots and remakes continues to climb, as can be seen from both the September and October script sales as reported by Script Pipeline… And there are a few other interesting things to note.
Click here if you’d like to see the full Script Pipeline report for September, or click here for October. And if you think you’ve got a script more original than anything you see here, get it into our hands by submitting to one of our contests here!