Hollywood Heisserer

My short story “Hours” was published today on the anthology e-zine, Popcorn Fiction.

There’s a great article about the site and its purpose in Entertainment Weekly, which you can read here.

I’ve been out of town since the convention this year, so I’m late getting back, but it’s notable to mention that this year we presented a Comic-Con exclusive trailer for Nightmare on Elm Street that offered attendees a first look at Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger. The trailer was well received and it felt good to be in the audience for it. Sadly, it won’t be available online, and it sounds like the next time we’ll be able to see anything for the movie is late this year, since Warners has dropped us on the weekend of April 30, 2010. Oof.

Sam was a phenomenal director and he really enhanced the script with his visual style. I’m also happy to report just how many times he used practical effects versus CGI. I spent a week on set in June and got to watch everyone in action, including Haley, and I’m thrilled with the attention to detail everyone brought to the project.

When I have more to share about Nightmare or the prequel for The Thing, I’ll return. Meantime, back to the screenwriting program…

My friend Peter Cornwell’s film premiered this weekend, and it’s a brilliant little haunted house movie. Back in 2005, Peter was attached to direct my own adaptation of The Dionaea House for Warner Brothers, but the project fell apart two weeks before shooting. He and I parted ways with the hope of reuniting in the future sometime, but I could tell he had the fire in his belly to make a horror movie, and so it thrills me to see him flex his muscles with Haunting. Rock on, Pete!

And if anyone has the desire to see a fantastic little stop-motion animated short film, Peter’s directorial “debut”  is called Ward 13.

From this link here, the little tidbit:

“We learned exclusively here at Bloody-Disgusting that Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment have tapped Eric Heisserer to rewrite The Thing prequel that was originally scripted by Ronald D. Moore (no idea how much of a rewrite). It was announced here yesterday that Heisserer also did some cleanup work on Wesley Strick’s screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Could he be the next big name in horror? It’s looking that way. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is attached to direct the prequel to John Carpenter’s classic film that fallowed scientists in the Antarctic that are confronted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of the people that it kills.”

They were quite fast on the draw, those folks at Bloody. Yes, Matthijs and I are hard at work with the very smart team at Strike on the prequel. We are all so much in love with Carpenter’s film, so protective of it, we’re doing all we can to avoid stepping on its toes. I jumped at this job because I hold the Carpenter adaptation to very high standards, and I knew it would be a challenge to create a comparable companion piece. Sort of a “Nobody better screw this up, especially me” mentality. Lucky for me, the people at Strike and the director have the same standards.

I can’t say any more at this time. I have the highest respect for both Ron Moore and Wesley Strick.

My story for the Boom! Studios anthology comic Zombie Tales was recently published. You can order it from the Boom website or search your local comic shop for copies. The link also shows you some preview pages of my story, as a little try-before-you-buy incentive.

I went to Boom! Studios last year when their Zombie Tales title was still new, and pitched a handful of story ideas. Each comic is like a Twilight Zone episode, except in the world of the undead. One issue will have anywhere from two to four standalone stories. I’d read the ones already published as well as a few in development, and realized nearly all of them took place during a zombie outbreak. So I approached editor Mark Waid with an idea: What if the outbreak is history? What if the zombie war has been fought and won a few years back—where would we be in a post-zombie world? My theories centered around the possible practical use of a drug or chemical agent derived from the zombie virus. What use would we have for something that reanimated the dead?

Criminal investigation came to mind. And that was the basis for my story “Crime Scene Reanimation.”

I hope you like it!

Let’s talk about the “jump scare,” otherwise known as the cheap scare, or false spook moment.

You know the kind. Tension is building in a scene, the character approaches the door, nervous, and then as you peek through your fingers at the screen– BOO! It was just the family cat. It’s not the villain after all.

Horror movies have used this scare tactic faithfully for decades. It’s called the “cheap scare” because it banks on the audience anticipating the worst, and then faking them out. They’re easy to engineer in almost any situation where characters are tense or suspicious. And for that reason, they tend to be overused. But the jump scare can be used deftly, in moderation, and under certain circumstances.

One of the best uses for the false scare is as a way to disarm the audience. The false scare beat is really just a tool to create a greater falsehood: A sense of relief. The scare moment is over; it was just the family cat. And so our character turns around to suddenly find the villain RIGHT THERE and BOO! Real danger. A second jump scare, but this one isn’t false. It’s the last time we probably see that character, too.

Another reason for using a jump scare is to reinforce the tone of the movie when you are short on legitimate scares. In the 1979 classic Alien, much of the legitimate scares happen past the halfway mark. So, to remind audiences “this is a horror movie and you will be scared,” screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Walter Hill made sure to pepper in moments of false terror — including one with Jonesy the cat — to keep you on guard for when the real scares show up. It’s the horror movie’s version of foreplay.

I’m not a big fan of the false scare because it’s been overused, but I find myself inserting two such moments in Nightmare on Elm Street because they work the way I describe above; as a disarming device, or in one case, as a means of placing doubt in the audience’s mind about the state of reality.

When have jump scares worked for you?

Last night I gathered with some friends and we played our first game of Android — a new title from Fantasy Flight Games, makers of Arkham Horror and the Battlestar Galactica game (side note: the BSG boardgame is astonishingly good).

Android lured us all to it like moths to the light, because of its “color.” The game’s setting is a sci-fi future much like Blade Runner or any number of Heinlein, Bradbury, or Asimov stories. The board is split between the Earth megacity of New Angeles, and various low-orbit and Lunar locations. The core means of travel between the two sides of the board is the space elevator known as “the beanstalk.” The game’s story centers around a murder mystery. You’re out to catch the suspect and help the innocent. Each player takes on the role of a unique investigator with their own talents and sci-fi/noir-ish weaknesses. There’s Raymond, the pulp-novel private eye with a past that haunts him and a lover he knows is bad news. There’s Louis Blaine, the Vic Mackey cop still angry at the world over the loss of his partner and friend. Or you can be Caprice, a woman with curious psychic powers who struggles with her own sanity as a cost for use of her powers. And Rachel, a bounty hunter with daddy issues. Lastly, the game would not be complete without the character of Floyd, a human “bioroid” who searches for what it means to be human while dealing with three directives he must obey as a robot.

As I said, the game is ostensibly about a murder. You select a case from a series of cards (much like Elder God cards in Arkham), read it aloud to the table, and then set up your suspects for the game. You always have suspects equal to your number of players plus one. In our case there were six on the table. Each player then gets a card dealt in secret with the face of one suspect. He or she is your “guilty” hunch. You want this suspect to be guilty. You then get an “innocent” hunch as well. You want to make sure that happens as well. The way you do this is by gathering evidence around the board and then placing that evidence on suspects. Some evidence will have a positive (guilt) value, and some will have a negative (alibi) value. No one else at the table sees the value of the evidence you place on the suspects, but they can all rather quickly figure out which two people are on your guilty/innocent “hunch” cards just by watching where you place your evidence markers.

At the end of the game all the evidence of the suspects is flipped over and totaled. The one with the most positive points is determined as the guilty party, and the rest are innocent. Ta-da, the mystery is solved! Game over.

And yet that’s maybe twenty percent of the game.

See, the winner isn’t the player whose suspect was found guilty. That just offers a good chunk of Victory Points at the end. The winner is the person who has the most points. And there are a dozen ways to accumulate those. Oh boy.

While the murder mystery is going on, each player has a side story running concurrently. These plot lines function like miniature Choose Your Own Adventure stories, where at various steps in the timeline of the game will fork in one direction or another, based on your actions and antagonistic actions of the other players. You end up with a variant of the “happy” or “sad” ending with these side stories, which either offer more victory points or hurt you with negative penalties.

Then there is a whole quadrant of the boardgame devoted to The Conspiracy — a 5×5 grid wherein players connect puzzle pieces to link various organizations to the crime. Mechanically these links then offer bonuses or penalties to other aspects of the game (such as, “Corporate favors are now worth more victory points” etc.). Yes, this board game also has a jigsaw puzzle element. That’s right.

Finally each player has two unique decks devoted to their character: Light and Dark. But you don’t draw from your own Dark deck. Instead that deck is available to any other player as a way to target you and generally make life miserable for your character. Using the cards from these decks affects your good/evil sliding scale indicator on your character card.

And after all that, I still haven’t covered all the various other resources and game components. If you thought Arkham Horror had too many moving parts, Android is like Arkham Horror strung out on cocaine at a Philip K. Dick convention. It’s ridiculous. At one point, I drew a card at a seedy location which let me spend a favor token from one of my personal contacts, which then let me uncover an evidence token that allowed me to follow up a lead, which uncovered a puzzle piece conspiracy token that allowed me to earn a good baggage token on my personal side plot.

Android seems to suffer from the game design concept of “If you run into a rule problem, the solution is to create more rules, and then burden the new rules with exceptions.” It feels like some old legacy software program whose code is a spaghetti bowl of outdated scripts, but the best the new programmers can do is write up even more code to patch the system and hope it keeps working. I own the Arkham Horror game so I have a high tolerance for lots and lots of moving parts, and I probably could have enjoyed this game fully even with all the chits, tokens, cards, and puzzle pieces. But four recurring problems ultimately left me feeling frustrated with the game.

1. Too much downtime. Granted we played with the full five players, but ten to fifteen minutes would pass before my turn came around again. If it’s not your turn, just about the only thing you can do to feel involved in the game is play Dark Cards on other players during their turn. This is actually a move you need to do somewhat regularly in order to readjust your own characters good/evil sliders so that when it’s your turn you can then play a Light Card for yourself. But the reason it takes so damn long for the game to get back around to your turn is that the other players have been formulating their plan for what they want to do on their turn and invariably those plans are dashed the moment a Dark Card is played on them. So it takes them a few minutes to figure out a new plan of attack, which just slows the pace for everyone else, including the player who played the Dark Card on him/her.

2. “Dogpile on the leader” is encouraged. There’s no way to really hide who’s in the lead in this kind of game. It’s evident based on the things the player amasses during the game. While the whole murder suspect that (at first blush) appears to be the main drive of the game is kept a mystery until the end, even those victory points don’t lock you in as winner. In our game, for instance, the player who correctly picked the guilty suspect got something like third or fourth place out of five. So when you have a number of tools at your disposal to focus on the leader, it makes for a rather vindictive game that otherwise reads and feels like a more narrative-driven personal journey for each player.

3. Unused pieces make me think I’m not playing properly. There are so many components to the game, it’s possible you won’t use them except for once every three or four play sessions. In this case we entirely avoided the attribute of Trauma, and all the Trauma markers remained at the hospital location. There were one or two other elements we never touched. Obviously this makes for interesting replays of the game where these components are featured heavily, but my reaction to this kind of setup is that something unused in even one playthrough is something extraneous to the system. If we don’t need it for one six-hour game, then please, leave it out.

I think I might have even swallowed those first three issues and had fun, but what killed my fun was this:

4. The color didn’t matter.

Every character card — every Light card, ever Dark card, all the personal Plot cards with the forking paths of that person’s journey — they’re all written with amazing narrative that describes the characters inner troubles, their actions and moods, their struggles, their lovers and their enemies… It’s some great melodrama that always matches the character for whom the stories are written. Raymond, the private eye, he had Memory cards that were triggered when he ventured to the moon. The moon was his Chinatown. Every other player had one Memory card for Raymond they could play on him while he was at a Moon location, which typically had some negative effect on him. But the story of what happened was slowly revealed in those cards and it felt like an engaging story at that.

Sadly, the color had no effect. And by hour three of the game, we as players were looking to play our turn as quickly as possible (see problem #1) and so we’d just jump down to the bottom of the card and read the mechanical effects so we could get on with the game. That’s the really sad part. For a game with so much story, with so many fascinating characters who seem at least someone linked together via side characters and common contacts, the story continued to make itself irrelevant. We didn’t need to listen to that color in order to decide what to do next.

Android will be the game that almost got it right. It was nearly the perfect board game. If only it had made its story matter.

I do believe heisserer.com is finally back from the dead. It only took a ritualistic burning of the database and a fresh install of the new WordPress by my amazing repair-guy Otto, but now I’m back in business.

First order is to set up the rest of the site, or at least a few basic pages. I got boxes I need to unpack, et cetera, et cetera.