Consider The Bleeding House
The movie that is vs the script that was
Continuing to write about previous projects, today a discussion of my first film as writer/director, The Bleeding House.
Below I discuss the development process and specifically the nature of my first draft of the script.
It was substantially different than what we ended up making.
The Movie That Is
Not many people have seen The Bleeding House. It was released to little fanfare, middling to bad reviews.
And it is very much a first film which is a nice way of saying “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing at any given moment.”
So before I talk about the version that wasn’t made, I should talk a bit about the version that was.
The Bleeding House concerns a family living in a secluded farm house. Mother, father, sister, brother. They’re being torn apart by a deep dark secret. Think of them more like a powder keg than a family, proper.
Then one day a white suit-clad stranger shows up at their door. Says he’s looking for a place to stay the night. He tells a sob story. Preys on their sympathies.
The family lets the stranger in.
Turns out not only does he know who they are but he came there specifically for them. Turns out he knows the secret. Turns out he’s come to mete out vengeance. Turns out he considers himself an agent of an angry God.
The powder keg explodes.
Some people are killed.
Some people are exsanguinated….
… but then it turns out what he thought the family secret was, wasn’t actually the secret.
In the end the family’s daughter wanders off down a darkened road into an unknown future.
The movie is intended to ask questions about self-hood. Can any of us deny what we are at our core? Can we change what fate deems us to be?
It’s supposed to be about the horror of the things we refuse to face about ourselves.
It’s not really successful in posing any of those questions. Like I say: very much a first movie.
I’ve not sat through the whole thing in years. The last time I did I remember thinking “oh the first 45 minutes of this aren’t so bad”… then things go off the rails, moments stop working, and well… it’s a first film.
The ending though. That I’ll stand up for. The movie’s final moments, its final image, are things I’m still pretty proud of. There’s something in there that works if you ask me.
Ambiguous endings are my favorite endings. I think they’re the only endings that actually stick with viewers. They’re the endings that actually reflect life as we experience it.
Everything is ambiguity (more on this idea sometime soon).
So that’s the basics of the movie as it exists…
BUT that’s not what happened in the first draft.
Not at all.
Unbridled, Wild, and Weird.
Before anything else, it was called County Road K.
That original draft still had the isolated family. They were still hiding a deep, dark secret.
The mysterious stranger shows up... he woos his way into the house… starts telling bizarre tales of his travels across the country…
And, of course, he then starts killing the family members one at a time... gutting them… making a bizarre art piece with their bodies…
He’s about to kill the daughter... when...
The dead family members reanimate as mindless flesh-hungry zombies.
In the original draft the family secret was that their daughter could raise the dead.
But she had no ability to control it at all.
It was like Carrie’s telekinesis, or Charlie’s pyrokinesis in Firestarter. A superhuman power unbridled and uncontrolled and therefore horrifying.
Anywhere she went, if there was something dead, it would be reborn. Animal or human or insect. Anything.
The daughter had accidentally raised the dead at a funeral and her mother had burned the funeral home down to hide the truth.
The family retreated from the town to live away, isolated, both because the mother was an arsonist AND for fear of what havoc their daughter might wreak should she be anywhere close to society.
So the reborn family, the resurrected parents of the young girl, kill the killer. Well, more than kill, they tear him to shreds.
Hurrah!
But.
The dead can't be controlled, and so the little girl flees her resurrected parents out into the wilderness.
But of course, in the wilderness, there are dead things everywhere... and so as she travels, a great swarm of reborn insects and birds begins to swirl around her.
They don’t kill her though. They follower her.
She wanders off towards civilization, an uncontrollable tornado of undeath following her... set to unmake the natural order of the world.
… also it was sci-fi…
As if that wasn't wild enough, I’d I also set the script in a war torn future America.
The family was worried that the war was going to reach their tiny community. The news reports they watch are full of insane tales of wars across the border. There was a whole unraveling dystopia just off the page.
When the police show up, they’re basically driving a tank because martial law is in effect.
Things had to change
That original draft was born out of cauldron of personal factors but the original spark of creativity was a pondering of location and sub-genres.
I remember I was flying home to Wisconsin and staring out the window of the plane at the fields and the remote farmhouses. They struck me as a perfect location for something. But what?
Who might live there? Why? And what horrible things might happen to them?
The next piece came from a discussion I had with a friend about sub-genres. It led to the question: What if a slasher film twisted into a zombie film midway through?
Had we been able to make that first draft, it would've been a glorious, insane genre mash-up mess. The sci-fi, horror, gory sub-genre twisting meditation on death and society that nobody knew they wanted.
But it was unmakeable.
Instead, we went into heavy rewrites. Stripped out the crazy genre mashup. Put firm boundaries around the more imaginative elements. Dug into making it into a psychological thriller with just a dash of horror.
And then we made the movie we made.
It all ended up very tame.
I’m not sure there’s a lesson here really. It’s just that that first draft still lives in the wilds of my mind, rampaging around in the darkness.
And occasionally I like to shine a light on it.
The film’s currently streaming on Tubi if you want to check it out.
That first draft sounds amazing.