Slaughter - The origin...

Hey people, well whoever has taken the time to check this blog out, THANKS, it’s much appreciated…

Well anyway this is the blog for “Slaughter” and as you probably won’t know “Slaughter” is a script written by myself (Bobby Lee Darby) and Nathan Brookes and it’s currently in pre-production with Angel Baby Entertainment and Maverick Red in Hollywood!!!!!! IMDB it, it’s there.

But I suppose I should start at the beginning of how two lads from Dudley in the West Midlands in the UK managed to get a horror screenplay that they wrote in just under two months into pre-production with LA producers Gregory Segal, Cheri Wozniak, Mark Morgan, Guy Oseary and John A. Gallagher!

Well here it goes…

Firstly the whole conception of “Slaughter” began about a year and a half ago whilst me and Nathan were making a short film entitled “Final Take” strange really as "Final Take" involved clones, car chases and all kinds of crazy stuff. And “Final Take” turned out okay, not great but okay – for anyone who has seen it, it’s all about that low angle Michael Bay pan!

But yeah so the original idea for “Slaughter” came from this short film and after writing various high concept action movie scripts and getting nowhere we were like “let’s just take a group of people to one location and chop them the fuck up” – it worked for “Evil Dead”, it worked for “Reservoir Dogs” maybe it could work for us! So we sat around for days, weeks, months trying to come up with a cool concept that we would be like “hey that’s a pretty cool premise” if we saw it on the big screen - cue lightbulb moment and it hit us!!!! But not going to reveal exactly what hit us, yet.....

So the script writing process began and I have to give Nathan credit here because I wasn’t so sure once we started, I think I had my heart set on another high concept action movie – hey it’s from growing up watching Cameron movies! What can I do it’s in my nature! But after a horror weekend movie marathon of watching “Halloween”, “Saw”, “Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Suspiria”, “Tenebrae”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (original and remake) and the brilliant “Wolf Creek” I decided “okay this could be a quick sick little exploitation flick with lots of nudity and gore!”

Originally we structured the script in a way that we felt was different from many horror movies of today and years gone by, essentially taking the “Wolf Creek” structure and using it as a template for ours where the first half of that movie was simply the characters talking, where we didn’t learn a great deal about them and nothing particularly interesting happened to them during the movie’s first half but I did love the characters and when the bad shit kicks off in the second part of the movie I didn’t want any of these characters to die, I was nearly in tears when Liz died and when Kristy died I was in tears, man tears like! So that was essentially how the first drafts of “Slaughter” looked, I mean in the original draft no one died until page 55 but from then on out through to page 90 it was all out carnage, set piece after set piece! Basically the sickest stuff we could think of. And at the time we we’re happy with the finished script and the fact that we had written it so quickly gave it a raw energy. But looking back now it was obvious that it needed changing - the structure particularly!

So with the script all finished we we’re kind of at a loss with what to do with it. You see we had tried sending UK based agents our work before but had got nowhere and we really couldn’t see any agent liking “Slaughter” – it was horror, it was an exploitation flick, it had lots of gratuitous nudity for Christ’s sake! But we tried anyway and surprise surprise no one was interested! We tried everywhere – emailed production companies, wrote letters, tried to get it too actors – nothing. Although there was Screen West Midlands who kind of liked it but thought it needed more work but to be honest it was something they would never make, not enough kitchen sinks – if you know what I mean… All seemed lost and at the time we we’re considering making the movie ourselves, raising the money, we believed that £20000 would be enough to do it, shoot on Hi-Def, unpaid actors beg, borrow, steal etc etc. But then through a stroke of luck Nathan had an email from this website that he had signed up to, Talent Circle, the email was requesting screenplays for a horror competition in the USA for Slamdance Film Festival, only thing was all entries for the competition closed in two days time from when we got the email – we’d never be able to mail it in time!!!! Luckily if the postmark was before the closing date then they would still accept the script so like crazy we rushed to print, package and post the screenplay and so began the crazy surreal journey of “Slaughter” that took us to the USA where we had lunch with movie producers, met MC Hammer and so much more…

To be continued…