Maybe I should make a horror movie where the heroes are based on Winnie the Pooh and friends, but so subtly the viewer is sure they must be imagining it.
Like, the final girl is blonde and chubby and cheerful, and her friend has pink hair and is smart but easily frightened, and they consult a professor of the occult who’s a bit of a fool and has big bushy eyebrows, and they call the monsters “elephants and weasels”…
And the viewer is going
You have good thoughts!
Importantly, I should mention that this is a horror movie along the lines of The Lost Boys, where there are some genuinely scary scenes but all the people we like survive.
Ah! A useful clarification (TBH that’s the kind of horror movie I prefer, but the use of the phrase “final girl” threw me off)
That being the case, a few more possibilities
The emo kid comes close to dying, but doesn’t, due to a combination of him finally mustering himself to get up and run away at the last possible moment and the jock swinging back around to grab him and carry him the rest of the way to safety (thus completing both the emo kid’s arc of no longer finding solace in total fatalism, and the jock’s arc of paying attention to the people around him)
The nerd doesn’t manage to get as complete a character journey as that, but he does get a big scene where he fights off a room of monsters with incongruous success by channeling his vast amounts of Anxious Energy into violence (complete with a string of yelled obscenities and other I’m-mad-as-Hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore style dialogue, delivered in the highest pitch of scream that the actor is capable of)
As a nod to Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, it may fall to the four-year-old to figure out that the more monstery monsters aren’t merely subordinate to the human(oid?) baddie, but are in fact unwilling conscripts, and can be freed and brought to the heroes’ side with the right incantation.
What Chris’ Deal ultimately is, I leave as an exercise for someone else
Your thoughts continue to be the best! Maybe Chris is psychic and unknowingly conjuring his teenage angst into actual monsters (like a less body horror version of The Brood), so they do ultimately have to use the Power of Friendship to get him to help banish them!
And also, to avoid an iconic Pooh scene that (even if the full gag isn’t repeated as close as it could with humans) would kinda be offensive with plus-size human characters, maybe one of the typical sort of “horror movie characters inadvertently put an obstacle in their own way” moments is the chubby as-close-as-this-has-to-a-final-girl having to find another way (either that or her smol sidekick has to face their fears by going in there) to retrieve some key piece of data or magic artifact or whatever because the obvious way to do so secretly would be through something like an air vent that’s narrow enough that a girl her size would get stuck in
And also I’m of two minds on this “final girl” heroine’s name, y’know, there’s the obvious (if that wouldn’t be too obvious) Winifred “Winnie” as a first name but on the other hand I’d want to find some way to work in the whole “under the name of Sanders” joke (as in the books Pooh’s said to live “under the name of Sanders” (as in there’s a sign above his door with that name on it)) and even if it’s just from the fandom of this hypothetical movie making her full name Winifred Sanders invites the obvious Hocus Pocus jokus
Also, I’m actually trying to be a screenwriter (written scripts, just nothing’s gotten picked up yet) and if you guys would be willing to work with me I think i could turn this into a legitimate script
I would love to see the small smart scared girl (Penny?) have to go through the vent or something and summon her courage to do so! That can be her arc, alongside Chris’s being “I now have friends who can help me and I can help in return, and oh shit I didn’t know I was summoning monsters, I’m really sorry about that”
The main girl (Sandy?) was originally intended to be an actual Final Girl, but then I realized I would be really bummed if any of the main cast died. She can still be the protagonist who leads the bunch, ala Sid in Scream. She’d obviously get scared at times, but her main strength is an inner core of unflappable calm. Characters who do die could be entirely new characters or contain vague references (a beekeeper, etc.)
I’m happy to talk on IM or whatever if you do want to work on this silly idea that’s slowly becoming a fleshed out thing! (Hypothetical tagline: “Wait, was that a Winnie the Pooh reference or did I just imagine it?”)
If I can stick around long enough to propose the rest of the names…
Fussy Guy: Roger
Jock: Tony
Emo Kid: Nobody seems to know their first name–everyone just refers to them by their surname, “Muller”
Professor: Aloysius Grosshorn (or Aloysius Tawny)
Mother: Shiela
Little Boy: Joey (is making this last pair actually Australian too cute?)
Those are wonderful names. I cracked up at Roger and Tony!
i am having idea
- Tony gets a sports jersey with some sort of tiger logo. Perhaps “Centennial Tigers” or something like that (100 acre woods, 100 = century, centennial, Yeah)
- that of the town they live in (or a building where this takes place) is celebrating its 100th year of founding/building!
And the town itself is a Twin Peaksy lumber town with lots of woods!
…the scope of this is rapidly going from a slasher movie to Winnie the Pooh-themed Stranger Things, and I’m okay with that.
And the town itself
is a Twin Peaksy lumber
town with lots of woods!
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
