Genre: Horror
Logline: A maniacal music teacher “encourages” a suburban housewife to learn to play the piano.
Hello darkness, my old friend…
I wrote this in one weekend for challenge #3 of the NYC Midnight Short Screenplay Challenge (2011). The writers in my heat had to write a horror short featuring a piano. The location for the short: a classroom.
HORROR! I’ve done NYC Midnight contests for years, and I still feel like a kid on Christmas morning every time I land horror as my genre. (For more on my love of horror, check out the Fragments comic book based on a few of my short horror screenplays.)
Considering that the judges nailed me to a wall for my last screenplay, Alone, I felt I had something to prove this time around. Maybe that’s why I had the script written within a couple of hours of reading the email with this round’s parameters. (For the record, the people who have read Alone dig the script. My guess is that I got nailed on a technicality, but I won’t know for weeks.)
The hardest part about writing Nocturne de la Mort was coming up with something that felt original, something that could still surprise the audience. Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) used the piano as an instrument of torture, both psychological and physical, in Cut, the segment he did for Three… Extremes. Although I didn’t want to go down the torture pr0n path, psychological torture (ala Saw) fascinates me.
The piano requirement, though, was the icing on the cake. I’ve played piano for over 20 years. My wife and I both have degrees in music education, and my wife retired early from her career as a public school music teacher to teach piano lessons privately. Even our kids are musicians, performing in choral ensembles, instrumental ensembles, musicals, and even an opera. That immersion in music enabled me to bring an element to the script (i.e., the subtitles) that other music geeks will appreciate.
I love this short, and considering that one of the first people I shared it with (an indie director) said, and I quote: “That was was fucking awesome! I would love to shoot that!”… there’s a pretty good chance that this script will make it to screen sooner rather than later.
Download screenplay: Nocturne de la Mort
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