I'm Steph. And I'm Jeff. Each episode, we review a film that needs screenwriting support. As writers, we'll deep dive into the characters and plot to tell you how to fix this film. Listen at your own risk. This podcast contains spoilers. Now sit back and enjoy this episode of Script Slayers. Steph and I are excited to announce our first co-written novel, The Curia Chronicles, will be published in 2025. To learn all about our creative pursuits,
Please follow us on YouTube at Steph and Jeff Writes. You can also check us out at stephandjeffwrites.com. And now, on with the show. Today, we'll be rewriting the 2023 film Knock at the Cabin, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. This film is based on the 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. The film stars Dave Bautista as Leonard, our protagonist, and one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Jonathan Groff as Eric. Ben Aldridge as Andrew, and Eric and Andrew are partners. Nikki Amoka-Bird as Sabrina, one of the Four Horsemen. Abby Quinn as Adrian, the Four Horsemen, Robert Gritt as Redman, our last Four Horsemen, and Kristen Q as Wen, Eric and Andrew's adorable daughter. And the antagonist in this film is... God or fate, I would say, as the supreme being that's causing the apocalypse to happen. Jeff, can you give us a summary of Knock at the Cabin?
seven-year-old wen is vacationing with her fathers eric and andrew at a remote cabin in rural pennsylvania she is approached by a stranger named leonard who explains that he needs wen and her parents help to save the world three other individuals break in with makeshift weapons and tie them up struggling to fight them off eric sustains the concussion leonard and his companions sabrina adrian
and redmond claim that they have no intention of harming the family however in the past week they have been driven by visions to find them they foresee an impending apocalypse in which oceans will rise a pandemic will spread and the sky will fall The only way to prevent this is for the family to sacrifice one of their own. If they do not make a choice, they will be the last people standing. The intruders sacrifice Redmond. Eric sees a figure of light as Redmond dies.
on tv news reports show devastating mega tsunamis andrew believes redmond was rory o'bannon a man who had been arrested after assaulting andrew in a bar years ago he thinks rory tracked him down for revenge the next day the intruders sacrifice adrian meanwhile a deadly variation of the flu virus spreads across the world andrew escapes and shoots at sabrina with his gun until she flees
As Leonard is being held at gunpoint, Sabrina breaks in and is fatally shot by Andrew. Leonard decapitates Sabrina, and afterwards Andrew finds Redman's wallet and proves to Leonard that he was Rory. A TV broadcast reveals that hundreds of plane crashes occurred around the world. Leonard tells the family that after his death, they will only have a few minutes to make a decision. He then slits his throat. Upon his death, lightning causes fires and more planes to crash.
eric believes the intruders represent the four horsemen of the apocalypse not wanting wen to grow up in a destroyed world he offers himself as a sacrifice and envisions an older andrew and adult wen thriving in the future He feels that their family was chosen to make the sacrifice because their love is so pure. Andrew reluctantly shoots and kills Eric.
Andrew and Wen find the visitors trucked with belongings that corroborate their stories. They drive to a crowded diner where they watch news reports confirming that the disasters have subsided. The end. Okay, Jeff. So... What are your thoughts about this one? This is an interesting M. Night Shyamalan film. Much, I would say, much better than After Earth, the last one we reviewed. Yeah, it's a unique film, I would say. It's not like...
your average paint-by-numbers film. It's one of those thought-provoking films where it's putting people in impossible situations of what are they going to choose. So yeah, curious what you thought of this film and how you would rewrite something like this. Good movie, too long. Oh, okay. I thought there was a fair amount of filler in this film. There were some flashbacks of Eric and Andrew that were completely unnecessary and broke the flow of the movie.
I think also that the ending would have benefited from being more ambiguous. The ending in the book has when being killed. right accidentally right and then so eric and andrew just decide well if you know any god that would do this is an evil god and they just don't care if there's an apocalypse now
This obviously ends with self-sacrifice and with the apocalypse ending. It's a happier ending. Personally, I think that ambiguity would work better. You think they should have stuck with the ending from the book? No. You've got your own ending. I do. Let's find out what it is with your rewrite. I actually don't have a lot to rewrite about most of the content. I felt that the opening was fine. I thought that the performances were good.
I felt also that there was a little too much talking. This movie felt overpacked. I don't think I needed as much on the Pete.
the horsemen talking about great people they used to be and things like that and constantly apologizing and all that it was interesting at first because how sinister everything is when they first break in and have the weapons and all that after a while it started to get just repetitive i already understood the point that these were normal people being pushed into abnormal circumstances and actions i had issues with some of the uh
At least with the tsunami shot where there's a camera that the image you see is of somebody shooting it live. On the beach, I'm like, how did anyone get this footage exactly? Yeah, how did they recover that? I don't know. So I think with one thing I would want to do is first not have a television. And it may seem minor, but... i would want the news to be coming purely through a radio so we don't have the visuals the visuals make it more real to an audience i think that hearing like some
You can even have like the only channel they get is like some holy roller station that Eric and Andrew came here for the reason that's completely cut off. They want to be off the grid and unplugged for the weekend. Right. This is going to be their off the grid weekend. They come here. There's no TV. There's one radio. It just gets like this. We could have an opening scene where it's this hardcore Christian station. They're like, yeah, never mind.
so that when the group shows up and says we'll turn on the news they put the radio on but it's people talking about ah this flooding is tsunami the virus it's all the apocalypse coming true i i would want to keep the ambiguity going constantly through the film because and i believe this is a problem with the film as we get it is that it's clear
at least from the moment redmond is killed if not before then that these people are the four horsemen of the apocalypse this is all true because it's like immediate he's killed and then suddenly there's like earthquakes all throughout the pacific ocean sending tsunamis destroying like you know the pacific northwest pacific northwest and stuff like this sort of story would work better if at no point are you 100 certain
that the four horsemen are telling the truth, that they're not just four deranged people. That also makes the sacrifice at the end more impactful.
By the time Eric is killed by Andrew, there's no ambiguity. We know that this is going to stop things. We know that... leonard and company were telling the truth it's the apocalypse if you don't make a sacrifice then the three you'll be the last people standing on a ruined earth i think it impacts more if they just been convinced but they don't actually know
And what I would do is that, okay, so there's, at the end of mine, there are storms, lightning strikes. They've heard on the radio about problems. Then the radio goes dead. So it seems like things are falling apart. I would still have Eric make the... decision to allow himself to be killed andrew shoots him
and we have win and andrew driving off and we see the sky clearing up but that's it they don't get to a diner they don't get to confirm that oh magically all these planes stop crashing and the water's receiving everything and the virus just went away keep that end of you going the whole time i think that's the because this is not a scary movie but it should be unsettling the kind of situation that andrew eric and when find themselves in should be something that people can
you want to be as you're able to get into their shoes and grapple like what would you do if you were asked to kill one of the people you love the most and if you didn't it's one of those scenarios of like would you kill one to save the planet but if it's the person you love but i think the thing is
and this is where uh both my rewrite and the book are in agreement is that it's more powerful if you don't actually know at the end if there was an apocalypse happening With the tsunamis, they point out that the earthquakes that caused them happened before the four horsemen show up at the cabin.
Okay, yeah, I think they were, there's something like, there's a few. They were trying to like find the holes that these are maybe just religious fanatics that are picking on us because we're a gay couple. There was that and then that Redmond was really this Rory guy.
Yeah, Redmond was this Rory guy who had attacked Andrew. And I had no problem with any of those. I think that that was the kind of, not even misdirection, so that the Rory and Redmond being the same person isn't a misdirection. It's just...
helps very coincidental but well maybe but i think the you could look at this and maybe this was a missed opportunity in the film is that rory was given this task cause of what he had done before that he had a connection to them and that perhaps that would have helped is that
That could have been something that each of these characters had some sort of connection. I was going to say because he was the only one that had the connection. Why didn't others have that connection somehow to Eric and Andrew? So I think that that would be something else that would work.
it's not an obvious one like oh you were my neighbor now you're here to kill me but it's something where we see how the their lives had intersected before and that that's why they've been sent to do this i mean that might work otherwise something like that is almost like a red herring yeah the whole roy thing was a red herring which just wasn't necessary to the plot the thing is i i think this worked pretty well as is
I thought this was a decent movie. This is overall a well-written plot, in my opinion. I honestly think a lot of it is just that for the story they were telling, it just wasn't a feature-length story. I'm not sure exactly what you would do to make it a feature-length story unless you wanted to have more build-up, like give us some more time with Eric, Andrew, and Wen, because this will be starts.
with leonard showing up right like he shows up and communicates with when yeah and then we get right into the four horsemen That's okay, except then you're relying on either an assumption by the audience that, okay, these two guys are in love and love their daughter, or you're relying on...
flashbacks sort of fill in. Which is what they did, which was the flashback. Which I actually didn't think was necessary. I think the best way to do this would have that opening 10 to 15 minutes just with the happy family. and if you want to show that you know they have to grapple with homophobia you could do that like maybe a diner they're driving up to the cabin and they stop at the diner and get some weird looks or some something like that right and then at the cabin show that they're having
you know, how well bonded they are and how they love each other. Yeah, they're dancing to Boogie Shoes or whatever. I had that song stuck in my head after this movie, yeah. I think that would have helped lay a foundation for these characters, so you wouldn't have to do any of the backstory, and you wouldn't have to rely on almost like the inferences of, okay, so of course they love each other, so we're just going to accept that. We'd actually see more of it.
enough time with the horsemen i don't really need a lot of backstory on them i like that idea you know that these are just people plucked up and It's well acted. Dave Bautista in particular really is good in this film. He is just captivating to watch. But like I said, the other horsemen are fine. I think the acting in this is fine. Even the little kid's okay.
There are a couple of times when she overacts with it, but the actor herself is young. She's like eight or nine. Yeah, she's cute. So she's all right. She did a good job for her. uh the role what i would do is streamline some things make things more ambiguous cut out the flashbacks open up with some quality time with the family streamlining oh shocking and uh
Yeah, but overall, I think that the general story and flow is fine. So overall, I thought this was a good movie. So I didn't find a ton to rewrite. I enjoyed this film. Yeah. A couple of things that I went a different direction with my rewrite is I made the film a bit more epic. Like, I wanted to see more of...
The plagues and what they were doing to the planet. I made this a bit more of like that, a doomsday movie and seeing that big cinematography of what's happening around the world. So I kept the TV, but. What I did is that I just want the stakes. I wanted to see the stakes raised because when you're just in the cabin and you're seeing this stuff on the TV, it doesn't have the same feel if you're seeing what's happening around the world.
I did is with each plague, I like took the viewer through the TV to actually see what was happening in the world.
with the plagues. And then you bring the viewer back to the cabin. So the viewer has a sense of how epic this disaster is. Maybe the people inside the cabin don't because they're only seeing what they're seeing on TV. But the viewer really... captures it so for example like the plane crashes that were happening all around the world like i wanted a scene where you're inside the plane and you're seeing people on the plane just being on the plane and then all of a sudden
it crashes and like you see the terror on the passengers faces as it's plummeting to the ground like that kind of thing like get and then i wanted one of the planes to crash in pennsylvania near their cabin so they had a sense of oh my goodness this like this big you know whatever airbus or something just crash like near us like you're seeing this plane fall out of the sky I
went way more doomsday movie with this okay with the tsunami i would have preferred to see like the earthquake rumbling underneath the surface and then the waves rising up and like multiple like people on the beach or people places drowning like again up the ante okay um i'm thinking like what's some good like doomsday movies where they do a good job with that like um
2012. Yeah, the day after tomorrow. Those types of feels. Independence Day, well, that was with aliens. But you get the sense of just epic doomsday. Okay. Oh, Armageddon.
right that's another good one with the dude like where you really can sense how bad things are at the planet so you basically had no problem though with not just a lack of ambiguity you just want to blow that away and just make it clear that this is all doomsday movie i wanted to make this more doomsday movie um but keep like the couple trying to figure out what they're gonna do like they're still struggling with this decision because they don't have they're in the cabin right they don't
get how bad it is out there it's like when you as a person watch something on the news about some horrible thing that's happening in a third world country it's horrible for the minute you're watching it but then you're moving on with your life like it's that sense like they just because they're not living it They're right now safe in the cabin. It's hard for them to really understand how bad it's getting out there. And they're only watching the TV.
in small snippets right they're they're not just sitting there glued for hours and hours um and so much is happening in real time they're not able to report on it as quickly as all this devastation is happening because it's going going so quickly with x9 i would show people
rapidly getting infected and like boils or whatever like make it look incredibly painful this virus like boils and disfigurement and in the last one i was like what is the last one wildfires or something just fires around the planet I didn't quite get a sense of the last plague. The sky falling, basically. The planes and then the lightning storms.
well the plane the plane that was the third that was there and then when leonard does it i think it's the lightning storms yeah the leonard one was like fires it was like fire goes so i would make that bigger with like why like wildfires like raging around the planet and people being burned alive and all that stuff and so we get to the final scene where
The fire, there's like a wall of fire coming at them. Now it's real. There is a massive wildfire that's like closing in on them and is going to burn them alive if they don't make a choice of. Who's going to be the one to die? So there's this thing in the movie where there's an angel or some kind of mysterious shadow figure that appears that...
There are a couple of times that, what is it, Eric sees, what, the light? Yeah. Yeah, he mentions that. It's like they play that off that he might because of his concussion, though.
Right. And he's ultimately the one that makes the sacrifice. Right. And so it's like because he feels at peace because... of the figure and what he sees is of like the figure shows him the future or something correct it was very ambiguous of who this mysterious shadow figure is i think it was meant to be maybe an angel giving him peace before he makes the decision to kill himself
think i just jettison that i don't think it needs to be there like i have it much more the wall of fire is coming at them at this point like one of them needs to die so they flip it's not going to be when they both have decided it's not going to be when so they flip a coin to decide who gets the bullet you could still have like eric getting the sacrificial bullet that's fine i get rid of the coincidence of the redmond rory thing being the same guy yeah i don't think i added anything so
Really? I mean, overall, I kept the story relatively the same. I just changed how they got to that ending. But I really just upped. Because I agree with you, the film could have either been shorter or if you wanted to make it. the feature length, you needed it to be more epic. So I just did that by making it more epic with actually seeing the plagues and the destruction in the world. It's an interesting idea. I think...
One of the things about the film, though, is that it does try to maintain that ambiguity. It doesn't go into as much of the disaster porn as you know like a like a full-on disaster movie like an emmerich disaster film i think that's one of the things that sets the film apart is that even though i think it fails in the end because it makes it clear that Yes, this was the apocalypse and Eric's sacrifice.
saved everybody i like the nod at like the attempt it has the nod towards trying to maintain that ambiguity and that's clearly what i was trying to do with mine is ramp up the ambiguity i want that sacrifice to be something where
You don't get an ending saying, yeah, you were right, do this. It's still... yeah you wanted to keep it more true to the book which is like yeah the way the book ends is that um they don't actually know they just agree to stick together no matter what even if the world's going to end like eric and andrew like we're in
together even if the world ends right and they don't know is the war gonna end is it not like at this point like they but they're not going to sacrifice to a god that won't accept the sacrifice of when when an innocent kid was killed right
Even the disasters in the book are there, but they're a little more low-key. Like it's not hundreds of planes falling. You've read the book, I'm guessing? Yeah. It's like seven planes fall. Okay. So it's a little bit more like... it still plays into the ambiguity of it, of, well, that's an odd coincidence, but seven planes going down at once, you could still...
rationally i think uh well maybe orchestrated a terrorist attack exactly whereas hundreds of planes dropping out of the sky everywhere it's like well okay that's a little something different i like i said i think that's my big problem with honestly my big problem with like your rewrite is just going too deep into the apocalypse side of it yeah it just depends on what what you're trying to do with the movie right so but at the end of the day
I would say this is a watch for me. This was an interesting film. It was enjoyable, well acted. M. Night Shyamalan is very hit or miss for me when it comes to his films. This is worth watching. i think this shows that he actually can do a fairly low-key film while this is a low-key movie and it mostly requires good acting and he has a really good cast and they all knock it out of the park
I agree. This is definitely a watch. I think people might find it a little long, a little talky at times, but overall, it's a really good film. Yep. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Script Slayers. Thank you for listening to Script Slayers. Please join us in two weeks when we'll be rewriting Abduction. Script Slayers is a production of Steph and Jeff Writes Media. Reproduction of this podcast without written consent is prohibited. All rights reserved, 2024.