Interview (Part 4): Ian Shorr

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script The House in the Crooked Forest.

Ian Shorr wrote the original screenplay The House in the Crooked Forest which landed on the 2022 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ian about his creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Ian delves into the horror elements of his Black List script: a group of Nazi soldiers, as well as Half‑Man, the Long Girl, and the Scarred Man.

Scott: This is like real pragmatic screenwriters stuff. You’re going to have this group, there’s five of them, the Germans, because you know some of them are going to get whacked. You need to have some of these guys die along the way, but you need to distinguish them, too.

I’m curious how you went about developing Kaiser who’s the leader of the group. There’s Schroeder who’s the madman. He’s the Niedermeyer, I guess you’d say of the group. Oscar Lange, Vogel Albert. How do you go about distinguishing and developing this core group of characters?

Ian: Real talk? I read the script for Saving Private Ryan and imagined what it would be like if the heroes were bad guys. There’s a reference to Captain Kaiser being a history teacher in his old life in Germany, which is a nod to Tom Hanks’s character in Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan is absolutely one of my favorite things ever written. The character work is impeccable. Each one of those characters’ voices leaps off the page. I could listen to those guys talk to each other all day long. I was just writing the shadow-world version of that squad.

I knew that I wanted to have a leader who is this perverse everyman character. I knew I want to have a second in command who had some weird unresolved emotional issues with the leader, possibly daddy issues or hints of a closeted attraction. I didn’t want to explicitly make him a gay Nazi, because I didn’t want to open up that can of worms, but I thought there was something interesting about a character whose regard for his boss borders on worship or love. Weird example, but I was thinking about the relationship between Ben Foster and Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma. Ben Foster did all the terrible things he did out of his love for Russell Crowe, and that made his character unforgettable to me.

Beyond the leader and his lieutenant, I knew I wanted to have at least one character who could be the tension relief, the wise‑ass cynic like the one played by Ed Burns in Saving Private Ryan. Since jokes aren’t going to fit into the mouths of Rivka and Hugo, and the lead villain would come off as less dangerous if I give him too big of a sense of humor, I wanted at least one of the Nazis to have a self-aware deadpan snark to him.

I would never talk about a Nazi as an audience surrogate, but to me, every movie needs somebody who can point out the ridiculousness, which is what a lot of the audience is doing. It’s a way of keeping the audience grounded in that world. They’re like, “Oh, there’s one guy who’s reacting to this the exact same way I would react to this.” That was my way in to the Max Albrecht character.

And then there’s the Junkie Nazi. I’d always been fascinated by the amount of drugs the Third Reich was taking, how they were giving their soldiers prescription meth. I was like, “You’ve got an army of people taking lab-grade stimulants on the regular, so I bet there was a speed freak in every squad.” And I started wondering what that guy would be like, feeding his habit while trapped in an increasingly scary situation.

Scott: It’s funny, you mentioned the thing about this Albrecht character, Max, having that sort of cynical, wise‑ass aspect. Literally, as I’m going through the script on page 100 where he’s having his final to‑do with Schroeder.

“I’m the ranking Officer now, Private. These are my orders.” Max says, “Just say our experiences with witches is somewhat limited.” I went, “Ah.”

Ian: [laughs]

Scott: Then this final line actually of his life is great too. Anyhow, it’s interesting to hear you talk about that process. Now let’s talk about these three other…I don’t want to get into “The Origin Story” about these guys. But these three other creatures, I don’t know how you’d refer to them.

Ian: I just call them “ghosts.”

Scott: Ghosts, OK. There’s the Half‑Man, the Long Girl, and the Scarred Man. Again, you don’t have to reveal the secrets of this, wait for the movie to come out. But where did they come from? Were there some images you saw, or nightmares you had? You’ve got a dark imagination. What was going on there?

Ian: Within the mythology of the house, you’ve got this overlord figure Vormelker who was a practitioner of an ancient occult belief system. He thought that if you tortured somebody enough in real life, they would become your slave in the afterlife. If you did enough things to physically, spiritually, and emotionally break them while they’re alive, they become your property after death. Thus, the three ghosts inhabiting the house that the victims he tortured to death. Their physical appearance still reflects the torment they went through.

I did a bunch of research about what kind of horrifying shit was going down during the Spanish Inquisition, what kind of ways they were disfiguring people with machinery back then, and I made a list: top five things I never want to have happen to my body. Then I created the ghost characters based on that list.

Whether I’m writing action, sci‑fi, or horror, my goal is to give the audience at least three to five things that they’ve never seen on a movie screen before. In this script, the ghosts were my opportunity to do that. For example, we’ve seen movie characters who have been put on a stretch rack and had their arms and legs stretched out. But I’ve never seen a version where everything was stretched — the jaw, the fingers, the neck, the ears, where everything pulled like taffy. How terrifying that would look glimpsed in the shadows?

If I’m asking an audience to pay money to watch a horror film in the theater, it’s my job to show them images they’ll never forget. That’s the contract a horror filmmaker makes with the viewer.

Scott: Wow. You’re getting in touch with your inner Cronenberg and Clive Barker in these characters.

[laughter]

Scott: There’s so many twists and turns in the story. It’s enjoyable. When I hit on that moment I realized, wait a minute, now the Nazis and Rivka and Hugo are both on the defense.

They’re both stuck there. That was such a great twist. There’s a moment where Captain Kaizer has this, the light bulb goes off, and says, “I’m saying the attack didn’t originate from outside. Someone’s hiding in the house.” Of course, that just brings to mind When a Stranger Calls.

Ian: Yeah, absolutely a direct reference to that. The audience has been waiting for him to have this realization the entire movie. That’s the explosive moment that we’ve leading up to. Once the bad guy realizes that there’s somebody hiding inside the house, the rest of the movie is on rails. You can’t slow down once he’s figured that out. A lot of the challenge of the script was delaying that moment for as long as possible so that it can happen at the top of act three.

Scott: A lot of the present things about the script honestly, Ian, one thing is I’m going to bring up Pixar here because they’re masters of this. They keep creating challenges, the twists, reversals, and obstacles. You do that. In every scene, you’re making it harder for people to survive. Is that an instinct? Is that a conscious thing like, “I want to push this?” Is it a combination of both?

Ian: All good genre storytelling has that feeling that audiences love, which is, “Oh, my God. How the hell are they going to get out of this?” It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a horror movie like this, or an adventure movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you were saying, a Pixar movie like Up. There’s always that sense of one-damned-thing-after-another being thrown at the character. That’s the kind of ride I’d sign up for.

The more you can torture your characters, the better. I don’t mean actual physical torture, necessarily; but anything that you can do to make their life harder, then harder, and then even harder after that. It’s going to make it even more satisfying when they find a way out of it.

Joe Hill said “Good horror isn’t about extreme sadism. It’s about extreme empathy. You don’t watch so you can see people get hurt. You watch to see how they escape.”

Scott: It reminds me of that Janet Fitch quote. “The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, then we torture them. The more we love them,” that’s that empathy you’re talking about, “The more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.”

Ian: That’s 100 percent it.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Ian talks about the experience of making the annual Black List and his thoughts about so-called screenwriting “rules.”

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Ian is repped by UTA and Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @IanShorr

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For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.