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lempickaLogliner
When a troubled journalist returns to her birthplace to investigate the mysterious death of her childhood friend, she finds herself fighting for survival against the satanic cult now secretly controlling the town.
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A logline should portray the protagonist as proactive .? Which this one starts out doing “returns … to investigate the mysterious death”.
But then it regresses to a rather passive “finds herself fighting for her life”.? Well, isn’t that the nature of the genre that the protagonist always “finds herself” fighting for survival?? ?Isn’t that always what the stakes become?? So what is different, unique about her struggle for survival that hasn’t already been dramatized in a 1,001 other horror stories?
When she discovers that a? satanic cult is running the town and (I presume) implicated in her friend’s death what MUST she do about it?? What becomes her proactive? m.o to defeat the cult, liberate the town?
Upon reading DPG’s advice, maybe instead of just fighting for survival, the lead is fighting to escape that town and expose the cult.
Have updated the logline:
When a troubled journalist returns to her birthplace to solve a friend’s murder, she uncovers a satanic cult she must destroy before they sacrifice the whole town.
Any comments gratefully received
I agree: ‘fighting for survival’ is too vague, and you should be more specific. I would lose ‘secretly controlling the town’, and instead delve more into the satanic cult in question. What is their endgame or reason for controlling the town? How did they rise to power? I would delete ‘mysterious’, since you already have that she is investigating the death.
Sorry, I missed your updated logline post. I like this updated version better, though I still want to know more about the cult, and how she uncovers the cult. Are they linked to the murder of the friend? What will be achieved if they sacrifice the town? Also, ‘She must destroy before they sacrifice the whole town’ could sound more exciting. You could use less-common words for ‘destroy’ and ‘sacrifice’, and try to make the second half of this updated logline sound more enticing.
A query and a concern:
The query: the whole town as victims
Why must the cult kill off the entire town?? I mean, it’s not that fanboys and fangirls of Satan can be expected to think everything through, but after they kill off the town, then what?? Does the cult renounce Satan, reorganize as a bridge club?? What’s the? “original sin” lurking in the backstory that created the situation, anyway?
The concern😕 the whole town as victims in the logline
Josef Stalin ? yeah that Stalin, one of history’s worst tyrants ? uttered what I take to be a great dramatic principle when he said: ?One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.? Applied to drama, it means that it’s easier to induce an audience to emotionally invest in one character or one relationship (like a romance or friendship) than to induce an audience to invest in a crowd.
Case in point: The tragedy of the Titanic.
Over 1,500 died in the sinking of the Titanic. That?s the statistic, the data point. And the sinking of the Titanic is the primary story James Cameron wanted to tell.
But Cameron was wise enough in the ways of film making to know that all the spectacle, all the CGI eye candy of the sinking wasn?t sufficient to sell movie tickets. The way to sell the movie, the way to get people to care about the death of 1500, was to narrow the focus, to first get the audience to care about only two of them.
So he embedded a romantic story line about a pair of star-crossed lovers into the tragedy of the sinking.? (And more time is spent on their relationship than on the sinking.)
The rest is box-office history.
(Ditto with Avatar which is a wall-to-wall 3-D CGI eye candy from FADE IN: to FADE OUT:. Cameron didn?t rely on 3-D spectacle to sell movie tickets. He wrapped the spectacle around a lead character with a serious problem, and a love story people could emotionally invest in.)
Now then.? I have no problem if the lives of everyone in town is at stake.? But in shaping the script I suggest that it might be more effective if the story spends some time focusing on one? stake character or one relationship (between the protagonist and the lead stake character) to prime the audience, get them emotionally invested in everyone else.
It seems to me that the obvious candidate to assist in priming the audience is the protagonist’s childhood friend.? But, alas, that character is killed off the in the back story.? I suggest the character be given a stay of execution, not killed off until the end of the 1st Act, killed off after the protagonist has come to visit (for whatever reason).? Killed off after enough dramatic pipe has been laid to get the audience emotionally? primed to invest in the fate of everyone else.
FWIW