By Nick Smith
The 2020 movie Eight Graves centers on two strong women – Sadie, a new mother, and Mrs. Garrick, a decidedly old mother who’s been dead for centuries. When Sadie visits her uncle’s house, she calls on her friends to help her cope with parenthood… and Mrs. Garrick gets jealous.
I have always enjoyed scary movies. They’re like a rollercoaster ride that can make your heart race while still reassuring you with their familiar types of characters and formulaic storylines. My late, much-loved grandmother, a lady who was full of life, enjoyed watching horror as well and shared a few gruesome movies with me while I was growing up. So, I was delighted when director Gus Smythe (Slammer) approached me with a project he wanted to make full of ghosts, graves and young people in peril.
Gus had a basic storyline. Sadie throws a party in an old house and not only is the ghost of Mrs. Garrick in there with them, but there’s also another ghost outside. Even if the party-goers escape from the house, there’s more danger inside.
I expanded the outline into a screenplay with one sequence written by Rodney Lee Rogers (Parole). We cast the film in Charleston, South Carolina and found a creepy location in a remote Upstate plantation. While Gus and I were both experienced directors, it’s important to note that we didn’t have a big budget or a big crew – we made what we could with the limited resources we had. Although some of my filmmaking colleagues prefer to wait until they have millions of dollars allocated to their project, no one should let a lack of money stop them from telling their story.
Our story was a fairly generic haunted house tale, full of sudden deaths and daring escapes. My job as screenwriter, I decided, was to make the characters watchable and memorable – especially Sadie, who has complaints about being a mother but is obviously committed to parenting and has a close bond with her friends, all former college classmates. I urge anyone who wants to tell a story, whether it’s supernatural or rooted in real life, to focus on the characters and their relationships. If an audience cares about them, then they will often forgive a low budget or a plot coincidence.
While the women are, in general, strong and outspoken, the men in Eight Graves exist to provide humor (like bad boyfriend Bruce and sleazy mechanic Mitch), romance (Colin) or danger (the ghost outside). The men get a lot less screen time, so there were less opportunities to develop their characters. But they still behave consistently – once Bruce is established as selfish; he behaves that way for the rest of the film.
The focus and the character development worked – when the movie was released this year, audiences were gripped as the ghosts closed in because they cared about the girls. Eight Graves has garnered some decent reviews too; my favorite, written by Medium’s Michael Clayton, celebrates our ambition ‘to be a Southern-fried Evil Dead.’
Hopefully Amazon Prime viewers will care enough about the surviving characters – not that many of them survive – to want to know what happens next so we can green light Nine Graves.
In the meantime, I encourage any filmmaker reading this to engage their audience with authentic heroines who deserve to live not just through a movie but beyond it as well.
