Badmovies.org Forum

Ever write something dark that makes you wonder if there's maybe something wrong with you?

I'm currently writing a script in which an incestuous, drug-addicted brother and sister take in a teenage prostitute who is hiding from her abusive husband.  Horrible things happen, then the brother and sister decide they need to kill the prostitute since she's the only witness to what they've done.  They kill her via poisoning.  Thing is, by this time she has grown to like and trust them, and dies blathering deliriously and happily about how they are the only people she's ever known who cared about her.

I had to take a step back and wonder how I can think up awful stuff like that.

Not that I'm an enormous Stephen King fan, but he talks about that very thing. Some of this books he writes about some very dark things. There is one part in the novel It that really disturbed me, and he has often cited Pet Sematary as a book that made him question if there was something wrong with him.

That's a fine line, my friend. My wife and I have entertained writing a couple of screenplays based on ideas that get a little dark. If what you are writing is cathartic, and carries with it some kind of meaning, then I think you are okay. Catharsis is almost like a releasing of demons, and can be sometimes painful and disturbing, and cause one to question themselves. This is not usually a bad thing. If it begins to manifest itself in negative ways, however, then there could be a problem.

I wrote a short story I thought was brilliant, told pseudo-first person from the perspective of a pathetic, delusional, morbidly obese man with a hobby of stalking strippers.  Everyone looked at me strangely after workshopping it; some of the female writers who I had been friendly with previously started to avoid me.  I couldn't sell the darn thing anywhere, even though I still think it's better than my published story.  The story was written during a tough breakup.

When I was about 21 I wrote a one-act play that was really just a series of short vignettes. One of them was a scene with a young teenage girl living with her older-than-average widower father who was alcoholic and abusive, and her life of total co-dependency. It was a very disturbing scene. The father suffers a fatal heart attack at the end of the scene and the daughter is sort of blessed, albeit in a f**ked up way, to be free of him. The play was called Smoke (this was before the movie of the same name), and the only thing that tied any of the scenes together was the fact that at least one character in every scene smoked a cigarette.

That scene was very bizarre to write and had me wondering what was wrong with me.

The only scene I was really proud of in that play, however, was a scene in which a man wakes up in a basement somewhere, tied to a chair. A man he has never seen starts talking to him and slowly reveals that he is the husband of the woman he is having an affair with, and presumably this is revenge and intends to kill her lover. As it turns out, the man tied to the chair is indeed having an affair with a married woman, but the abductor is not the husband. He is just a really crazy guy who adbucted the man at random, toyed with him until he revealed the affair, and pretended to be the avenging husband. That wasn't nearly as disturbing as the scene above, but every scene was dark in some way.

a few years ago some guy got in serious trouble because he posted a violent/offensive/gory story he wrote on the net - he got in trouble because the main characters in his story were The Spice Girls, and they all died horrific deaths in hs story - and I mean serious trouble as in lost his job, fined etc...

so I suppose the moral is be careful if you think about including a real life person in any of your stories...I'm trying to find this guy's name and more about the story but can't seem to turn up much. it was on the news/in the papers a few years back though

Sounds kind of brilliant, insightful... sad.  Hurtful delusion is powerful drama if you handle the material right.  Your gut knows the universe of possibilities that people are capable of; if you can marry motivation to such possibility, you could have some heady drama or hot sh!t.  You might even make that idea the whole point of your story. 

Ill sometimes write song lyrics that are extremely violent and offensive. I sometimes share them with closer friends but they are not something I'd show to people I sorta know. I don't think their is a problem with it. After all in the inside well all are pretty violent.

When I was drunk I wrote some really really messed up poetry when I was in college. At the end the main character shot his head clean off his body and was happy to do so. Infact he felt relief.

 :drink:  :drink: :drink: :drink: :drink: + writing = WTF

A few years ago I was working on a screenplay about a guy in the 1930s who nailed his triplet daughters shut in a wooden crate in his barn and left them there to die slow deaths.  Fast forward to modern times when the crate (complete with sratches inside where the girls tried to claw their way out) is on display in a carnival sideshow.  A writer sees it and decides to do a magazine article about the murders, so he goes to the town where the girls were killed and . . . I never finished writing it.

Wow you guys are messed up. My stories are about nice things, like unicorns molesting rainbows. :smile:

Well, including unicorns or rainbows in anything immediately ups the wholesomeness quotient, and you, my friend, write about both.