Monster Script
Draft 1

Ms. Harper: Good morning class! I thought today we would do a fun writing activity.

Class: Awe (whiny, not waning to do it)- Lilly is seen and she does not participate in the whining.

Ms Harper: Now, now kids I mentioned it would be fun, so there is no need to panic. I want you to write about what you are most afraid of. It can be fictional or non-fictional. I am leaving that for you to decide. Say for example, if I were to write about my worst fear I would write about giant spiders attacking my house! (laughs) Anyway, get started now and you have until the end of the lesson, if you don’t finish it’s homework!

(The focus will start to go towards a little girl in the front of the room. Due to an over the shoulder shot, we can start to see what she is writing. Her first written words are “I’m not scared of spiders. I’m not even scared of ghosts. The only thing that frightens me in this world is a monster.”- Then the narration starts and we fade into a flashback.

Lilly: The monster I know isn’t like any other monster. He doesn’t live in my closet or under my bed. He doesn’t only come out at night. I don’t really understand because he says he loves me one day, and others I just hear screams. We still have fun too. But playing hide and seek isn’t the same as before. Because these days, if I lose the game, I lose sleep that night too. I know everything will be okay and the fear will go away. Besides, the monster only comes out when the bottle is out. But I’d still like to know why does he treat me so? I’ll never be mad but I still know there should be comfort at home, not pain from your dad. (As the last sentence is said, we skip to a shot of a man’s shadow hitting Lilly in a dark room)



Monster

This short film reveals the inner feelings and views of a world so much bigger than a girl can imagine. Her outlook on life has been simplified to common metaphors of a young child. However the deeper meanings behind the metaphors are more than some children could bare.
The story opens with the setting of a regular, every day classroom. The teacher gives the children their daily assignment. Today it is no regular assignment. They have been requested to write a short essay-fiction or non-fiction about their worst fear. The teacher jokes about how she is deathly afraid of spiders- therefore her essay would consists of giant spiders taking over her whole house! Lilly’s (main character) fear is a monster that she takes careful detail describing. She describes his actions and his ways- the reasons why she is afraid of him. Throughout her writing there are cuts/fades to Lilly wandering around the park alone. After school hours she’d rather roam the park finding things to occupy her time than go home. In her thoughts while she is at the park she plays on the swing set, kicks around an old found ball, lay in wonder in the grass. As the end of her story approaches it seems to become clearer of who the monster really is. This is reassured by the concluding sentence and the last shot of someone (her father) assaulting Lilly- this being done by a p.o.v. shot of her dad hitting her as she steps foot into the house.
This story gets inside the head and thoughts of a young child who lives in an abusive family. She has created a ‘monster’ in her head as to replace the actual abusive father who has caused her to think this way. The sadness of the main character has made it for the audience to be highly empathetic towards her experience. The entire purpose of the story comes together in the end when it all ends in a bang as the audience finds out that the monster is not an imaginary character in a book or a cartoon, yet an abusive father living in her very own house.