Steven Hale
1 min readJul 26, 2021

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You've picked some of my favorite scenes for your examples. But I think it's important to see where the conflict takes place.

Suppose you have the typical slasher movie with a psychopathic killer in the closet while the unsuspecting babysitter talks with her boyfriend on the phone.

The babysitter feels no sense of conflict or danger.

The psychopath is just waiting for the babysitter to hang up. He feels little conflict.

The conflict / danger / suspense is experienced by the viewer.

This is important, because there are many scenes in unfilmed scripts (and some in filmed scripts) in which there's lots of conflict on the page / screen but little conflict within the viewer. These noisy scenes tend to create boredom rather than engagement when they don't involve the audience.

P.S. To give away my age, I used to watch Queen for a Day as a kid--long before I knew who Elgar was.

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Steven Hale
Steven Hale

Written by Steven Hale

Music: Discovering the lost and forgotten. Politics: Exposing injustice. Screenwriting: Emotional storytelling.

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