Animamina Scores an 8 for Premise on Blacklist

I started writing ANIMAMINA because of a sentence I couldn't shake: *what if a person’s only form of sustenance was consuming the suffering of others.* This story has been done before, obviously. One of my favorite authors, Stephen King, related that story in “The Green Mile”, a life-changing movie for me. The themes were huge—redemption, racism, discrimination, suffering, evil, and salvation. There are few movies in my life that I can say were more moving to me.

The theme of the sustenance of the soul is the whole engine of the script. A surgeon in a 1950s asylum discovers that consuming a patient's brain unlocks their memories — not metaphorically, but literally, the way a sommelier tastes terroir. Every consumption is a séance. Every consumption is also a step deeper into something older than the asylum, older than medicine, older than the man holding the scalpel. The script is what happens when an appetite outruns the person it lives inside.

The title is a palindrome. ANIMA reversed against itself. *Soul* mirrored into *soul*, with the killer's identity folded into the middle. I didn't plan that going in. I noticed it about thirty pages in and then the whole structure rearranged itself around it. That's the part of writing nobody quite prepares you for — the script tells you what it is, and your job is to be quiet enough to hear it.

Horror is the most honest of the genres because it refuses to look away from the body. I've spent thirty years inside bodies — surgical assist, obstetrics, intensive care, pediatrics, post-mortems, and end of life. Conception to death, which is what family medicine is. The horror genre and the medical chart share a vocabulary. Both deal in inventory: what's intact, what's compromised, what's been taken. I wanted to write something where the medical specificity *was* the horror, not decoration on top of it. Where the procedure mattered. Where what the surgeon does to the brain in that basement laboratory would read true to a pathologist and still terrify a layperson.

Egyptian theology came in through the back door. I was researching memory and the Egyptians had thought about it longer and more carefully than almost any culture — the *ka*, the *ba*, the way the heart was weighed against a feather. They knew memory wasn't a recording. It was a substance. ANIMAMINA is what happens when that substance becomes a different form of sustenance.

The Pivot

Three weeks ago this was a $1M+ script. A producer read it, said the right things, and then said the harder thing: *the price tag is wrong for our slate.* He offered the door he was actually opening: $250,000. Non-SAG-AFTRA. Single warehouse. Could I rebuild it?

The honest answer was I didn't know. I had never been asked this question. The phrase “value engineering” came to mind. This is something I’ve done with all the offices that I’ve built for my practice over the years. You have an architect design the office you hope to put into a space, you get your three bids, realize that they’re all more than you really want to pay, then go back to the architect and ask him/her to redo it with some considerations on expense, but maintain the important parts of a build. Flow. Productivity. Efficiency. Comprehensiveness. I'd written the script I wanted to write. I hadn't written the script you could shoot. I needed to value engineer the thing.

What I learned over the next two weeks is that constraint is its own kind of revision note. The bridge sequence had to go. The riverbank had to go. The ranch-house fire had to go. The Egyptian prologue moved to the desert with two actors, a hole in the ground, a sarcophagus, and one figurine. The dream sequences and possessions — the family murder, the Loretta poisoning, the Presidio sequence — restaged in a void aesthetic in the manner of Jonathan Glazer's *Under the Skin*. Black duvetyne. One soft light. The objects each killer-identity remembers materializing in pools of light and dissolving at frame edges. An aesthetic choice which, in horror, actually can intensify the experience.

And here's what I didn't expect: the script got better. Not just cheaper. *Better.* The void aesthetic does something the dressed sets couldn't do — it puts the audience inside the protagonist's failing grip on reality. Production economy and story logic turned out to be the same problem. Every time I cut a location, the script's interior got louder.

What the readers said

A working development reader called it a horror-supernatural thriller and reached for Eric Heisserer and Haley Boston as comp filmmakers. The buyer comps they offered were A24, Neon, Automatik. Premise scored highest at 8. Plot lowest, but still a 6. That tracks. The premise was the thing I'd been chasing for two years; the plot is still teaching me what it wants to be. With an Overall Score of 7, this screenplay hopefully has places to go.

Writing, just like each and every one of us, starts off with a premise, a theme. That story changes as it goes. Evolves. Adapts. Fits into the space it’s given. Aims to break free, explore, go places it hasn’t been. And that’s the fun I find in writing.

You can find it on Blacklist at: https://blcklst.com/projects/218377