Over the past 6 months I've been writing a screenplay. It's now 50 pages, dialog heavy, and would run about 92 minutes. It's not done, but nothing ever is really, is it?
Well first of all, I promised.
Here's why from the closing notes of the script's draft.
This story wasn’t written for a contest. Even if I put it in one. It wasn’t meant to be pitched. It needed to be written. We had big plans. They got stopped.
Tanner was one of those rare people who felt like a secret only a handful of us got to know. He was my family, for real. That extra layer made us understand the logic behind us both. Balance.
He was larger than life in a small town. Wild, hilarious, frustrating, brilliant. The kind of person who jumped over fires before you could tell them not to. Then made you believe you could too.
"Jersey Devils" isn’t a horror movie. It’s a haunted one. We’re haunted. It’s when grief sneaks in sideways on you. About the way we SHOULD mythologize people we lose. About camcorder summers and growing up just late enough to feel it.
This one is for Tanner.
And for anyone still looking for their missing frame in the footage.
“Jersey Devils” is not a monster movie — it’s a grief-soaked, punk-rock tribute to friendship, memory, and the ghosts we leave behind.
In early 2000s South Jersey, a group of teenage misfits set out to film a fake documentary about the Jersey Devil. But what starts as a joke spirals into something stranger, and more personal as their camcorder begins capturing the edges of a loss they haven’t fully faced.
Told through handheld chaos, late-night diner booths, and static-laced footage, it’s Clerks by way of Lake Mungo — a story about how we mythologize the people we can’t bring back, and how art lets us haunt ourselves long after the credits roll.
In the near future I'll be sharing this with some close friends for feedback. Sometime next year I'll start throwing it into some contest or whatever to get feedback. But I made this for me, us in fact. Those things don't matter, but they seem fun and I've really enjoyed the writing process overall so far and hope to do it more in the future. Sometimes just putting things on paper make it worth it.
Author: Will Blew
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