“WITCHES DRINK ORANGE JUICE”

SCENE 1

INT. SUPERMARKET

We see a few common supermarket items,

A woman at the checkout scans items

Bread is on sale,

Halloween decorations are around the store

And are also for sale

We look down each aisle briefly, until we catch a glimpse of

a witch. She is dressed in a long black dress and velvet witches hat.

She pushes her trolley, casually browsing, then turns into one aisle. She is now facing us.

She approaches a young worker.

WITCH (to supermarket worker):

“which aisle is the juice in”

Upon turning to face her, he drops what he was stocking the shelves with and jumps.

EXT. SUPERMARKET

A carpark, the witch exits with a grocery bag, and begins to walk down the street.

People stare, the witch is unphased.

INT. CHURCH OFFICE

We see the details of a rotary phone, already ringing.

A hand reaches and picks up the receiver.

PASTOR (on phone):

“everything’s ready,

yes, yes. I don’t know,

any moment”

The conversation is interrupted by the sound of the main doors being opened.

INT. MAIN CHURCH

We see the witch standing under the grand church door, they close behind her, as if by magic

We follow her down the aisle, the priest stands watching her approaching.

She puts down her suitcase and the shopping bag.

She kneels down and the suitcase is opened and she pulls out tarot cards and a cloth, sage She pulls out a 2 litre jug of orange juice and pours a little into a chalice.

The pastor peers over her shoulder

PASTOR:

“what, what’s that for”

WITCH:      

“I’m, thirsty”

PASTOR:

“I guess I’ll leave you to work then”

He speaks quickly, he tentatively offers a handshake, but she doesn not turn around so he pretends he was going to scratch the back of his neck.

she continues to set up her ‘work space’

He wanders down the aisle, looks back, pats the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and closes the front doors.

All natural light is gone.

The peers up to check that he is gone, and turns on her mini stereo. Music begins playing

The sound of a match can be heard, and her face is lit up as she lights the candelabra.

The music skips, she makes a gesture towards it. And the music resumes playing.

We see her spread out the cloth, which has a pentagram on it She takes a sip of her juice and then lights some sage.

She looks around at everything she has set up, nods and stands.

She raises her arms slowly and as they get higher the wind begins to blow stronger from apparently inside the church. the candles go out.

EXT. CHURCH STEPS

We follow the paster up the stairs, before he opens the church doors,

INT. CHURCH MAIN

The morning sun shines in and reveals her packing up. The gap between them close, as he walks towards her. She locks her suitcase, turns and starts towards the doors.

WITCH:

“my invoice is on the altar”

His gaze follows her as she continues out the door.

He turns back around and walks towards the altar.

He picks up an envelope from the altar

He opens the envelope, out of which falls the invoice and a business card.

This is my screenplay so far. (in google docs it is PROPERLY FORMATTED but this silly blog website stuffed it all up and i’m done fighting with it sorry!) When I first wrote this, I found it so so incredibly difficult to not use explicitly cinematic language and camera directions. As someone who has always been on the production side of a script, my mind always goes to how you would frame something so writing down the type of shot was so natural. But of course that is simply not how scripts are written. so then I went back and formatted the massive block of text I had, into a proper script structure, and then removed all the camera shot references, to only IMPLY what camera shot a director might use. that was really quite tricky at first but I think I got that hang of it by the end. That was the most time-consuming element of this, changing my thought process from camera lenses to story. I think it’s ok though, I hope? I mean this is the first script/screenplay i’ve ever written in the proper format so I can’t be too harsh. and i also have no idea what I’m doing so I have nothing to judge this against yet.