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critique Opening to a road trip thriller

Untitled Road Trip Thriller - Opening Scene

After taking a bit of a break, I thought I might get back into my dark and twisted love story. While I don't have every single thing planned out just yet, I have a core idea of two "lovers" embarking on a cross country road trip, filled with murderous excitement and all sorts of debauchery.

The concept is this - troubled woman (Evelyn) seduces an equally troubled man (Jacob), and essentially becomes her "pet." He helps her satiate her perverted desires, without question. Until at a certain point, where he feels the same desire. By the end, we learn that Evelyn is grooming Jacob not to become a serial killer, but to become HER killer. She wants to die by the hands of someone completely in love with her, and feels true love is when your life is taken by the one that loves you.

I'm going for a dark comedic tone, so a little more light-hearted than Natural Born Killers. The first 5 pages are below, and I would love to hear anything regarding what I'm sharing, or about the idea itself.

EDIT: Ignore what’s on page 7-8, that shouldn’t be there as it’s an older draft.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wc...60IwD5zpyEeBYfs2aT_AyZLqfjx/view?usp=sharing)
 
Untitled Road Trip Thriller - Opening Scene

After taking a bit of a break, I thought I might get back into my dark and twisted love story. While I don't have every single thing planned out just yet, I have a core idea of two "lovers" embarking on a cross country road trip, filled with murderous excitement and all sorts of debauchery.

The concept is this - troubled woman (Evelyn) seduces an equally troubled man (Jacob), and essentially becomes her "pet." He helps her satiate her perverted desires, without question. Until at a certain point, where he feels the same desire. By the end, we learn that Evelyn is grooming Jacob not to become a serial killer, but to become HER killer. She wants to die by the hands of someone completely in love with her, and feels true love is when your life is taken by the one that loves you.

I'm going for a dark comedic tone, so a little more light-hearted than Natural Born Killers. The first 5 pages are below, and I would love to hear anything regarding what I'm sharing, or about the idea itself.

EDIT: Ignore what’s on page 7-8, that shouldn’t be there as it’s an older draft.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wc...60IwD5zpyEeBYfs2aT_AyZLqfjx/view?usp=sharing)

Okay... I took a look at your file url and did a little tweaking so it would open up for me...

Here it is:

Untitled Road Trip Thriller

I just read your pages... Not bad for a start. It got my attention and that doesn't happen very often, so that's good. That's about all I can say thus far.

Having said that?

Reading your description of the story... What immediately comes up in my mind is this question...
  • How does getting Jacob to share in all these murderous events eventually get him to kill her?
I get that he loves her... That she has some kind of special power over him. I've never seen it to THIS extent, but I've definitely seen guys do things for their wife or girlfriend that to me? Defies logic... So you have that base covered and it's not really something we've seen before so that's really good too.

From just the little reading of Jacob's voice over, I got the sense that he's not nearly as much of a sociopath/psychopath as Evelyn is. If this is true, then what I'm imagining here is that the murders or crimes Evelyn gets Jacob to commit with/for her should INTENSIFY. As they get worse and worse, Jacob begins to question what the hell he's doing until eventually settling on taking Evelyn out as the ultimate act of love.

If that's not your plan then I'd be interested to know how you want to go about it... What do you WANT his motivation to be for killing her? If she just flat out asks him to kill her, I think that'd be a bit dull. I think at a minimum, he's got to somehow figure that out on his own.

Just my two cents... Good luck with it!
 
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Something very much like that happened about 25-30 years ago, a young woman had her doting boyfriend tie her to a signpost at some local Southern California beach, and shoot her with what he thought was a blank pistol... it wasn't. The only thing that kept him out of a 20 year vacation at Pelican Bay was that she left a suicide note, where she admitted that she had been manipulating him for just this. I remember at the time thinking it sounded more like a Zalman King movie that a true story, and I thought it could make an interesting story, if done by the right person (but I wasn't that person). Best of luck.
 
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