What was that called again?

I've asked several people to help me come up with a title for my slasher screenplay and the most common response I get is, "pick a good line from the script and there's your title." Unfortunately either I'm not very good at picking lines or just the thought of a character having the titular line just kind of throws the audience off a little.

Every time I hear someone say the titular line I always chuckle a little, even if it's a serious movie. I think that notion comes from a sketch from the Upright Citizens Brigade. There was a video store clerk that claimed he had the titular lines in Out of Africa and Star Wars. For Out of Africa he said it was when Robert Redford was teaching Meryl Streep to drive, there was a lot of traffic and he pulls of next to them and says, "Boy I'm tired of all this traffic, I can't wait to get Out of Africa." and he had just filmed himself and put it into the video tape. I guess you had to see it, but that stuck with me... hence my avoidance to using one.

Picking a theme or an event in the movie is another popular method of choosing a title, but there's really not enough going on in the movie to merit a theme. It could be called "Reggie's Party" or "The Last Get Together" but I don't know. The former could be mistaken for a Reggie Jackson biopic and the latter would probably be about old people or a cancer patient. Not really slasher movie-esque.

Slasher movies (and horror in general) have a pretty standard title formula: place, date or monster. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Prom Night, Black Christmas, April Fool's Day, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead, The Haunting, House on Haunted Hill, The Changeling, The Exorcist, so on and so forth. Mundane things turned deadly! Unfortunately all the good ones were taken so I'm left with Arbor Day or obscure holidays no one will get yet are relevant to the story. I could call it Mabon but then my audience would consist of Wiccans even though the date is relevant to the story.

The same two ideas keep coming back to me and I really can't work them out to fit a slasher movie. As I mentioned in a previous blog I came up with "_____ Woods" or "_____ Park" but I just can't find a proper noun that would fit the theme of the story. I mean, a random name isn't really going to cut it in this case but giving the name of the woods would just be... naming the woods. Perhaps I'm over thinking it but maybe those are just lousy titles. "Reggie's Woods" "Scutter Park" ... who knows.

There are always the semi-descriptive titles that tell a little about the story but don't give away too much. Most of the characters know each other from the past but a few new people are introduced to the group, so it could be called "Old Friends, New Acquaintances" but that sounds more like a romantic comedy than a slasher film. In fact, I think I WILL use that for a romantic comedy, so now that you've seen it, don't steal it. Okay, hmm, some of the characters have some loose morals in regards to their relationships, so I could call the movie "Loose Morals" ... but once again that doesn't sound like a slasher movie. It kind of sounds like an 80's teen comedy, but not a good one, one of the bad ones with Andrew McCarthy. The only decent ones I can come up with would give away the whole story so they're completely out of the running and I won't even mention them.

So, in light of this I'm leaving it up to you, dear reader, to help me come up with a decent title for my slasher screenplay. Just e-mail me or leave a comment and if it's awesome, you'll have earned a special thanks.