Ruthless (Volumes) by Joshua Pierre
This was the first screenplay I had ever written. My junior year in high school, Mr. Ruttenburg, challenged me by saying that I couldn’t write the most brutal and disgusting story that he’s ever read. Turns out I won that challenge by going above and beyond in the violence and gore occurring in the story, but underneath all of the bloody distractions survived a decent storyline that follows a young woman who is tricked into being kidnapped by a man who has escaped a transport bus for death row inmates with two other criminals who enter the nearest town from their bus’s crash site and begin leaving bodies in their wake. The police try to contain the men but seemingly fail as the three men have three women tied up in a barn off in the distance as they take turns doing their fetishes of violence against these women. When they are all left for dead in the desert by the maniacs as they escape, the main woman survives after being stabbed 78 times with a screwdriver by the psychopath the kidnapped her. After her recovery (where the story starts) she has devoted herself to revenge against these three men, who are still at large, and takes it upon herself to hunt them down and give them a hell worse than what they gave her.
This story is inspired by an I Survived story that I had watched with my mother long ago: three men kidnapped a woman, raped her, stabbed her with a screwdriver countless times (for some reason I think 78 is the number) and left her in the middle of nowhere. She crawled through the desert to the nearest road, dehydrated, weak, and when she was discovered by a man and his son, the boy said “Dad is that a monster?” And that comment stuck with her in the interview and she started crying. For me, this is a scene in a movie, this movie to be exact. Not to glamorize or neglect what happened to this woman, but to turn her story into a heroine character that will lead a series of stories hunting down the evil in the world that will only be eradicated through ruthless pursuit and uncompromising dedication to vengeance.
The story starts with her grabbing her first kidnapper in a motel and brutally cutting him up with a chainsaw before house cleaning shows up to do a turn down service. The story goes back and forth from her current mission and what happened to her when these men escaped. The reason that this can evolve into multiple stories is because there was an idea that I had based on the classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that I wanted to title: “The Cabinet” where a group of insane killers are trapped in a mansion where they are sentenced to suffer in many of the same ways their victims suffered. The Doctor would study these people and look to develop them into creatures as punishment. Now, the story is cool, but I want this mansion and these criminals to encounter this heroine and everyone must answer to her. There will be many different kinds of killers and monsters that exist within this story but one of the worst is our heroine and we will watch her become her own monster.
Intended to be a series of novellas, I haven’t decided if a novel would suit this series better or if simply writing the screenplays for the subsequent movies would simply suffice. First things first is the first volume of this horror escapade, which very much could (and probably) takes place in the writing universe I am developing. Honestly, most stories probably play a role in the overall universe that exists and characters from other stories may appear in this series as well. Maybe even a vampire of sorts.