How to Write an EARLY DEATH Scene (Chrissy Cunningham DEEP DIVE) | Stranger Things

so i find chrissy cunningham so compelling i find her relationship with eddie super compelling her trauma her death scene and it's like five total scenes maybe four and a half and i'm super invested i'm rooting for her i'm rooting for eddie and then she dies and it's not just horrifying because of how it happens it's actually sad and all this is built up in like 10 minutes of screen time but they really use every second it's really impressive so i want to go through all five of chrissy's scenes talk about max's brief interaction with her and what's going on there talk about eddie's connection with her and everything that's going on there and then chrissy vecna and see if we can induce some principles here on how to write a character you're gonna kill immediately so let's take these first two scenes together quick scenes scene one is the pep rally we see this chrissy this chrissy and this chrissy and then scene two is like three seconds long but it's this look at her contradiction right what is going on here this character is not as happy as we expect her to be given what seems to be a pretty good life she's the queen of hawken she's got the cheerleader dating the basketball star thing going on she's in love why this total 180 why happy and then suddenly sad why was she visiting the school counselor and if we choose to connect the dots here we'll notice that she's leaving the guidance counselor's office looking troubled which means the counselor couldn't help her whatever's going on here must be pretty serious in scene three they draw out this contradiction beautifully chrissy's discomfort or shame or whatever it was that we're seeing turns to something almost like aggression are you deaf i said go away and it's clear she's really trying to hide something from everyone around her and aggression in particular is an emotion that really embellishes this contradiction we just met this person but we can already identify this as uncharacteristic for chrissy and before we go to the actual content of the scene with vector and everything just take note of the emotions we experience here in these first three scenes with chrissy we start off with joy and romance then we quickly get anxiety or shame or pain or however you want to identify this then frustration or maybe even anger then confusion and fear really really extreme fear debilitating fear and then it's all over and we're confusing and we're relieved we survived okay pause so what fundamentals can we get from this so far rule number one prioritize strong hooks promises and problems as if this isn't always important it totally is but with a character you're going to kill off in the first episode you really only have one shot to get the audience's attention and you better use it create a strong question we want answers to create a serious problem that needs to be solved and most importantly we get a promise to a promise that will get answers and that comes in the form of glimpsing things that we expect to get a fuller picture of soon and it comes in the form of a character who is just as curious as we are who also wants answers and this prevents the contradictions from just being confusing like we're missing something rule number two take us on an emotional journey even just up until now we've been through about a dozen emotions alongside christie we've experienced her outer world her inner world feeling she's trying to hide memories that scare her personal secrets deep trauma pain terror horror we've gassed and fear with her we've screamed we side with relief when we come out on the other side attack and it's been what like five minutes going through that intense of an experience where the character invests us it creates a bond familiarity concern if we stop watching here or here we'd be like chrissy who but if we stopped here we'd be lying in bed like huh i wonder what ended up happening to that cheerleader character rule number three start late and this is a rule you often hear with short stories and it applies equally to these littler stories within your bigger stories you want to start as late as possible and end as early as possible which means your story essentially is going to comprise just the steps before a climax scene and then the climax and then you're done with chrissy we do not start out at the beginning by the time we meet her this problem has been going on for days and then scene three introduces us to trauma that's been going on for years again we just have no time to waste here and we can put two two together ourselves so no reason not to start with a story already advanced things already at their breaking point okay now on to the content of scene three the bathroom scene here we learn all about chrissy's trauma except no we don't they don't tell us what the trauma is we get hints we get a specific relationship has to do with her mom and her mom's emotional abuse we get an implication of a subject matter body image stuff and just from this we can put together a much fuller picture ourselves mama's overbearing mom has a temper mom gave daughter insecurities about being fat even this position she's in might be meant to either imply or at least make us associate to eating disorders so rules four and five take advantage of archetypes and their resonance archetypes help you condense the amount of narrative you need to build we're not constructing a story from scratchy that no one's ever experienced before popular girl with body image insecurities maybe an eating disorder that is a story we know and once we realize that this story is that sorry we already have our whole little suitcase of emotions that come along with it automatically sympathy empathy concern whatever it is and again this is about freeing up space we have main characters whose stories we need to tell so associating these big characters strongly with archetypes helps us free up the space to do that contrast that with a character like 11 who's less archetypal who they want the audience to have more of a nuanced relationship with but it's okay she's the main character we have time for that with chrissy we don't rule number five subtly create dynamics you will immediately play with okay weird formulation but here's what i mean scene three's main function is introducing vechna it's secondarily about introducing chrissy's trauma but within the vehicle they use to accomplish both of these is this dynamic that powerfully frames the next scene what am i referring to look at this please just go away are you deaf i said go away and what's the next scene about you know you're not what i thought you'd be like mean scary yeah well i actually kind of thought you'd be kind of mean and scary too scene 3 is about vechna and trauma but the dynamic at the forefront is chrissy pushing everyone away even the form her trauma takes is about her not letting her mom in the door this is a character who distances herself from people there's a character who's isolated who's lonely and then the next scene is all about her letting someone in letting them get close not pushing them away allowing them to alleviate if not the primary pain of her trauma and the curse at least the secondary pain from the isolation that has resulted from this and this segways into scene four eddie reciprocates perfectly in this role i love how he doesn't seem to plan on helping her until he realizes that she's in pain and the way he helps her is showing her that she is not alone at all in this experience do you ever feel like you're losing your mind um you know just on a daily basis he shows her that they've already kind of had a bond of some sort for a while and he even tries to explicitly identify her with his own moniker right name like that how could i forget i don't know you're a freak and we see this joining of their storylines he plans to help her and how how is it going to help her that's another dynamic they perfectly set up what's plaguing chrissy is inescapable eddie in the scene is the one helping her to escape and yeah i'm talking about the drugs but even without the drugs we get the sense that it's the first time in a long time that chrissy has honestly smiled and laughed what we saw before seems like a front here she's not putting on a strong face for anyone it's just this beautiful moment of her finding relief from her suffering through this new bond she's allowed herself to make and also keep in mind these two are coming from completely different worlds they barely belong in the same scene which makes this bridge eddie's for me even more meaningful he's really reaching far and doing something incredible to help this girl he doesn't know very well and keep in mind eddie's personality he's the super grandiose guy who goes through a lot of effort to make himself small and unthreatening that is a big gesture from this guy all because he sees someone is in pain it's a beautiful scene and it's not nearly as powerful without previous scenes emphasizing how closed off she was and now rule number six i think this is the most important rule of them all by far the goal here is starting a story that you will not finish if you want a character's death to be meaningful meaning if you want it to impact us once a sorry has taken this person away from us then we need to feel what we're missing what we don't get to see this death has to feel like something is being cut short so we get this beautiful beginning of a friendship maybe a romance and i personally at this moment want to see a whole season about the freaking cheerleaders budding relationship fighting off this jock boyfriend who's a total mouth breather we don't like at all so that eddie and chrissy can live happily ever after that's where i'm at with this scene and then in the next scene chrissy dies and eddie's life is ruined you cannot cut a story short if you don't set it up to be long and that's what this scene does they even set up actual future scenes that we're not gonna get to see uh we play at the hideout on tuesdays just come see us so if you're gonna kill a bit character write them as more than that write a future that will not happen and then kill them rule number seven make this character subplot the most important thing happening in the story at this moment so this is coming when the rest of the story hasn't really taken off yet there's not much else really pressing happening but chrissy needs to solve her thing right now it cannot wait it's gotten that bad and we know this point is bad the drug conversation furthers that it furthers our understanding of just how severely this character is suffering do you ever feel like you're losing your mind that is bad she's not just afraid this is driving her insane and she's about to make this wildly uncharacteristic decision of turning to hard drugs because of this innocence is a thing we've already unconsciously started to associate with her and she's gonna sacrifice that innocence because that is how much pain she's in and then at the end of the scene we get this do you have anything maybe stronger it is worse than we thought this problem needs to be solved now on to chrissy's final scene and the scene is so visually horrifying at such an intense emotional ride it's hard with the scene to disengage from the loudness of the horror these overwhelming aspects of the scene in order to get a broader deeper perspective of what's going on here that's what we gotta do so who is this happening to we gotta focus we gotta center ourselves what is the story of christy cunningham the story of so i think christy cunningham is the story of someone suffering internally externally it all seems to be going just fine but these types of problems a bad home life abuse from family members body image issues eating disorders these are internal problems and the problems that come from inside of us feel inescapable in ways other problems don't you cannot avoid inner trauma you can't just not go home when you're a teenager and you have an abusive parent you cannot run from an eating disorder and this next part happens to be false it's part of the sickness but these problems feel like you can't tell anyone about them because no one understands what you're going through because it's shameful because there's a social stigma and that creates the sense of inescapability from these problems nothing i do will get me away from this no one can help me that's how it feels so now i'll ask you what is the horror of vecna and is it any surprise that it matches perfectly vechna's horror is inescapability you cannot escape from vector's curse the whole reason why he feels so threatening and how he curses you is the non-interact-ability of everything about him he is reaching you on a plane of existence you cannot get to so you cannot run from him you cannot escape the sequence of events that precede him murdering you are this inescapable process they both died less than 24 hours after their first vision and i just saw that goddamn clock so looks like i'm gonna die tomorrow the visions all present these situations where you physically have nowhere to turn no one can help you the exits are blocked off every inch of space is covered in vector evilness of some kind or in these symbols of inevitability and this is my favorite part every detail of the physical form the last step of this curse takes epitomizes this inescapability he puts you in a trance that makes people around you practically incapable of reaching you and then he also puts you physically literally out of reach as well through the levitation and then come the breaks then these are not normal breaks what's up with how weird and unnatural these types of injuries are and i think the reason why it's so horrifying is because as onlookers we can't fathom what's doing it there was nothing you could see or uh or touch it's not like oh vector's taking an invisible baseball bat to chrissy's kneecaps no the type of breaks we're seeing are just downright confusing on a visual level i see this and i don't understand what's physically happening here the notion of being able to stop it that's just beyond all hope like i can block a bat to the kneecaps that's defendable you can dodge it you can run you can wear a kneepad you cannot block whatever this is there is no knee pad for your eyes being torn out from the inside so we have here is this all-encompassing horror of an inescapable end this is expressed in vecna himself in terms of who he targets once he curses you there's nothing you can do to stop him so we have it on the big picture then a level deeper the form his violence takes bolsters that impact the visions the trance even him slowly walking towards you instead of chasing you why should he run if there's nowhere for you to go and then finally putting you physically out of reach an invisible force lifting you and torturing you in all these unnatural ways we have no hope of defending against they don't even make sense to us and finally this time not deeper but broader this is coming in the context of a greater story that's already hyper focused on the fear and agony of exactly this kind of horror it is not one scene about this inescapability thing coming out of nowhere no it's been building all this time for us through chrissy and her story this is the worst form of what is already plaguing her and that leads into the final rule here chrissy unfortunately is not here because we love her she is here to perform a specific function her character's purpose is introducing us to the horror of vecna with supporting characters i like to ask supporting who is supporting what chrissy is a support for vekno she's antagonist support and because of that we see every aspect of who she is geared towards the particular horror that characterizes her murder so rule number eight quite simply is victimhood is a tool just like anything else craft the victim the scene the method of murder the story leading up to the murder setting pacing imagery everything to fit the emotion you're evoking through the death or if not an emotion whatever starry goal it is and i want to show you a great example of this in a non-horror story just to show you what that looks like gangs of new york one of my favorite movies ever plot-wise it's essentially a revenge story bad guy kills protagonist's father protagonist grows up and wants revenge but really this is a story about the growing pains of the modern world the humanity that endured the painful process of the old ways of the world being replaced by the new and you have this character who epitomizes the old world it's in who he is a priest who he aligns himself with is this it priest the pope's new army it's in the tones of how the character speaks you plague our people at every turn and of course it's in who he's fighting what characterizes his enemy on you whatever your name is what is your name amsterdam sir amsterdam i'm new york it's in the weapon he uses a sword this weapon of the old world and we even hear the sounds of the old world as he dies [Music] this isn't just a death insider revenge plot they integrate everything horror movies traditionally and somewhat superficially do this by having the monster destroy something beautiful or innocent and stranger things is doing that also with chrissy but it runs so much deeper here with this motif of inescapability that characterizes everything about her because it characterizes everything about vecna super well executed subscribe to the channel i think we're gonna hit 100k soon or maybe we already did pretty crazy to me i feel like i have to do something really special and i pretty much no idea what to do for a hundred thousand subscribers celebration tell me any ideas you have actually i do have one idea but it's rather extreme but if i don't see anything else i like it i guess it'll be that might not come for a bit i would need to physically get to the location first but yeah thanks to everybody a ton for the support next video we'll be going back to arcane it's a video i mentioned before comparing something in arcane to the same thing in game of thrones i'm actually curious if anyone can guess what i'm comparing it's something i actually can't believe i didn't think of sooner it's a super interesting topic to me support the channel on patreon shout out to weir westeros and william morris julian for the top tier subscriptions thank you so much and thanks to everyone who's given support stay tuned for upcoming stuff and thanks for watching

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Id: 0VfxEeSevfE

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022