How do you get an audience to collectively say, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" or make them want to look away but they can't take their eyes off the screen?
This is what Fall 2: Deadpoint accomplishes. The sequel to Fall, a survival thriller about a pair of climbers who find themselves stuck on a small platform at the top of a TV tower 2,000 feet up, puts that same sense of dread on two more climbers. How to make it more intense than the original? This time, the two main female protagonists travel to Thailand to walk a dangerous plank wall on Mount Kwan. After a rockslide takes out the surrounding planks, they find themselves trapped on a couple of pieces of wood, 4,000 feet up, with seemingly no way down.
Small Cast, Few Locations
You may recognize this as a common pattern in movies over the last month or so. Movies like The Last House, It Ends, and even The End of Oak Street have stuck with a small cast of characters put in perilous or strange situations.
Fall 2: Deadpoint has the same setup. There are mostly three characters: Jax (Harriet Slater) and Luce (Arsema Thomas) who embark on the heart-pounding adventure and their guide, John (Tom Brittney). Like the other films, the limited physical space forces the writers to find new sources of conflict while keeping the characters close together.
There's obviously something appealing to producers in keeping a cast small and locations minimal. If the story you want to tell supports it, it's a highly recommended approach.
Play the Phobia
Countless phobias exist in the world, and if a screenwriter can hone in on one, they can make the audience squeamish in their seats and the action too irresistible to turn away from.
Fall and Fall 2: Deadpoint hit acrophobia (the intense fear of heights) pretty hard. Even though the characters in Fall are risk takers who don't experience a fear of heights like many people — even if it isn't technically a phobia for most — the fact that they are trapped up there is enough for viewers to hold their collective breath and try not to panic.
Fall 2: Deadpoint continues drawing on that terror with Jax, who isn't nearly as adventurous as her sister Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) from the first film, and Luce, who doesn't seem to be afraid at all.
Using universal fears gets people invested in the character and the scene because they can relate. If you want to add some intense fears to your screenplay, here are the top ten most common phobias according to Very Well Mind:
- Arachnophobia: spiders
- Ophidiophobia: snakes (one of Indiana Jones' character-defining phobias)
- Acrophobia: heights
- Aerophobia: flying
- Cynophobia: dogs
- Astraphobia: thunder and lightning
- Trypanophobia: injections
- Social phobia: social interactions
- Agoraphobia: places that are difficult to escape, sometimes involving a fear of crowded or open spaces
- Mysophobia: germs, dirt, and other contaminants
Can't Watch, Can't Look Away
Anticipation is always better than watching something go wrong. The best thrillers use anticipation to draw the audience in. Fall 2: Deadpoint is all about discomfort and building the suspense of something terrible happening, so much so that the viewer can't look away.
When shuffling through a haunted house, people move slowly because of fear of the unknown and the suspense of what might jump out. Fear can come more from what the viewer imagines than from the thing itself. When Jax and Luce stand on a narrow plank thousands of feet above the ground, and the audience feels the anxiety, they tense up too.
This is why the movie doesn't need a villain. The filmmakers use the environment to add conflict, tension, and character development. There's no villain when a character is reaching out for a backpack that is too far away to grab or when they're climbing a ladder into a blinding fog, it's the anticipation and the stakes that failure equals a plummeting death that brings the tension.
Familiar Fears, New Scenarios
"We didn't wanna make it a tower or anything similar to the first film," co-director Peter Spierig said in an interview with Polygon. "There was just no point of going there again."
While Fall 2: Deadpoint tells a different story with new characters, the writers Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann and directors Michael and Peter Spierig understood what worked about the original Fall movie and brought some of those elements into the sequel.
One aspect of the original that Fall 2: Deadpoint echoes is the connection between trauma and using adventure to move on. Just like Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) in Fall, Jax is hesitant to go on the journey. Both characters don't care for the adrenaline rush at that moment in their lives, and their personal experiences make them hesitant to follow along. Shiloh, in Fall, and Luce, in Fall 2: Deadpoint, motivate their respective foils to find freedom through a dangerous situation.
The sequel also uses a few other tropes to make the situation more perilous, such as a character getting injured, the loss of important equipment, and someone almost falling while the other character has to save them. The filmmakers show that reinvention isn't always necessary; instead, they put a familiar story in a new, terrifying situation.
Michael Spierig put it like this to Polygon: "When you go to the movies, you want an experience. You don't want to feel like you've been ripped off."
Keep the Audience Squirming
It's already uncomfortable when two characters are dangling 4,000 feet above sea level, but the audience will actually start to get comfortable with the situation. That's why the filmmakers had to keep making things worse.
Fall 2: Deadpoint constantly introduces new complications that force Jax and Luce to reassess how they're going to survive. Suddenly, an injury becomes a liability, lost equipment makes rescue even further out of reach, and an unresolved issue with a chain, plank, or harness lets the audience know something awful is about to happen.
The initial premise of the movie might be enough to get the audience to the theater, but the last thing you want them to do is get bored. That's why each obstacle must change the situation's dynamics and force the characters to make increasingly desperate choices.
Fall 2: Deadpoint doesn't have a complicated villain or major action set pieces. It's a survival thriller that exploits relatable fears by putting characters in impossible situations. When the moviegoer sits down in the theater, they expect an experience; delivering it means using anticipation and expectation just as much as action.