Reddit mentions of Rebecca

Short answer: YMMV

Long answer: Converting from writing short stories to screenplays will require that you not only learn new formatting, but also requires that you focus more on crafting dialogue, action and scene settings that balance descriptiveness with efficiency.

You see, prose is often celebrated for the author's ability to craft a world in which a reader can fully envision in his/her mind's eye. We don't just love the book The Lord of the Rings because of the story of Frodo carrying the One Ring to Mordor, we love it because Tolkein convinces us that this is a real place with real sights, sounds, smells and feelings. Tolkein's Middle Earth is made tangible, and it's done so through lots and lots of descriptions that establish who the characters are, what they look like, where they live, what they think and how they act in detail. That takes a lot of words.

The screenplay, however, can't afford to spend ten paragraphs describing what a Hobbit is. The screenplay is written so that a reader can get a general idea of what a Hobbit is and what type of actor might be cast for the part so that the audience can take one quick glance at a Hobbit and instantly know what a Hobbit is.

It isn't unusual, then, for a 500 or even 700 word book to be shaved down into a 110 screenplay that produces a movie with a run-time of under 2hrs.

I recently read Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, which was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

The opening chapter of the book describes the Manderley estate where much of the story takes place. The entire first chapter.

> Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge
was uninhabited.

>No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened.
Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches
intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

> The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would
recognize shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture and grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside
them.

Those are just the first three paragraphs of the book ... it goes on and on about the "choked wilderness," the "approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub" and the "malevolent ivy."

Yeesh.

The prose is a bit purple, but I genuinely like the book ... and I love the care the author takes to describe this very important location. The way she's described the location, too, is interesting. Note how creepy Manderley is in the narrator's descriptions. There are "skeleton claws" and "rusted spokes." Nature is a "menace." By the time you -- and anyone -- finishes reading the first chapter of this book, you will be sufficiently afraid of Manderley. This creates a sense of for boding that overshadows all the happiness times in the narrator's life before she even knows what Manderley is, let alone the events that occurs once she finds herself there.

In a screenplay, however, this would be one scene.

---

EXT. MANDERLEY ESTATE - NIGHT

The Manderley Estate sits on a hill in the English countryside, as sprawling and grandiose in its design as it is decrepit and overgrown in its current state. Ivy cracks the brick exterior and covers the windows while the once-lush gardens are full of nothing but weeds.

A full moon is intermittently covered by passing clouds, casting shadows that a scared child would be sure to mistake for ghosts.

Suddenly, a DARK FIGURE emerges from the shadows ... it is MRS. DeWINTERS, in her 50's now and herself a shadow of the beautiful, happy thing she was in her youth.

Mrs. DeWinters crosses the gardens as though in a dream, crossing the drive en route to the main entrance of the house. She walks up the stairs and stops at the front door.

She places her hands on the door, then presses her cheek up against it, too. Tears stream down her face as she whispers ...

MRS. DeWINTERS
Manderley.

---

To be honest, this is still a bit over-written and overly-descriptive. It's only appropriate here because, once again, it's important to convey to the reader that this is a ghost house, although it wasn't always a ghost house. The care given to the details here is MUCH less than in the book version, and alerts the reader to the fact that this location is extremely important (or, alternately, that you are a bad script writer who spends waaaaay too much time describing locations).

The best thing you can do to understand how to write in screenplay style is to read as many screenplays as you can get your hands on.

The best thing you can do to understand screenplay story structure and pacing is to read some books by accomplished screenwriters and watch movies and TV shows to understand how these ideas are applied in practice.

How difficult is it? It will take you a lifetime, but it will be a lifetime well spent ;)

Your description has elements of Rebecca, but this is just a guess.

EDIT: Had trouble linking to wikipedia, changed to amazon.com link

Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child kept me bound to that book so this might fulfill that sci-fi page-turning suspense you are looking for.



Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier is an incredible book that, like Ex Machina, you were worried what might happen and what does happen is so far worse and incredible than you ever could have imagined. It also happens in a pretty isolated house as well.