Page 33 of Brian Duffield’s screenplay for The Babysitter is typeset in 106 pt. Courier Final Draft bold and reads, in its entirety, “WHAT THE FUCK.” It’s the kind of self-conscious screenwriting stunt David Mamet was railing against 22 years ago, even as writers like Shane Black and Adam Herz (whose American Pie script had the studio-reader-friendly title of Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars Which Most Readers Will Most Likely Hate But We Think You Will Love) were making a killing with it. It’s also a pretty decent response to the trailer for the finished film, which McG directed for New Line Cinema before the studio unloaded it to Netflix when they couldn’t find a release date.
Samara Weaving—Hugo Weaving’s niece—plays the hot babysitter to Judah Lewis’s nerdy preteen, but there’s trouble in paradise after he spies on her and discovers she has a habit of stabbing hapless nerds right through their goddamned skulls with knives and then collecting their blood in ceremonial goblets. (You guessed it: page 33.) The hapless nerd in question (Doug Haley) bleeds like he’s in the lawnmower scene from Dead Alive, and that seems to be the tone—if not quite the level of gore—that McG is going for here. And frankly, we’re all for it: whether The Babysitter turns out to be fun or terrible when it comes out on Oct. 13—and the trailer makes a pretty good case for “fun, but also terrible”—a hot mess of a film where carnage is reduced to something manageable and funny will be a welcome relief from the real thing on the news. Like a wise man once wrote: “WHAT THE FUCK.”
