The Happening: The Abridged Script
By: Rod Hilton on Jun 28th, 2008 | Movie Rating: 
Wahlberg looks in terror as a very angry Funky Bunch approaches on the horizon.
This script was featured as a Cracked.com Guest Column. To read it there, follow this link..
FADE IN:
EXT. NEW YORK CITY - PARK
People walk around in the PARK while two unimportant characters have INANE DIALOGUE.
BORING CHARACTER 1
That was weird. Suddenly all of the people in this park stopped dead in their tracks and started acting like brainless robots.
BORING CHARACTER 2
Large groups of people behaving as though they have no personality whatsoever? That can only mean…
BORING CHARACTER 1
Oh shit, we’re in an M. Night Shyamalan movie!
They both KILL THEMSELVES.
EVERYONE ELSE
An M. Night Shyamalan movie! Our careers will be ruined!
EVERYONE ELSE kills themselves as well.
INT. PHILADELPHIA - CLASSROOM
MARK WAHLBERG teaches SCIENCE to a classroom full of middle school students.
STUDENT
Hey Mr. Wahlberg, how come bees have been dying off in record numbers lately?
MARK WAHLBERG
Well, you see, it’s an act of nature that nobody will ever understand. Those crazy scienticians will come up with something just to put it in a book, but ultimately they’re just chumps.
STUDENT
What? Who wrote this script, Kirk Cameron?
MARK’S friend, JOHN LEQUIZAMO, enters the classroom.
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
Hey, a there’s a suicide epidemic in New York. People think terrorists are releasing some toxin in the air that’s causing people to kill themselves.
MARK WAHLBERG
Awesome, disasters in movies tend to serve little purpose other than to unite families with problems. Perhaps this can fix my rocky marriage.
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
This is serious. This toxin doesn’t just make you stop breathing or anything, it makes you go far, far out of your way to kill yourself in the goriest, most dramatic way possible.
To illustrate this, JOHN and MARK watch a high-resolution video on top of a color printout of a hand holding an iPhone, which depicts a guy getting lions to rip his arms off at the zoo.
MARK WAHLBERG
Holy shit, did I really just watch a guy perform Jax’s fatality on himself? Are we in Toxic Avenger 5 or something?
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
We need to get out of the city. Go home and get your increasingly distant wife and meet me at the train station. We need to get on a train, because if there’s one place we know terrorists won’t attack, it’s a vehicle carrying hundreds of people.
MARK goes home to find his wife ZOOEY DESCHANEL, whose name is ZOOEY.
MARK WAHLBERG
(yawning)
Hey honey, let’s go to the train station to awkwardly progress the story forward without any character motivation. Or whatever. Is it lunchtime yet?
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
Alright, but only if I can pretend I have depth by illuminating a completely superfluous side story about a guy I met at work.
They meet JOHN and travel by train out of the CITY.
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
I can’t get my wife on the phone. It’s probably because we have Sprint, but I want to make sure. I need you to take care of my daughter while I go look for her.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
No problem, I’d love to help.
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
I wasn’t talking to you, you cum-guzzling cunt.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
My apologies. I’ll just politely ignore your rudeness and take care of your daughter anyway.
MARK WAHLBERG
And I’ll go ahead and not even defend my wife like the whiny little bitch I am.
JOHN LEQUIZAMO
It’s a good thing you guys are such likable protagonists instead of, for example, completely uninteresting assholes that audiences would hate watching for two hours.
MARK WAHLBERG
Good luck finding your wife. Make sure to drive everywhere with the windows down since we know that this is an airborne toxin, and doing so well help ensure the audience feels no sense of danger whatsoever.
He DOES, then listens to MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE and CUTS HIMSELF. MARK, ZOOEY, and JOHN’S DAUGHTER find themselves with a large crowd of random strangers.
MARK WAHLBERG
Alright everyone, it looks like this toxin is somehow targeting only large groups. Stay in small groups.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
So if you’re by yourself, you’ll probably be alright?
MARK WAHLBERG
It looks that way. All across the country, crazy loner shut-ins are probably doing just fine.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
Good news for Sony and Microsoft.
MARK, ZOOEY, and JOHN’S DAUGHER take refuge in an abandoned house for a minute, then for some reason decide to go back outside where the DEADLY TOXINS are.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
Look, I need to come clean with you. I… I had dessert with some guy I met at work.
MARK WAHLBERG
Oh my God! Is ‘dessert’ some kind of euphemism for letting him take a shit in your mouth after he fucks you or something?!
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
Er, no. We had cheesecake.
MARK WAHLBERG
Oh. Well I’m going to go ahead and act like it was the other thing!
MARK and ZOOEY sleepwalk their way through some more scenes as the plot progresses itself forward without their involvement.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
You know, for a movie called ‘The Happening,’ there is surprisingly little actually happening.
MARK WAHLBERG
No shit. Alright, Shyamalan. Where does this painfully boring roller coaster take us next?
M NIGHT SHYAMALAN
Let’s see here. The next thing that happened in “War of the Worlds” was Tom Cruise finding that crazy hermit guy. I guess we should do that for a few minutes, since I’m such a fucking hack.
MARK, ZOOEY, and JOHN’S DAUGHTER try to outrun the air and eventually make it to a boarded-up HOUSE.
MARK WAHLBERG
Hey! Let us into your fortified home! I promise that the completely mysterious toxin that nobody understands won’t come in and kill you!
RANDOM STRANGER
Fuck off! Here in this house, we done got a strict policy of not allowing entry to cast members from that shitty ‘Planet of the Apes’ remake, ya hear?
MARK, ZOOEY, and JOHN’S DAUGHTER locate a different CRAZY HERMIT and stay with her for a bit.
CRAZY OLD BAT
Woohoo, tiger stream junket floating can purse lily munch! Turd fighter glass breaking eardrum turnip, John!
MARK WAHLBERG
I wonder what totally unexpected twist will happen as a result of your wackiness!
NOTHING happens, and eventually the CRAZY OLD BAT dies.
MARK WAHLBERG
Oh. I guess her only role was to illustrate that the deadly toxin is, in fact, deadly. Go inside and close the doors and windows, Zooey.
ZOOEY DESCHANEL
(quizzically)
Why?
MARK WAHLBERG
Why? Did you seriously just ask me that? Are you watching a different movie or something? Listen up…
(pause)
The fucking air. It fucking kills you. It’s fucking deadly. Don’t fucking breathe it. Was this script written by a fucking monkey?
Suddenly, THE HAPPENING stops HAPPENING, largely because the audience members left to go get a REFUND.
An EXPERT comes on TELEVISION to explain the movie for the benefit of any RETARDED PEOPLE in the AUDIENCE.
TV EXPERT
You see, it seems that plants became tired of the way we treat our environment, so they started releasing a deadly toxin.
TV ANCHORMAN
Why didn’t they just stop producing oxygen?
TV EXPERT
Well where’s the unwatchable pile of garbage of a film in that?
MARK WAHLBERG
I don’t get it. We found out it was plants like an hour ago. Aren’t M. Night Shyamalan movies supposed to have some crazy surprise at the end?
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
Surprise, I managed to make a movie worse than ‘Lady in the Water’!
END
“… whose name is Zooey.”
OLD SCHOOL REFERENCE. Hell yeah.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:13 pm“I was going by the Abridged script, which didn’t mention the virus being contained, which it logically wouldn’t be, given the twist. Unless New England plants are just really fucking angry.
Still, unless Rod left out a massive subplot, Andromeda Strain’s main plot of the secret group of scientists working to find a cure, and the whole bit with the nuclear missile, are unrelated, so I still maintain that The Happening doesn’t qualify as a Andromeda Strain ripoff, like how any movie about people robbing casino wouldn’t instantly be a Oceans Eleven ripoff.”
well, yeah, the toxin is actually confined to new england, which goes along with the twist as shitty as you’d think.
but i meant that the viruss in the movie seemed to be a ripoff of the andromeda strain virus… not really the happening itself being a ripoff of the andromeda strain.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:45 pmIf anybody knows, how the hell do you pronounce the wife’s name? Zoo-e?
June 30th, 2008 at 9:02 pmThis might be the most retarded attempt at a message since Happy Feet.
July 1st, 2008 at 2:25 am“i meant that the viruss in the movie seemed to be a ripoff of the andromeda strain virus… not really the happening itself being a ripoff of the andromeda strain.”
I guess the virus itself was “inspired” by Andromeda Strain virus.
Also, to lowercasep, according to imdb, the actress playing the wife’s name is pronounced ZOH-ee.
July 1st, 2008 at 2:13 pmFor the record, this crazy loner shut-in loves your scripts :-)
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:31 ami noticed when the page loaded, Rod, that you titled the movie ‘The Crappening’. But it was then covered up by the picture. Do you do this with all your movies?
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:21 pmSeems that way. Every picture should have an alternate text.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 pmIndy has one, too. Good new feature.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:38 pmXdude, Ryan, Matt:
Yeah I’m putting one on all the new scripts. I’m also very slowly going back and doing it for older stuff, the way I’m adding pictures to older stuff (usually only when it’s a related post linked from newer stuff).
I’d like to get a picture, caption, and mad-magazine style alt text on every script on the site at some point, but I’m not really in any hurry.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm