Wrapped a round of contest reading. No names, no titles, just patterns from about sixty horror scripts. Posting because the same notes came up over and over.
1. Page one opens on a nightmare, then the character wakes up. Roughly one in five did this. It spends your reader's trust on the very first page. 2. The cold open kills someone we never meet again, then the story starts somewhere else with no link for twenty pages. 3. The rules of the threat change in act three to make the ending work.
The best scripts had one clear, strange rule by page five and kept every promise it made.