Paranoid stands without a screenplay credit because, in a classic sense, there was no screenplay written for the film. The main thing that I did was to take King's poem and place it in a screenplay form adding scene direction to help convey to everyone else working on the project, exactly what I was looking for. Other than that, the main writing was King's poem, which stands completely unaltered, plain and simple, so I felt that no screenplay credit was deserved.
Taking a look at page one from my shooting copy of the script - you can get a little insight into the way my mind operates in production (be careful, it can get a little crazy in there... you've been warned).
The first handwritten note at the top left reads: "Slow, even. real - informative" I'm refering to the nature of the voice over and to the overall pacing at this point in the film. The woman goes through several stages of emotions as she acquaints us with her horror - and right now this is merely the fact sharing stage... She's probably told these details to herself and to anyone who would listen half a million times... It's route, old hand...
The next note is a technical one referring to camera blocking - I know I want movement around the room here and I'm making a written question to myself - 'Should I do this handheld, or on a dolly?' As it turned out, I couldn't do exactly what I wanted to do with this shot and it was broken into two shots: one, a dolly along her dresser, and two a tilt-up across the notebooks and then a pan to reveal her in the corner. I wanted to start a bit slow here (well, as slow as I could in an 8 minute film). I wanted the audience to see the world she lived in before we saw the Woman herself.
The third handwritten note reads: "Cowering. Looking over her shoulder." Obviously a note about blocking.
Probably most confusing here are the forward slashes in the voice over. As I've said before, King's prose was absolutely the key to this whole project - and not just the prose, but the structure and cadence of his words. In my draft of the script, I made notations where line breaks happened in the poem itself (single forward slash) and where paragraph breaks happened (double slash) so that I could keep that rhythm in my mind at all times and still stay true to the accepted screenplay format - which averages out to 1 minute of screen time for 1 page of script.