Moonchildren

Synopsis

MARVIN, 55, a rugged look African-American man, paddles his kayak across a lake while nervously glancing back as if aware of some menacing presence behind. A pair of deathly pale, claw-like hands burst from the water and grab him. After a struggle, Marvin kills the unseen swimmer by hitting his head with his wood paddle.

Los Angeles. 1992. YOUNG MARVIN, 30, marries CORINNE, 25, an African-American woman with whom he is going to spend the wedding night in a cheap hotel. That very night, while the infamous L.A. riots break out, Corinne is violently murdered in a dark alley by someone unseen.

Blaming the police for Corinne’s death, Marvin joins a small armed group formed some weeks after the riots. After a military training in the woods, he kills in self-defence a strange simian creature. Next morning he finds the corpse of MICHELLE, 25, one of his comrades, disembowelled.

Marvin takes refuge in his grandparents’ farmhouse in Wisconsin, where MARVIN’S GRANDFATHER, 80, tells him about some hideous creatures that haunt the family for generations and is later brutally decapitated by someone unseen.

A bloody "eye-for-an-eye" game has started. As years go by, Marvin will have to learn to protect his friends and family while researching his ancestors’ history in order to know the enemy he is facing. A non-stop war whose final battle will reveal that nothing is what it seems in this curse.

Pitch: "Moonchildren" is a free adaptation of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s short horror story "Children". Structured in two interwoven time frames -the present day and a time period between 1992 and 2001-, this is an original concept for a horror script. The chronological jumps are well negotiated during the story, dialogue is strong and expressive of character, and its action sequences are effective. Suspense and eeriness is well built, as well as moments of visceral, bloody action. Overall, this is a very original and intriguing work, with an interesting back story about racism and circularity of violence.