THE SCRIPT

Synopsis

1. A young Irish woman barges into an exclusive restaurant in Los Angeles demanding AIDEN O’BRIEN, a literary agent, read her script, insisting his life depends upon it! He refuses. 2. And so, begins AIDEN’s repeated confrontations with terrifying demons, some who even address him by name. 3. Soon AIDEN, the objective evaluator of horror scripts, realizes he is the unwilling central character in this anonymous young woman’s developing script. 4. In it, his hour-by-hour actions, real and fantastical, are recorded. A naked woman in a nearby apartment rips her lover to shreds before AIDEN ‘s eyes and then grows bat wings and horns before flying at AIDEN himself. 5. Later, after sex, AIDEN is in the bathroom, when he hears the sound, from his bedroom, of a huge dog shredding something. AIDEN’s date is dismembered, and, above his bed is written, in her blood, a message in Gaelic. 6. Yet, when the desk attendant at the apartment building checks, he sees nothing. 7. Angered, AIDEN repeatedly rejects and even shreds the script. Each time it reemerges, continuing to record Aiden’s actions. 8. Frustrated at his lack of control and familiarity with the demons he faces, AIDEN consults with his brother’s partner, LACHLAN, an Irishman. 9. But LACHLAN is loath to discuss these demons, believing they, and the girl, are present in AIDEN’s life for a reason. The bloody Gaelic message written on AIDEN’s bedroom wall reinforces this: “The Past Does Not Die.” 10. Desperate to be freed from the young woman and her script, AIDEN escapes to Ireland, a land he visited over twenty years ago. His task, ostensibly, is to check out the boglands as possible locations for an upcoming romantic comedy. 11. But AIDEN’s past is not dead. At each stop in the three different boglands of Ireland, the demons return: the seductive young woman in the blue dress combing her hair; the all-knowing old crone; the headless rider who chases him through the streets, lashing at him with her fiery tail; tiny pooka figures; and, through it all, that same young anonymous woman. Each time he is pushed closer and closer to a confrontation with her and with the truth of his past. 12. Finally, AIDEN and the young woman confront each other in the bogland of Carlow, a village AIDEN visited in his youth. 13. They struggle and the enraged AIDEN hurls the young woman into the bog. As she sinks beneath the darkened, murky slime, he learns the truth: a beautiful woman with whom he had a one-night stand twenty years earlier in Ireland gave birth to a daughter. 14. Before her death, the mother gives her daughter a task, a “geas” a prohibition she has to fulfill. 15. She has to find her father, AIDEN’s, and, without revealing her name to him, make him aware of the consequences of his past. 16. AIDEN, seemingly successful, returns to his apartment in Los Angeles. He has left his past, but it has not left him. 17. When the desk attendant at the apartment complex checks on Aiden, he finds him being sucked into a bathtub of choking bogland AIDEN slowly dragging him to his death