THEY

There are no walls.

LOG LINE

A houseshare becomes an increasingly unhinged nightmare during lockdown. New roommate Nick believes an ancient death cult is plotting to take control of the living - using the pandemic as a distraction. Skeptical at first, Cass finds it harder and harder to resist the dead as they colonize the house and demand her submission.

ABOUT

THEY is a headfuck horror that updates the haunted house subgenre by blending current and ancient fears into a cult conspiracy of awesome, inescapable power. Comps include: Hereditary, The Shining and The Thing.

SHORT SYNOPSIS

London, 2021, third COVID lockdown. Gardener Cass, behind on rent, needs a new roommate for the home she shares with Alejandro, Magda, and Lou. Nick arrives, very different from his Facebook persona. He only drinks de-ionised water. He refuses to wear a mask. He hints at a dark COVID conspiracy - but says his housemates couldn’t handle the truth.

One day, Cass discovers a garden of poisonous plants and takes cuttings to propagate them. At home, Nick fills Lou’s head with tales of a cult “final solution” - and she becomes convinced her parents have been “replaced”. Cass confronts Nick and he claims he’s figured out where they are - the dead that control the cult. Cass thinks he’s gone mad, but that night she sees him half-swallowed by his bedroom wall and he says the words that bind “There are no walls.”

Next morning, Nick apologizes for his paranoid behaviour. Lou thinks he’s one of them now. When Nick develops a cough and chokes and dies, Cass notices her deadly nightshade is missing. Police claim a particularly nasty COVID strain is responsible and quarantine the house. Cass escapes to a park, but when she tries to get something to eat, she discovers they are everywhere now. The police are in on it too, they arrest Cass and take her home, where she finds Alejandro and Magda have also said the words. Only she and Lou remain outside the cult now.

The dead start to emerge from the walls in greater numbers. And no matter how many times Cass and Lou kill them, they keep coming. Lou tells Cass about the 10,000-year-old temple where the death cult was born. The dead helped mankind evolve but the price they paid was always blood. Cass escapes again, and the lady who gave her the poisonous plants gives her a special tea that stops her from seeing the dead. But Cass cannot handle “normal” now she knows the truth.

Driven mad, Cass corners her housemates, demolishes a wall with her chainsaw and sets it ablaze,. She declares, “Now there are no fucking walls.” The roof caves in on her and time falls away and Cass finds herself with the women 10,000 years ago as they tear down the Temple.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

There are three primal fears of death. The fear of the “little death”, i.e. fear of your own death or the death of a loved one. The fear of the “big death” - the fear of apocalypse and/or the death of all humanity . And finally, the fear of “soul death” - fear of the death of your individuality or identity.

All of these fears were triggered big time by the COVID pandemic and the measures governments took to address the perceived risks to public health. Everyone went crazy, but seemed to do it in diametrically different ways depending on which fear of death moved them the most. I conceived of THEY as a way to side-step the politics of the pandemic and explore the fear and the crazy.

I have always wanted to make a horror about group think and cultish behaviour. And the ancient cult in THEY became a perfect vehicle to explore both the pressure to conform and our inbuilt instinct to resist authoritarianism.