MORE DEMONS

My last feature, HEY ANDROID, came out in 2004. That's twenty-two years. In that time I've written a lot of screenplays and talked myself out of making every one of them.

I've been indecisive. I'd pick a script, live with it for a month, and then another one would start looking better. A comedy. A thriller. Something set back in Pittsburgh. Then back to the drawer. It's a very comfortable way to never make anything.

So here it is, in writing, where I can't take it back. My next feature is THE DEMONS ARE HERE.

A contract killer named Edwin Hershel Goat takes a job. Three young adults have stolen money from some drug dealers who don't forgive anything, and Edwin is hired to find them and settle the account. It isn't even that much money. That's sort of the point.

The three hole up in a cabin in the woods, figuring nobody will look there. They're mostly right. Edwin finds them anyway. That's what he does.

But the woods are already occupied. Something lives out there, and it doesn't care about the money, or the dealers, or who's hunting whom. Before long the hunter and the hunted have the same problem.

It's not a horror movie. It's a crime picture that takes a wrong turn and keeps driving.

Why this one? I've asked myself that. Part of it is practical. A cabin, some woods, a handful of people. It's a movie I can actually make.

The rest is harder to explain. I can put down the other scripts. This one keeps getting back up.

I'm rewriting it now. I'll post here as it comes together. No more switching horses.

DEMONS

Finished the rewrite of THE DEMONS ARE HERE, originally written in 2024. Edwin Hershel Goat is a contract killer on the way down — slower, sloppier, running out of road — and the job that lands in his lap is the kind that used to be simple: recover a pile of stolen money from a young couple who don't know what they've stepped into. Drug dealers on one side, the end of the world creeping in on the other. The rewrite cleaned up a lot of what wasn't working in the original draft. Tighter, meaner, funnier in the places it needed to be. 

The plan is to produce and direct this in Charleston, provided I can raise the funding. The city has the texture I want — the heat, the marshes, the way the light falls — and I've spent enough time here now to shoot it as it should be shot. More on that as it develops.