Boards & Nails:
Gracey Roberts, Aiden McCoy, Hayley Craig
A family of four is in the driveway of an average suburban
house, shoving suitcases and bags into the back of the car.
There is a son, daughter, mother and father. They are having a
casual conversation.
After managing to get everyone into the car after the chaos of
packing. They begin their drive down various roads. Eventually,
they pull up on a large, old house.
The mother reluctantly enters the house while the rest unpack.
The grandpa, her father, is sitting on a rocking chair in the
living room. He turns to her slowly and greets her. The mother
does not look particularly excited to see her father.
The rest of the family comes in with their luggage and they hear
the sound of the moving truck arriving. They have a brief
conversation with the grandpa, mostly exchanging greetings.
The next day, we see the son in his newly moved room getting a
backpack and leaving the house, saying goodbye to his dad in
passing.
Cutting to inside a school building, we see him standing alone
in the hall as everyone is walking and talking with each other.
He is visibly uncomfortable. Making his way to class, he thinks
about his old friends from his old school, who meant a lot to
him.
On the way, he sees a poster for basketball tryouts. He signs
up, but is clearly very nervous about it. He thinks, once again,
about his friends and how they all played basketball together.
Later, the son is back at the house and is wandering around the
halls. He walks past his sister in her room, then his mom and
dad’s room. He notices a cracked door into what he guesses is
his grandpa’s room. He doesn’t know his grandpa well, and
curiously checks out the room.
He looks around without touching anything, until he opens the
closet. His clothes are all typical old man clothes (boring). He
notices a box in the corner of the closet on the floor. He
ponders opening it for a bit, then reluctantly does only to see
a picture inside along with some other seemingly unrelated
things.
The picture was of what he assumed to be his grandpa in some
sort of old army uniform. The son couldn’t tell where he was in
the photo, but it seems vaguely industrial. The son is off put
by this photo, but puts it back and moves on.
The family gathers in the dining room that night for dinner. The
family is chattering, but the grandpa is eerily quiet. The
family continues talking. The dad asks the son about his day at
school. He says it was fine and quickly changes the subject. THe
mom comes in with the food when the grandpa suddenly slams his
hands on the table.
THe family goes quiet. The mom asks him what the issue is. The
grandpa starts irrationally yelling about everyone being
connected to him and how he wants them to get out of his head.
The family is shaken and scared. Everything is silent besides
his incessant rambling.
The mother quickly rushes him out of the room, being the one
most used to his outbursts. Still, she was unnerved by what he
said. She took him to bed and told him to lay down. He
apologizes as she leaves the room.
The next day, the air has shifted between the family and they
all feel tense. As the son is about to go out the door for
school, he hears his mom, panicked, yelling about how she can’t
find grandpa.
The house falls into a frenzy as everyone goes searching for
him, including the son. The dad says he can take him in late.
After about 45 minutes of searching, they found no traces of
him. The mom calls the police, telling them she thinks he had a
schizophrenic episode and might have wandered off. While on the
phone, she swears she can hear a sort of knocking sound from
within the walls. She chooses to ignore it.
She continues to hear a knocking sound, and even a low whisper
within the walls every so often for the rest of the day. She
goes to her husband and tells him about it, and she proposes
that grandpa might be INSIDE the walls. The dad dismisses it
immediately. He is sure she is just hearing things.
The next day, the house is quiet and tense. The mother is
quickly growing more agitated with the noises in the walls. She
decides she can’t rely on her family to do it, since they
wouldn’t believe her, so she decides to look for an entrance
into the walls.
She begins searching close to the walls, looking for any sort of
latch or secret entrance. She looks in the basement, and
everywhere else, until she reaches the attic. She starts moving
around boxes and discovers a latch hidden in a peculiarly placed
spot in the wall.
As she crawls inside, she hears the noise again, and begins
yelling for grandpa. After no response, she tries to coax him
out more calmly. She is nervous and shocked, but continues
venturing further into the hollowed walls. She wonders why they
are hollowed out like this? She hears the noises again, but
louder this time. Then again. Then once more. Each time it is
louder. She doesn’t seem to be fully aware of the way the world
is beginning to distort around her. It continues and becomes so
loud that the mom begins to scream. Yet, despite all the noise,
she could not see grandpa. Before cutting away, the grandpa
appears behind the mom, smiling.
That night, the family cannot find the mom either. Like with
grandpa, they search the house high and low for her. The boxes
that were moved to reveal the entrance were mysteriously put
back by someone.
After no luck, it begins to set in for them that something is
seriously wrong. It seems she is missing as well. The father
tells his kids what their mom said, and he is beginning to
believe it has something to do with her disappearance. He
believes she might’ve been right about grandpa’s location and
believes she must be there, too. They are all scared to think of
why she hasn’t come back yet. The daughter is in tears and asks
dad if she is coming back. The dad seems shocked by this
question, but says yes with certainty.
Scene transitions to mom inside the walls, flashlight in hand.
She calls softly for her father to come out. the walls behind
her begin to warp but she doesn’t notice. Whispers slowly grow
around her. She starts walking faster in the walls. Calling her
father louder, and more frantic. At the end of her path, she
sees her grandfather hunched over socking. She runs towards him
but when he turns around he looks different. Younger. He’s
holding a baby that could only be her. She stands there, mouth
agape until he puts a thumb on her forehead, the corners of her
vision go white. She nods, tears in her eyes, then there's a
snap, everything fades to black. Camera jump cuts to a startling
image of the mother slumped against the corner of the walls.
Glass in her flashlight broke, oil looking substance bubbling
out of her mouth and eyes.
******
Back inside the house,they feel a sort of dread coming too close
to the walls now that they are aware of what's happening. As if
you can feel the dark energy seeping out.
The walls are all brick when they tear the paper off. It appears
there’s no way in. Son is snooping around bookshelves, looking
for a weak spot when he hears the echo of hollowness through the
shelf when it’s hit. He moves a small hatch on the side and the
door pops open. They’ve found their way in.
Walking into the room the son is horrified by the scene around
him. Jars incubated of two headed animals and fetuses stored in
alcohol. He almost doesn’t see the swastica hung above the desk.
He goes to open the drawers but they’re locked. Using a bronze
sculpture of Apollo he finds next to an identical one of
Artemis, he breaks the lock on the drawer. The gods head falls
off.
He reads detailed papers of experiments. Most of the letters are
in German but he sees the black and white pictures attached.
It’s here he realizes which side of the war his grandfather was
on. Next, he finds an old leather journal. It’s to document his
grandpa's findings. He talks about his detailed experiments on
several sets of twins. As he reads more the excerpts become more
frustrated. The Americans are closing in and his research isn’t
completed.
That is until he reaches the last page on the journal. It’s
titled “BREAKTHROUGH” and nothing else. The journal abruptly
ends. The son breaks out of his state of shock and runs into the
living room where he last saw his father. His father is there,
but something is wrong. His baby sister is missing.
Desperate to find a way to save his daughter, the dad hat he’s a
plan attempting to enter the walls by going under the house and
through the crawl space. He tells his son to go upstairs and get
the flashlights, as the son makes his way upstairs he sees his
mother walking past the doorway and runs to see her.
Scene cuts to the father waiting for his son outside the
entrance of the crawlspace. He intends to wait for his son to
get back but from within the crawlspace he hears the coughing,
and strained breathing of his daughter. Immediately he rushes to
his knees calling her name and crawling through the dark towards
the noise. He reaches instead a pile of mangled flesh and
clothes. Tufts of curly blonde hair peek through the carnage.
He approaches the wreckage and picks up the only lock of hair
untainted with blood. Clutching it gently in his fist his
breathing begins to quicken. The walls around the crawl space
grow until the room is the size of a cathedral. The father is
now standing in the Ilse of a church. Something is illuminated
at the altar but he doesn’t check to see what it is. In the pews
around him are different versions of his family. Some were burnt
to unrecognizable bodies. Others rotted from the inside out.
They’re all looking at him. Grandpa is playing the cello in the
corner. As the father begins to walk towards the exit, the cello
plays faster, more vigorous and high pitched. He breaks out in a
sprint, running towards the chapel doors at full speed. The
scene then shifts to the real world outside of the
hallucination, where the father has fallen to his death,
tripping straight into the empty well where he smashes his head
on the sides.
Back inside the house the son makes his way through the doorway where his mother holds a picture of him holding his sister as a baby. She hums a melodic song, looking at the picture fondly of not longingly. Her son asks her if she is okay but she just keeps humming. He puts his hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle shake but she doesn’t turn to face him. “We’re gonna be a family... but not like other families. We're gonna be a real family. One. One eternal beating heart...you're gonna love it. I can’t feel you yet like I feel them.....why won’t you hear us? What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t teach my son to listen?”
She turns around smiling. He notices black around the front
pieces of her hair. He pushes the hair behind her ears, and sees
thick black fluid, like oil, running down from her ears down
onto her neck. Before he has a chance to react, she grabs his
face in her hands.
“Come with me. My only son. It’s not safe out here.”
She walks to a dark corner where the wall is nothing but shadows
and beckons for him to follow her but with tears in his eyes he
shakes his head. Her screams become wicked as she tells him to
follow, but he refuses, slowly backing up to the door, then
running down the hall. Almost immediately she catches him. The
gentleness of her hands is nowhere to be found. She begins
ripping at his hair and clawing at his hands. Dragging him
towards the wardrobe where the black shadows indicate another
entrance. He begs for her to stop, but she doesn’t seem to hear,
mumbling nonsense about how at peace he’ll feel once it’s all
over.
“It’s like when you were little, You were so small, and when
we’d take you to the doctor you’d beg me just like this. You’d
always make such a fuss about getting your shots. No amount of
bribery or explaining that the medicine was good for you would
make you cooperate. Eventually they just had to strap you down
and force the needle in your arm. And once it was over, it was
over....Think of it like that. It’s just one quick shot, and it's
all over.”
He looks around the room frantically searching for something to
help himself get free, and locks eyes with a scarf in the
wardrobe. As she pulls his head into the abyss, he pulls the
scarf taut. She trips and falls down unconscious. He checks for
a pulse and runs back into his grandfather's office, looking at
the pictures of twin children with black fluid seeping through
their ears and mouths.
He finds a USB drive and plugs it in. A black and white film
begins playing through the projector.
“In my findings, the children respond best, not to each other
like we expected, but instead to one greater power. I believe if
we can understand this controlling force, and in turn, control
it, we can use it not only with specimens who share the
connection of that within the womb, but any species that
responds to it. However, the problem lies within the thing
itself. If one twin is injected with the concoction the other
becomes solely dependent on the life force of the first. While
its only purpose is to spread, in the end, if the original host
dies, so does the contamination in all other specimens. How do
we motivate the virus to co-”
A man walks in the door and begins speaking frantically in
German, his grandfather turns the camera off. The video stops.
The son sprints to the downstairs window, to tell his dad his
newfound discovery, but he’s not by the crawlspace. He searches
the downstairs, then the upstairs, calling his dad with worry
making his voice crack. Finally when he reaches the attic, and
finds it empty, he looks out of the attic window to get a view
of the front yard. Directly under the window, sits the well. The
moonlight reflects off of his fathers corpse, making the blood
trickling down his forehead look shiny. His eyes look too blue,
and what especially sticks out is the blonde lock of hair his
father still has held in his now open fist. A single black tear
falls from his fathers eye.
His family isn’t dead...yet. The son, now having a new sense of
confidence knowing he still has a chance, storms down the garage
where his dad keeps hunting stuff. He grabs a shot-gun off the
shelf. Going to his bedroom he uses the butt of the gun and rams
it into the back of his wardrobe until it caves in. He’s made
his way into the walls.
He screams for his grandfather to come out. Cursing him in
every way he knows. We see for a second, grandpa's point of
view, he’s looking down at the son, suspended by his arms and
legs when he drops down on the son like a spider, knocking him
unconscious.
The son wakes up strapped to a chair. His legs and one arm are
cuffed. His shotgun is nowhere in sight. He can tell by the room
around him he’s still somewhere within the walls. The food in
front of him looks like entrails. It smells horrendous, flies
buzzing off of it. His family is also gathered around the table,
happily eating. His grandfather at the head of the table smiles
kindly. His father cut his sister's food into bite-sized
portions. A record plays in the background. He falls unconscious
yet again but this time he’s in the same spot as he was before
he was knocked out. Thinking it was just a dream he doesn’t
fixate on it, going deeper into the walls hunting for grandpa,
shotgun in hand.
He finds grandpa writing in German on the walls. He frantically
scribbles and the son points the gun at the back of his head,
quietly stepping closer for the better shot. Until he steps on a
creaky floorboard, and halts dead in his tracks. Grandpa
freezes. Slowly turning around to look at the son. The pupils of
his eyes look like slits. He laughs at the son going to make a
move when, BOOM. The shot gun goes off by his head. His ear is
bleeding but the bullet hits the wall. He only laughs harder,
the son backs up and trips on a piece of wood behind him.
Grandpa lunges at his throat, the son struggles to keep him at
bay. His shotgun was knocked too far out of the way when he
fell, grandpa is near centimeters away from his throat. Seeing a
sharp piece of floorboard he broke in his fall, the son grabs it
and drives it through grandpa's eye socket.
Grandpa slouches down to the floor. The son looks at his body,
he starts crying. It seems over until there is a second voice
crying with him. The son realizes this and slowly looks up, he’s
still crying, but his noises die out in shock. Grandpa is
mimicking his crying, that is until his crying turns into
laughing. The scene goes black.
**********
A car pulls into the driveway of the family's house. A young son
and daughter run into the house arguing about who gets what
room. A Father closes the trunk while a mother grabs a small
back, clutching her baby bump. The husband puts his arm around
his wife and kisses her forehead gently as they stare at the
outside of the house.
From inside the walls we see five sets of slit-like, yellow
eyes, they look at the family through a small crack in the
walls.
END
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