An ADAPTED SCREENPLAY FOR A FEATURE FILM
Psychological ghost-chiller, adapted from Picano’s novella, Looking Glass Lives.
Setting: Contemporary ocean-front, semi-rural, Rhode Island Coast, and in Civil War days.
Logline
A spellbinding, erotic tale eerily bridging two sets of young people living in a seaside New England town two centuries apart. Stories within stories, secrets buried for epochs, and the mysterious figure of a solitary figure from the American Civil War era that haunts the imagination.
Synopsis
When Roger Lynch and his newly-wed wife, Karen, detour from their honeymoon to the town where he spent an unforgettable childhood summer at his grandfather's summer house, they fall in love with the old Pritchard Place, up for sale: the town’s "haunted home" of Roger's youth.
They buy the house, move in, and restore it to its mid-Nineteenth Century glory. But they also set in motion a chain of events that Roger realizes was fated from long before their birth. The two young lovers and Roger's dangerously obsessed, cousin Chas end up playing roles that appear to be predestined.
Workmen discover a long shuttered library and among the dusty tomes, journals of Amity Pritchard, describing her life during the 1860’s, her beautiful sister, Constance, and dashing Union Army captain, Eugene V. Calder, who comes to court one sister and remains to seduce them all.
At first mysteriously, then openly Chas returns to the Pritchard Place and charms Karen, despite Roger’s warnings. Chas makes it known to Roger that he wants to pick up their relationship where they left it off, at ages twelve and thirteen. Roger violently rejects him, and Chas vows revenge.
Roger immerses himself in diaries and we too follow Amity Pritchard in her guarded life as she entertains Calder's advances and falls under his spell, only to be betrayed.
Roger begins to have vivid nightmares, out of which he awakens to see the figure of a woman – Amity?
Karen refuses to listen to Roger’s ideas of his and Chas' connection to those long dead, nor the horrifying future he predicts. More discoveries enlighten and frighten Roger. Chas impels the triangle to a climax demanding that Karen leave Roger to go with him. This is an exact repetition of what happened to Amity Pritchard.
Despite everything, Roger determines to halt the cycle of love and tragedy that seems doomed to recur again and again, forever, like the infinity sign engraved on the cover of Amity Pritchard's moldering journals.
Script Available