SCREENPLAY
Hello Darkness
In the wake of working on the Trouble in Paradise script for several years, my writing partner, Justin Tuan Smith, and I decided we needed to take a crack at a true blue horror. Our initial thinking was essentially that if Trouble in Paradise’s budget was too steep for the current studio market, we’d make something more budget-friendly.
Well… Hello Darkness definitely didn’t end up being budget-friendly lol. Although this psychological horror, set near Gnome, Alaska, had a small cast and sparse set pieces, we also wrote in a polar bear that was onscreen for at least a fifth of the story’s running time. After sharing the project with several VFX professionals for their estimates on the cost of CGing a bear into that much of the film, the consensus was roughly the same: we had made another mid-budget film at minimum.
However, Justin and I truly do love this story, and there’s a fairly good chance it’ll see the light of day as a comic or graphic novel in the future.
About the story: Driven by cryptic guilt regarding his wife, an unnamed metropolitan man ventures into the isolated Alaskan tundra to strike it rich at a desolate gold mining claim. Struggling against constant summer daylight and fruitless labor, his brief triumph of unearthing gold is shattered when a starving, displaced polar bear arrives and begins relentlessly hunting him. Days of extreme sleep deprivation plunge the man into a hallucinatory state, revealing he is an unreliable narrator who actually gambled away his late wife’s medical funds and is on a desperate, symbolic quest for redemption.
As the brutal ordeal strips both combatants of their strength, empathy shifts toward the dying bear, whose desperate struggle for survival mirrors the man’s own tragic downfall. Down to his last bullet and physically broken, the man relinquishes his weapon and collapses alongside the exhausted beast just as a Coast Guard rescue helicopter arrives. After witnessing his rescuers mercy-kill the bear and later recovering in a hospital, the man stares blankly back toward the tundra, leaving it ambiguous whether he will finally return home or repeat his self-destructive cycle.
created by: JC Lacek
words: JC Lacek, Justin Tuan Smith
Read the Hello Darkness pitch deck below