When swarming shadows slay beach-goers during a solar eclipse, a troubled young sheriff, her alcoholic ex-husband, and friends struggle against secret forces to hunt the shadows down to save their Pacific Northwest fishing town.

SYNOPSIS:

Deadly Shadows

WRITER

Toni Martocchio

PHONE

+1(818) 540-8031

EMAIL

tlmartocchio@gmail.com

When swarming shadows slay beachgoers during a solar eclipse, a troubled young sheriff, her alcoholic ex-husband, and friends struggle against secret forces to hunt the shadows down to save their Pacific Northwest fishing town.

Deadly Shadows is a supernatural horror feature in the vein of Ghost Ship (2002), as both involve secret military experiments . The film opens in Charleston, Oregon, a small fishing port, present day. Lead Morgan Lee, a deputy sheriff, works her shifts as usual, patrolling the town. Blonde, Caucasian, tall, 25, and recently divorced, she is alternatingly anxious and cerebral, relating to animals better than people. Morgan has an odd habit of twiddling a lock of her hair and pacing back and forth while thinking, as she analyzes how to defend her friends and the town.

Her ex-husband, Fred Lee, 28, is Caucasian, tall, handsome, and an ex-soldier who owns and captains an inherited commercial fishing trawler, Defender. After the reported accidental fishing death of his father, for which he (incorrectly) blames himself, Fred succumbs to self-doubt, and becomes his own worst enemy, harming himself by drinking heavily and pushing Morgan away. Fred still carries a torch for Morgan and defends her and his community more tenaciously than himself.

Fred’s inherited crew, Etta Baker and Matu Nez, regularly drop by to pester Fred about taking the boat to sea. Etta, 37, African American, and take-no-prisoners tough, carries a Bible everywhere. Matu, 38, 6’5”, Native American, is a fastidiously dapper, yet built like a linebacker. Both former elite forces military, Etta and Matu join RAH, a secret organization dedicated to rescuing soldiers from covert agency/military experiments, to find their missing soldier siblings.

On routine patrol, Morgan pulls up to Sunset Beach, intending to spend lunch with her friends as fifty townsfolk gather to watch a solar eclipse. As the eclipse progresses, a dozen black shadows instantly appear a few feet above the crowd. Starkly black against the twilight sky, the shadows are roughly man-size and opaque. The shadows’ outlines flicker with static. Electricity fills the air with menacing sparks and crackling. The shadows descend and envelope the townsfolk, who scream and scream, dropping and writhing on the sand, as the shadows siphon the life force out of each victim. As Morgan reaches the beach, all lie dead, faces frozen in fear and agony. The shadows are gone.

This attack thrusts Morgan, as the sole living witness and local deputy, into a dangerous hunt for the shadows. Morgan’s superior, Sheriff Terrell Daniels, 54, finds her account unbelievable. He orders activation of the emergency mass notification system, warning townsfolk to stay inside due to a chemical spill, and an all points search.

The sun is setting as Morgan patrols the harbor, then heads down the dock to the Defender to warn Fred, Etta and Matu about the shadows. On the dock, Morgan spies a looming shadow appear behind a pizza delivery guy. She tackles him, falling with him into the bay. The shadow stops, quivering, at the water’s surface, then dematerializes. Continuing her patrol, Morgan finds a dead teen girl in the Fisherman Memorial Garden, and calls it in.

A montage follows, starting four years ago, with scenes showing Matu and Etta learning that their siblings are missing in action, then joining RAH with Fred’s father, Captain Mark Lee (44, decisive), and other ex-special forces, who then rescue soldiers from a covert experiment.

Next, montage scenes starting eight months ago show Mark jumping overboard from the Defender, faking his drowning to go undercover for RAH, then Mark’s funeral, and ending with Fred passed out drunk as a deputy serves him with the divorce judgment.

Returning to the present, Mark enters a covert CIA lab at the Coos Head Naval Station near Sunset Beach, masquerading as a CIA agent, with Matu and Etta hiding outside.

Meanwhile, Morgan has second brush with death by shadow. Driving home, her headlights illuminate a mélange of dead rats, dogs, and cats. As she kneels to examine a dog, electricity fills the air with sparking sounds. Morgan rotates and looks up. A shadow is dropping on her! She screams and crabs to the side into a roll over the rats and cats, just as Fred tosses a bucket of water on the shadow. Again, the shadow dematerializes with water. Morgan tells Fred to get lost, but he follows her anyway.

An hour later at her trailer, Morgan does some internet research about Project MK-Ultra and secret CIA tests in the ‘60s, and she wonders whether the government would still be doing tests like that. She decides to investigate the naval station near Sunset Beach. Calling Fred to join her, they head to the station to take photos as proof of the shadows.

Back at the naval station’s control room, Navy Commander Cal Pierce (48, lifer yes-man) and CIA agent Stan Fisk (aka Mark Lee), watch a large wall mounted monitor showing inside the adjacent lab. The brightly lit lab houses a dozen comatose soldiers wearing a wired helmet on their heads. The soldiers convulse in synch with the oscillating crackling and sparks emitted by opaque, man-sized, flickering, staticky shadows floating two feet above them.

Dr. Maura McLaren (42) assures Agent Fisk that they have created the ultimate weapon. She explains that an anomalous electrical surge right before the solar eclipse that day caused energy to separate from the subjects and form deadly shadows. Each shadow instinctively siphons energy from every life form that it encounters to survive. The shadows hunt during the day and return to their person of origin at dark.

At that moment, Morgan and Fred burst in, handcuffed, followed by guards. Fred and Morgan are shocked to see Mark alive, with Fred exclaiming “Dad! My God! How?” Mark knows his cover is blown, so he takes Commander Pierce hostage. Before they can escape, soldiers shoot them with darts. They collapse and are dragged to the brig.

The next morning, Fred and Morgan are strapped on gurneys and taken to the lab. Mark is duct-taped to a chair for interrogation, but he wakes up and escapes the cell. At the lab, rising electronic gauges show increasing amperage. Morgan and Fred twitch, then convulse simultaneously. A shadow materializes above each of them. As through a fisheye lens, Morgan sees her body convulsing a few feet below her, eyes closed. Morgan turns her head to see the other test subjects, and gasps in horror. Floating above each unconscious soldier is a translucent doppelganger of the soldier staring down at themselves, and, on each soldier apparition’s back, diaphanous revenants of that shadow’s victims float one on top of another in a gruesome stack, flickering and moaning, trapped in a pulsing sparking shadow. Morgan recognizes her three friends killed at Sunset Beach, writhing and moaning. Morgan screams.

Morgan awakens later that night, alone in a deprivation chamber. Dr. McLaren had her placed there to test whether the darkness prevents the shadow’s return to its person of origin. Morgan bangs on the chamber walls and is rescued by Etta, Matu and Mark. As they discuss their plan to rescue the test subjects, their friend Gene Bradshaw shows up with Sheriff Daniels, and Deputies Brown, Gardner, and Smith. They join forces to take charge of the control room.

After a fire fight in which Deputy Smith is killed, our team takes charge of the control room. The monitor shows that the experiment is still in process. Gene is horrified to see the apparitions of his wife, Destiny, and five-year-old son, Danny, writhing and moaning with the other victims, stacked on the backs of the hovering doppelgangers.

A flashback shows Gene playing softball with Danny on a sunny day at Sunset Beach. As they sit together happily on the sand, Danny holds up his right hand, pinkie finger curled, insisting that Gene pinkie-swear he will never leave him. Gene pinkie-swears.

Back in the present day, at a computer, Etta discovers that her missing brother may be in the lab. The team agrees that they need to get the shadows out of the lab so they can save the test subjects, even though it means turning them loose in the countryside again. Etta shuts down the power, and the shadows leave through the wall. But when the team goes to the lab to rescue the test subjects, six soldiers blast the lab with a LRAD - sound cannon, crippling our team, then wheel out three test subjects, including Etta’s brother, Sam, and escape in a van. Etta and Matu follow them in Mark’s sedan.

In a showdown at a warehouse in the seedy rural outskirts, Matu disables the escape helicopter tail rotor, so the soldiers drive an armored vehicle through our team’s blockade, and a chase scene ensues. The deputies gain on the armored vehicle until its passenger throws spiked tire deflation devices onto the road, deflating the SUVs’ tires. The armored vehicle speeds away. Knowing the road is washed out ahead, they walk Eastward, guns drawn.

Blood-curdling screams and rounds of automatic weapon fire echo through the forest ahead. As they turn a corner, a dozen bodies lie in the road ahead. Black shadows float sparking and crackling above three of them. The shadows dematerialize, leaving Sam and the other two test subjects unconscious but alive. They’re taken to the hospital.

As the day passes, the shadows continue hunting, killing a janitor at the elementary school and a family picking wild Chanterelle mushrooms at Cape Arago pine forest.

Late afternoon, our team heads to the hospital to protect the test subjects, patients, and staff, in case the shadows return, as expected, to their persons of origin at dark. They implement a two-fold plan: Defensively, relocate the test subjects to a large underground storage room, placing them in Faraday shielded tents to block the shadows from reconnecting. Offensively, the team stands watch, and arms themselves with defibrillators and High Energy Electrolasers.

As the shadows approach the hospital at dusk, they kill Sheriff Daniels standing watch at the entrance. Attacking underground, the shadows are strengthened by the Electrolasers, melding into one huge quivering mass. Matu leaps at the mass with a defibrillator but is drawn upward into its undulating shadowy mass as distorted siphoned souls start peeking through the murky fog. Matu’s lifeless body drops to the floor. The shadows enter the tents, convulsing the test subjects. Finally, Morgan climbs a ladder and uses a lighter to set off a ceiling sprinkler. The grid activates and sprays the room. The shadows disappear.

Fred awakens in his Faraday tent. Overcome with happiness about Fred and sadness about the death of Matu and Sheriff Daniels, Morgan lays her head on his chest, silently sobbing. Morgan has learned to face her anxieties and understand that although life is uncertain, she can be courageous when faced with danger, and, by the film’s end, she renews her love with Fred. Dr. Takata gives him a clean bill of health. The others remain unconscious.

Early the next morning, Morgan, Fred, Mark, Gene and Etta gather in Defender’s wheelhouse, mourning Matu. Timu enters and reveals that Matu was embedded in the CIA black op conducting the experiments, and, thanks to him, RAH knows who the main players are and is launching a mission to terminate the program. Fred, Morgan and Gene pledge to join RAH to stop the experiments. Three days later, RAH raids a CIA black site in Seattle, and takes the top CIA agent and other agents to the RAH Caribbean facility for debriefing.

Two weeks later, Fred, Mark, Morgan, Etta and Gene are seated at Defender’s galley table eating sandwiches. The team acknowledges that many questions remain unanswered, including where all the shadows and their victims’ souls went. Mark reports that RAH will stay ready to confront any injustices or crimes that hurt America’s armed forces and veterans, plus continue to pay for treatment and rehabilitation of test subjects.

Morgan and Gene accompany Etta to visit Sam, her brother who remains unconscious at the hospital. When Etta sits by Sam’s bed, he suddenly sits up and doesn’t recognize her, but repeatedly addresses Gene as his “Papa.” Sam has never met Gene. Sam panics when Gene tries to leave to get a doctor. Gene freezes, eyes welling with tears, when Sam holds up his curled pinky finger, crying, channeling Gene’s dead son Danny, that Gene pinky-swore he'd never leave him.