A mother wades through Chinese mythical culture to free her son from possession.

SYNOPSIS:

SETH, a six-year-old American boy, is possessed by the soul of a self-mutilating Chinese hunger striker. JULIA, Seth’s desperate mother, braves the world of Chinese mythology to free her son from the deadly spirit.

Bitter over her husband’s untimely death, Julia won’t allow Seth to leave a gift at his father’s grave. Despite fervent warnings from an Asian woman grieving nearby, Seth takes photos in the cemetery. Soon he hallucinates bloody images, stops eating, speaks Chinese, and begins injuring himself. Physicians and friends despair. Julia overcomes the psychological jail she’s created for herself to chase down the ghost torturing Seth. Evidence leads to superstitious Chinatown and MRS. CHANG who was burying her nephew, SU GWONG (Morning Light), the day Julia and Seth visited the cemetery. Su Gwong’s trauma from Tiananmen Square and Seth’s behavior are connected.

The spirit inside Seth is acting out age-old Chinese myths: a boy cuts flesh from his own leg to feed his starving father; a young man lies on a frozen lake to melt it, driven by his father’s hunger. Julia must hold worried social workers at bay as time runs out for her and Mrs. Chang to free Seth of the spirit of Su Gwong who committed suicide after hearing that his father had been killed in retaliation for his son protesting and fleeing China. Su Gwong’s soul yearns to repent for abandoning his father.

Julia and Mrs. Chang arrange to exhume Su’s body and send it back to China, and bury him atop his father to warm his spirit. As Su Gwong’s body is raised, Julia grasps Seth’s hand and in a vision is transported to Tiananmen Square-1989. She drags Su Gwong off the Square and convinces him not to blame himself for his father’s death. Seth is freed. In her own way, so is Julia, as demonstrated when she allows Seth to leave the gift on his father’s grave.

(There is a second version of this script that utilizes more recent persecuted Falun Gong protests as backdrop rather than 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) **** This script received the ScriptVamp ranking of “delicious.” Coverage: “This is a creepy-kid tale. Like The Ring, The Shining, and The Sixth Sense, it’s full of horrific images sure to scare an audience. A fantastic and unpredictable ending. Unlike its predecessors, the possession is not the bad guy, rather a tortured soul in profound grief shared by the main character. The creepy stuff the boy experiences is the reenactment of the torture and death of Su Gwong (Morning Light)-a Chinese hunger striker. Rare to feel sorry for the antagonist at the end, which makes this so unique.”