Film treatment: Signal 20.
After some minor research and a lot of people helping me out, I’ve come to the conclusion that my weird, awful, horrible dream from a few weeks ago should be made into a movie. So here’s my treatment, rough draft, for a film I am tentatively entitling Signal 20:
There’s a husband and a wife. Somehow a very large (re: FAAAAT, aka the mother from “Gilbert Grape”) neighbor woman dies in her trailer and the couple find her dead. As they’re shocked and trying to figure out what happened to this poor woman, some other neighbors come to the door. Not wishing to be seen with the body (for *some* reason), the couple choose to act like they’re house-sitting (or something) and answer the door. The nosy neighbor talks to them, asks to come in, but they manage to rebuff the neighbor (for some reason in my dream, a black woman, middle-aged, kind of proper). The neighbor gets a little nosier later and somehow stumbles onto the fact that there’s a dead woman in the house and is freaked because, hey, why are they trying to conceal the fact that the woman is dead? So the neighbor and her husband begin to poke around after hours to see WTF is up, but the original couple have been holing up in the house, trying to figure a way out to bury this large woman or at least keep the dead woman from being blamed on them. So the nosy neighbor and her husband are discovered by the wife, who then proceeds to kill both the neighbor lady and her husband. So now they have THREE dead bodies to deal with. The husband is freaked out by the sitch, but, hey, that’s his wife and he’s trying to stick by her. No other neighbors appear to come around but we see this couple staying in the house, trying to figure a way out of the whole ordeal. But, slowly, the wife appears to be losing her mind. She even remarks about “if it weren’t for SOME PEOPLE” (meaning the neighbor lady). The husband is getting scared because the longer they stay with the body, the worse it looks for them AND they’ve got two victims of their own (at this point in the story, the audience may not yet know the neighbors were killed by the wife). So he’s freaking out because she’s losing her mind and this goes on for a while, worse and worse until there;s a struggle between them. A life-threatening one. Someone’s now pounding at the door, and I mean POUNDING, and the husband, frightened by his wife’s perceived murderous tendencies now, runs to open it. The woman’s screaming NO DON’T and I’LL KILL YOU IF YOU DO. He knocks her down in a far room and gets to the door. It’s the police, they’re there because of stench complaints, missing person complaints, whatever, and see this guy rambling about the whole thing (“She’s crazy! You’ve got to stop her!”). He explains what happened as best he can. Cops come in, guns drawn, ready to deal with a psycho wife somewhere in the house, and see the dead lady and the dead couple. Dude’s story is checking out just fine. Only one thing: the wife has also been killed, days before. As it runs out, dude imagined his wife trying to do all this shit, but it was all him. He killed the wife and the couple. And possibly the big fat woman from the start.
I’m going to make millions!