Ashes

Ashes was loosely inspired by the In Cold Blood murders made famous by Truman Capote. It's a semi-contained psychological horror/thriller set primarily in small-town Kansas--with a majority of the scenes taking place in and around a farm house. The project centers on themes related to control and manipulation, with inter-woven challenges for the main character, Anne, a 26-year-old woman fighting to leave her abusive, manipulative boyfriend behind. As she looks to wrest control of her life from Brax, her boyfriend, she finds herself living with the murderess spirit of Percy G. Jones. Percy has been "stuck" in the farmhouse for the past 60 years after being hanged in the basement for the murders of the family that used to live in the house. Obsessed with the number five, Percy needs to kill one more person in order to find peace. But, what he'd really like is for Anne to help him go back and NOT kill the four people in 1965. "It can be zero, or it can be five. There is no peace otherwise." He KNOWS she can help him, he explains, because he saw Anne try to intervene when he first committed the killings. She has a gift, he explains, and he needs her help. Screenwriter's note: Percy is one of the most fun characters I've had the pleasure to write. He has a certain Kansas quality to him, but he fancies himself a bit of an East Coast academic. Like his spiritual existence, he's stuck between two worlds. That is, there's a certain way the world sees him, and a definite way that he sees himself. It's his fatal flaw, and this internal fight drives him forward as he struggles to be the man he really wishes he could be. I hope you enjoy reading Percy as much as I enjoyed writing him.