Dead Chain

Two traumatized and competitive young men, Jim (18) and Steve (20) find themselves in a tie in various games they've been playing in the years of their friendship - board games, cards games, etc. They keep scores in notebooks. The older more traumatized male comes up with the ultimate tie breaker. Who can create the longest chain of dead bodies in the woods in the month of September? During the contest, the younger male meets a girl, Samantha, and falls in love. She's his newspaper girl. The older male, Steve, is constantly making jokes about her being added to a chain. There's also a bad flu going around at the time, which impacts various aspects of both main characters' lives, but neither of them personally gets sick. A detective, Christopher James, is put on the case but immediately runs into issues with the press and media, because one of the chains of dead bodies is found early on in September, and the press and media keep trying to tie the murders to Satanic cults, which at the time was a go-to for the press. The detective, as well as other officials, lean more towards it being the work of a single serial killer. Both the media and the detectives are wrong. The detective is also an avid photographer and has a dark room in his two bedroom apartment for processing photographs he takes with his camera, which actually helps in his solving the case - he never gets a chance to find out how complicated the case is, though, as he's killed by the older main character, Steve. The detective does find Steve's dead chain of bodies, but when he waits for Steve to return to it, hiding up in a tree, a mishap with a cigarette and his gun cause him to be Steve's final victim. On the final day of September, when they are done measuring Steve's dead chain of bodies, Jim takes his own life, due to his mother dying of the flu the day before, and also after realizing he won the contest by quite a large margin. Steve never gets to know who won the contest and ends up in a psychiatric institution.