Fathers Synopsis Rewrite

Fathers Synopsis

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In most of the horror genre, evil is out to get good, whether on religious, vindictive, or simply sadistic bases. Fathers is a different kind of horror, where evil doesn't have to go out of its way to haunt, eat, or violate good. Evil simply has to do what it does best in the real world: stop good acts from happening. The heroes of Fathers are three normal people—a man, a girl, and a mother—who are trying hard to do what they think is best in a city full of people who, by trying to live normal lives, get in their way.

Book One: Fathers.

It begins with a normal night for Paul Moeller, a businessman with an appetite for cheating on his wife, Beatrice. When his prostitute drugs him and attempts to murder him, Paul transforms into a monster, going on a city-wide murder spree and finally collapsing into his bed at home. When he wakes up, he finds that the world hasn't noticed his apparent massacre: the world has transformed, and his wife has disappeared. He goes back to his office to find that it's full of drones. Business as usual, right? But now, their bodies reflect their mundane, uninteresting lives. Paul's coworkers no longer have faces, only smooth panes of skin. They make noises to indicate conversation, but their mouths are no longer necessary, and they can only inflect. Thinking that he's suffering from some kind of drug withdrawal, and still recoiling from violent memories of the night before, Paul begins his quest to find out what happened to his world.

The unnamed and unfamiliar metropolis is the centerpiece of Fathers, and as Paul goes from area to area, it dawns on him that perhaps he's not having some kind of drug-induced fever dream. The cops of the city are huge, brutish, but they carry on petty arguments about whether it's worth the effort to hunt down the “real monsters.” Children, untamed by negligent parents are tiny imps, brutalizing weaker things without empathy or pity. In the city's theme park, ecstatic men are roasted on spits—and all the carnival-goers eat fresh kabobs. Paul is led on by a little boy who looks just like his abandoned son, and as he visits each city locale, he finds a dark exaggeration of what he remembers as real.

Vivid illusions of his wife being tortured rip at Paul's conscience. He tracks down the hooker's drug dealer, a stage performer at a seedy bar. Her name is Diana. She confesses that although she cut a mild hallucinogen into the drugs given to Paul, they're not responsible for the drastic change in the world. “Face it, honey. I'm real.” As she sings, her skin peels off and drifts away from her in slices, like rose petals. Unhelpful as she is, she does offer Paul one lead: one of her clients is his ex-girlfriend, now a helpless junkie.

Drug addicts in this world are one of the many enemies that Paul has to face. Instead of just wasting away with altered minds, the addicts crave only the blood of people they love, feasting on it then punishing themselves almost immediately afterwards. Paul's ex-girlfriend is a literal husk—the more drugs she consumes, the less of a person is left. Paul gives her a little bit of his blood in exchange for information that she claims to have. She confesses that she never put their son up for adoption when she said she would. After Paul left her, she killed the boy and threw him into a dumpster. Paul leaves, committed to finding his child, and his ex finds his blood bitter and unsatisfying.

Paul wanders through the world more, searching for evidence of his son and his wife, and finally finds them in the custody of a massive creature, bloated and blistered, called The Mayor. Consumed by excess and power-madness, Paul's negotiation with the Governor are a simple exchange of services. Paul leads four people, including Lenny Kennington, to the Governor for access to his wife and son. It turns out the boy, much like the children Paul sees earlier, is a monster, torturing Beatrice in a dungeon beneath the mayor's office. Paul rescues his wife, but, like always, chooses to abandon her to her fate, resolving instead to raise his son up properly and protect him from the nightmare world.

Book Two: Children.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside; she feels more committed to his idealistic morals than to her hardworking mother, who scrapes together a small suburban existence for Lenny and her four brothers, who all went into the military. All four suffer from cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, ranging from mild, in the case of the middle twins, to her nearly comatose youngest brother. Lenny divides her time between caring for her brothers and haunting a nearby servicemen bar. One night, two regulars give her crap about being a slut, and a man who looks just like her father comes to her rescue. After awkwardly turning down her advances, he gives her his phone number and address—he has an apartment in the city. She promises to stop by if she's ever in town.

She returns home to find her mother weeping uncontrollably. She has wept her eyes out of their sockets, and keeps trying to put them back in, babbling incoherently. On the kitchen table are four folded up army-issue flags as well as a letter saying that all four of Lenny's brothers are dead. Lenny, transitioning into the change much faster than Paul did, comforts her mom coldly, then packs a bag and heads into the city.

Traveling from a suburb into a city can be an adventure in and of itself. Lenny hitches a ride from a suburban family whose mother puppets her young children on literal strings, then gets on the subway, where anyone who makes eye contact gets attacked. On the train, she also meets Dinah King, who assures her that everything will be all right, because her baby says so. She goes through various other set pieces—a central transportation hub, a strip mall, and the college area—all the while finding her brothers pantomiming their wartime selves with innocent people. The twins, who jovially tortured people, torture themselves, while staring at each other in an empty mirror frame. The eldest appeals to attractive women, who are barely-responsive balloon figures, for forgiveness, then pops them when they can't respond.

The youngest is missing an arm and mutely scavenges others, trying to put himself back together. Lenny, still on the trail of the man she's sure is her father, has to try to sate their wartime desires, while keeping hold of the wonderful vision she has of patriotism and warfare. Her conclusion is that sacrifice of the self is worth it for the larger, greater thing, and she arranges to meet with The Mayor to negotiate the release of her father. The man slaps her, and tells her that sacrifice is sometimes letting other people take care of you. He fights the Mayor, and when the fight is over, Lenny finds herself back in the real world, forced to attend the funerals of her brothers and the mysterious stranger who looked just like her dad.

Book Three: Mother, tell your children not to walk my way.

Dinah King finds out that she's pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. After a few months, her ob/gyn gives her the bad news: the child has Down syndrome. “That can't be true,” Dinah insists. “My baby speaks perfectly.” As it turns out, Dinah's baby has already told her about his ailment and assures her that there is a cure at the heart of the city. The transformation of the city happens to Dinah as she clocks in for the graveyard shift at the stationhouse, and a horrible creature—recognizable as a transformed cop from Paul's earlier encounter with them—massacres a precinct of police. Dinah, however, is untouched, and her baby even seems to purr at the bloodbath.

Armed as best as she can, Dinah cuts into the heart of the city, following the footsteps of Paul and Lenny, but oddly in a different order. She goes to the Mayor's office first, where she finds and patches up Morgan, the man who looks like Lenny's dad, and Beatrice. She helps them defeat the Mayor, and recruits them to help her navigate the city safely.

Beatrice leads her to Diana, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dinah. She demands to follow them wherever they go, but ends up leaving a trail of skin petals for the Mayor's henchman, a ravenous beast who needs a master to live. The big set piece of Dinah's chapter is going into the underground mall and appealing to the queen of the mall for safe passage to a church which Dinah's baby demands to be birthed in. The queen constantly surrounds herself by things that she does not allow herself to have, an exercise in desire and self-torture. Dinah negotiates with her with what ends up being overindulgence and stimulation, giving and giving until the queen cannot contain herself. She gives Dinah two saints' bones which will take her over the river into the church an island.

For the birth of her child, Dinah is granted two options. The child can grow as a normal human boy in the nightmare world, or as a boy with Down syndrome in the real world, with the potential to bring apocalypse. Diana offers to take care of the child, and her greed forces Dinah to kill her. She drifts away in a cloud of petals. Dinah chooses the real world, but as she prepares to leave, Morgan and Beatrice beg her not to leave them behind. She relents. She returns to the real world with her potentially demon baby and two lifeless dolls for his crib.

Although obviously Fathers has a limited plotline, I think the story has enormous potential in the setpieces, exploring different parts of the city and how each part changes. Most zombies or horror in general these days features monsters afflicted by some kind of illness. I want to create monsters afflicted by a social disease—essentially, what could happen to society if it gets carried away with its simplest obsessions. It's motivated by good zombie flicks, bad zombie flicks, and survival horror video games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.