Outline for fantasy-drama screenplay TERRITORIALITY

     TERRITORIALITY

                                                               By Andrew Hawcroft

The fishing town of Gormandy, once a thriving industry and tourist destination on the Cornish coast, has been dying by inches for over five years ever since the fish ran out.  The reason for this disappearance is known by most members of the notorious Gormandy Fishermen's Union, but none of these will dare breach the code of silence regarding their profit-motivated disregard for government fishing-quotas.

Gormandy's only claim to fame these days is Sefton's Wound, a natural crevasse in the sea floor a few miles off the coast, that, due to unusual geological elements, cannot be probed by any electronic scanning device. Nobody knows how deep it is or what it contains.  Scientists from around the world continually arrive to search for these answers and, at the same time, provide a modicum of income for the largely redundant fishermen and tourist businesses of Gormandy.

On land, thirty-five year-old Hayley Fender owns Fender’s Cafe, one of the few businesses still open and not boarded up with graffiti-covered planks on the once-bustling Gormandy Boardwalk.  She lives above it with her thirteen year-old son Dominic, and eleven year-old son Ethan, who is afflicted with higher-level Downs Syndrome.

She scrapes by each day as the town scrapes by, running as it does on Welfare payments, political apathy, drunken violence and an ever-decreasing populace.

Then one day, two young American men arrange a meeting at the Town Hall.    Electronics specialists with an interest in underwater transmission technology, they claim to have brought the answer to Gormandy's problem.  Wishing to patent an invention called The Attractor, an underwater device that transmits electro-magnetic waves to redirect marine life (including fish) from traditional migration routes, they request a month’s trial so they can achieve their patent and mass-market it.

The idea of tampering with Nature and, more importantly, stealing the fish stocks of the neighbouring fishing towns is finally thought to be too high price by the townsfolk, and they grudgingly refuse to comply.

However the head of the GFU, a man of ill-morals named Hugh Cramer, has other ideas.

When, days later, the fish suddenly return to the Gormandy waters in vaster numbers than ever before, the populace are too glad to question the miracle too deeply.

Unfortunately, events take a sinister turn, and the town of Gormandy becomes a place of fear and unspoken suspicion.   Whales beach themselves, dogs bark hysterically at the sea, boats go missing, and finally, one night, the evidence that something other (and larger) than normal marine life has been drawn to their waters by the Attractor can no longer be denied.