COLD
TO THE TOUCH
Based upon the stories of
M.R. James.
Conceived and adapted for the
screen
by Andrew Hawcroft
Outline
Cold
To The Touch (first produced as a play of mine called
An Unsettling Evening in Southend’s
Palace Theatre in 2011,) is a deliberately lean and sparse (tonally) screenplay
that adapts five of M.R. James’ most famous short ghost stories, and plays them
out in a single film of atmospheric chills, shocks and slow-burning dread.
Cold
To The Touch will take audiences out of the
comfortable world of the technological and pragmatic, and return them to the
childhood fears that hide inside all of us until brought out by the right
circumstances.
WRITER’S NOTE: Regarding the five stories I have adapted; while taking the essentials of the plot for
each, I have, in places, adapted them with my own creative content regarding
settings, plot points and characters, hopefully respectfully endorsing the
spirit of each classic tale while adding something fresh to the telling.
The five short stories chosen to be adapted
are;
CANON
ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK: An English amateur
archeologist travels to a remote cathedral in France in search of artifacts to
outdo his similarly-motivated friends.
As night falls, eerie, mocking laughter arouses his interest in the
building, and a pale and nervous sacristan shows him a book that suggests an
unpleasant possibility as to the culprit.
A
WARNING TO THE CURIOUS: A young History student of good background has squandered his
inheritance money on the fast life. He
arrives in the English seaside town of Seaburg with the aim of replenishing his
fortune by finding and digging up the legendary third crown of East Anglia, rumoured
to be buried somewhere on the coastline. Unfortunately for him, he will be
successful.
NUMBER
13: A traveling
academic staying in Room 14 at a Denmark hotel, finds the quaint national
tradition of having no rooms numbered 13 to be amusing….until the room beside
his becomes occupied in the night-time hours by more than the salesman staying
in Room 12
“OH
WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD”: A schoolteacher, holidaying upon the desolate
beaches of Burnstow, discovers an antiquated whistle whilst poking amongst a
ruined Templar abbey. Blowing the
whistle attracts to him the increasingly undesirable attention of….something.
CASTING
THE RUNES:
When a magazine editor refuses to publish the disturbing articles of a
local self-professed master of the occult, he finds himself in mysterious
possession of a slip of paper bearing strange Runic symbols, and the English
words…’Seven days are allowed’. From
then on, he cannot escape the rising feeling that he is being followed…and not
by a man.
In the age of cynicism, social media and
smartphones, Cold To The Touch escorts
the unsuspecting audience back to a state they had forgotten. It will be an unsettling return, but a
memorable one.
-
Andrew Hawcroft.
Copyright ©Andrew Hawcroft 08/01/2010
Tel (00353) 872383083
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