The PITCH - A shocking discovery!

Orgininal Article: Mummified Baby Haunts Police By: Susan Candiotti. CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/02/btsc.candiotti/

In Short: This story has haunted me for three years now since I first ran across it and lived in the back of my brain. After her mother dies a woman goes to clean out her parent’s old storage locker and inside a suitcase finds a mummified infant wrapped in newspaper that dates back to 1957. Religious paraphernalia is included. A shocking discovery for sure for both she and the police investigating it. However it has a built in mystery and horror worked into it.
The Pitch: It is that mystery with which we begin. Now the simplest plot revolved around solving the mystery of who this child is and how he got there. The body was wrapped in newspaper from 1957, still had an umbilical cord attached, then was wrapped in nylon pants. Several religious themed post cards along with a silver container with a rosary inside, and a black and white photograph of a young girl were all in a stripped box that was stored with the mummy in the first suitcase – which had been stuffed in a second suitcase. Oddity abounds because of these simple items placed with such a horrific find and each provides its own tiny mystery that as they are solved lead back to who the baby is. Movie-goers like being shown such an odd motley of clues and working along with the lead character to the final discovery after all. Now at first glance all of the ephemera plainly points to some sort of religious and secret shine made to a dead baby. That is creepy enough.

However what if we tweak it just a bit from a familial mystery past thriller and straight into horror?

Now the audience is going to assume along with the female protagonist that the baby is somehow related to her via her mother but what if after DNA testing that comes up as not true? Likewise the photograph of the smiling young girl is of someone no one in the family has ever seen or heard of. Next simply move the rosary from being in a box to being wrapped around the newspaper’ed mummy. Then have the newspaper’s front page speak of a local tragedy or odd happenstance back in 1957. Finally add in a healthy dash of dementia, mysterious circumstances, and/or suicide on the mother’s part that brings the prodigal daughter home and you have now, with small alterations, redressed the stage for something a bit more diabolical.. but what?

First we start with odd happenstances around the mother’s death, some references form the mad old woman about the events leading to the tragedy in that newspaper along with worry that ‘her burden’ will be left uncared for. Then in the first act as the facts start rolling in we assail the female protagonists with unsettling happenstances from moving shadows, to moved objects around her house, to infant cries in the middle of the night and top it off with something cataclysmic when she tries to go back home and leave the investigating to the police like a pile-up on the freeway on the way to her plane that leaves her in the hospital and unable to travel for a few weeks or the plane she was going to get on going down before it lands at her airport and her having to stay for an extra day or two until alternate flights get figured out. Now that we have the heroine who is rattled and trapped and a foreboding sense that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

But what is it? The mummified baby is actually the Anti-Christ and the mother an ex-nun that killed it to save the world? The mother was responsible for the mother of the child and it to die through some jealous revenge plot that went horribly awry and had kept the evidence every since? The mother in a moment of altruism picked up a young expecting woman (the girl in the photo when she was younger) who disappeared leaving a stillborn baby in the spare bedroom with the rosary and then was seen at the events leading up to the ’57 incident before disappearing? Or hell make the infant’s DNA ‘unknown’ and you can have some sort of Communion style plot where it a hybrid from abduction experiments and the corpse was the only thing that kept the mother and her family off of the alien’s radar… and now they are back.
But what if it’s not Schlock? This is pretty easy. Make it a heavy picture that keeps hitting you in the gut with its dramatic actors, overall melancholy and reality jarring horror. Just make sure not to take it too serious and focus more on characterization of not only the heroine and other bit players but the baby and the girl in the photograph to. Likewise don’t telegraph the reveal and don’t make it Nazi experimentation and probably steer away from the alien hybrid idea.

In the end make what the mother did back in 1957 horrible but something that had to be done for the sake of her family or mankind. The sort of thing that eats a person inside and haunts them every step of their life – figuratively and literally.

-Crowbait