THE STRANGER COMES AT MIDNIGHT is a psychological thriller rooted in a young girl's botched basement abortion, a horror once widely practiced in the U.S. and now under threat to return.

LOGLINE: A stranger's stalking of a young woman triggers a spate of bloody haunting dreams from her childhood past. Desperate to end her nightmares, she designs her fight-back with a clear intent to kill.

SYNOPSIS:

A twelve-year-old girl at a gravesite in a desolate cemetery. As she stares in silence at the gravestone, a child's haunting cries swirl and escalate inside her head. When the cries end in a piercing scream, the hardened young girl's slight flinch is her only sign of emotion.

As the young lady matures into confident womanhood her childhood traumas escalate, especially when a shadowy stranger begins appearing in the dark alley outside her bedroom window.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, her uneasy childhood recollections flash back in bits and pieces. They unfold in mournful cries, and in her own morbid recall when as a child she predicted her own death. Clearly, the woman has not yet come to terms with some horrid family secret, one that has spawned a love-hate relationship with her catatonic mother, an old woman now confined to a mental institution who repeatedly begs for her daughter's forgiveness.

Around the same time the stranger appears, the young woman meets a little girl who will further complicate her life; for the youngster comes with a handsome father who takes a romantic interest. When the shadowy stranger finally breaks into her bedroom, kills her protective German Shepherd, then leaves her a chilling calling card that he is going to return, our victim begins to conflate the two new men. In her rattled state of mind she rationalizes that her one bullet will eliminate them both.

"The Stranger Comes At Midnight" is among my lower budget projects. Screenplay is available on request: elgato@netzero.com