Work in Progress
The difficulty of writing an action script lies not with the hero, but with the antagonist. The villain is the one with the master plan. All the protagonist must do is thwart it.
The same turns out to be true of horror. If anything, the malevolent forces of horror are even more important than the villains of action. The lack of an eventual, coherent explanation for the evil forcesósupernatural or otherwiseóin the horror films I've seen recently make this abundantly clear.
For that reason, I've been working hard to craft quality backstory for my embryonic ice-fishing horror project. Here, for your commentary (please), is one of the backstory ideas I've been thinking about.
There is a lake in the middle of nowhere, in the forests of far northern Minnesota. Only two buildings stand on the lakeís shores: a deserted lodge and an old building of indeterminate use.
The second building was an asylum, an institution of last resort that accepted (sought out) problem patients from other facilities. It kept them far out of society's way, and out of the mindspace of those who liked to check up on their crazy (but otherwise benign) uncles at 'mainstream' mental hospitals. The asylum on the lake kept the wholly depraved, the utterly mad, the completely deranged at safe remove in the distant wilderness.
The asylum was run by an intellectual outsider whose ideas about insanity were themselves both mad and dangerous. If the mainstream treatments of the day were dubious and inhumane, the cures administered by the doctor at the asylum by the lake were an abomination, having more in common with the crimes of the holocaust than the acts of medicine carried out at even the most notorious houses of insanity. But if treatments at the asylum failed and patients died appalling deaths, they were in the middle of noplace, with no one the wiser or more disturbed. There were plenty of places to hide the corpses that were not kept for study or amusement.
What localsóthe closest of whom were an hour away on dark dirt tracksóknew about the place was a mixture of superstition and invention. It was a rest home for the wealthy, a work house for the wayward, a secluded compound home to a reclusive robber baronís inbred descendants, a haunted logging camp abandoned after a fire in the days of voyageurs. Over time the superstition and invention receded into the community's collective unconscious, no more actively remembered than the names of distant cousins who lived back in Scandinavia.
The asylum stopped seeking new patients in the sixties, but continued on. In the seventies the doctor's place was taken by his son, whose lunatic mother was herself a patient since girlhood. It was openóthough uncommentedóknowledge at the asylum that son drowned father in the lake, holding the elderly patriarch's head under the water for an hour even after his struggles subsided. The son cared for the place's charges as his father had; life persisted, uninterrupted.
In the eighties, when public disinterest for funding public wellness demanded that houses of mental health close, a bureaucrat chanced on a record of the asylum's existence. A public servant trekked from St. Paul to inform the doctor's son that the place must be shut down, and it was. The mad were calmly turned out, the doctor's son among them.
The lake and its shores was purchased by a developer, who built a lodge for summer retreat between April and August of the following year. The construction was weighted by misfortune: broken tools, supplies gone missing, a plague of minor injuries, an architect's unexpected disappearance, a fight in which two laborers drowned one another. The year after, when the developer and his staff returned at winter's end (the place was never planned for cold-weather habitation) to welcome a summer's vacationersóanglers, hikers, huntersóthey discovered the asylum's population had returned to their home, painstakingly re-collected by the doctorís son, meticulously re-organized into their original social order.
What vacationers came were driven off. The staff followed them in short order. The developer himselfóafter an aborted attempt to involve the authoritiesófell out of society's awareness. When he contacted his family (with whom he had never been particularly close) almost twenty yeas later he had been working odd jobs across the country for a long time, trying to drive from his mind whatever had transpired at the end of the lodgeís only summer of occupation.
When the developer died last year, the courts discovered the deed to the lake and property, still in his name. His brother, an avid ice-fisherman who would have loved to make use of the old lodge in the wintertime, didn't even get a chance to visit it before his physician discovered a mass of tumors that gave him no more than three months to put his affairs in order. The developer's probate ended the day his brother died, and the property passed immediately, in equal portion, to the developer's nephew and niece, his only surviving kin.
The nephewís life stands in shambles, his tech startup a disaster of debt and ruin. The niece has worked seven different retail jobs in two years since graduating from college. While they puzzle out the location and particulars of their surprise inheritance, the doctor's son cares for his mad patients on that very lake, in the middle of nowhere, in the forests of far northern Minnesota.
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