Film Writing | Jamie Fessenden's Blog

I missed Halloween with this post, so I’ll aim for the Day of the Dead instead! My intent was to blog about some of the scary/creepy stories I’ve written over the years.

I love horror, so I’m actually surprised I haven’t written more of it. For a very brief time, I made micro-budget horror films. They were of variable quality, and unfortunately you can only see one, at present, on YouTube. It’s really grisly, so don’t watch it if you don’t go for gore. I made it for the Eerie Horror Fest in 2006. They had a contest for filmmakers to submit ads for the festival. Sadly, ours “won,” simply because it was the only submission, but I’m proud of it. We were experimenting with lighting and learning how to use our new camera crane (basically a teeter-totter device that allowed the camera to smoothly pan up and down). If you go to the YouTube channel for Dunkirk Studios, you can see some trailers for other films we worked on. Some made it into festivals, but our big project, “The Resurrection,” was never finished, due to lack of locations willing to allow naked people covered in blood to run around on their premises. It would have been epic. EPIC.

After publishing some short stories and novellas (one I’d consider novel-length, in its second edition), I decided to dive into a full-length novel in same vein as The Da Vinci Code, in which the characters are piecing together an occult mystery by researching ancient tomes. The result was Murderous Requiem.

In this novel, I delved into the writings of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Italian scholar who was more or less responsible for bringing the works of Plato to the West, and who believed that music could heal the human body by bringing our pure spiritual form into harmony with our physical form. He was a jack-of-all-trades – a doctor, philosopher, writer, and composer – so the story is about the discovery of a mass written by Ficino, which could go one step further and pull the soul back into the body after death. The story involves a beautiful drug addict with the voice of an angel, a murder, nearly everything my music theory major taught me in college, and ominous, supernatural flocks of ravens.

Bigfoot Hunters in Love was originally a free short story I gave away on my blog. You can still get it here. But I thought it needed more, so eventually I expanded upon it and contracted Scott J. Coatsworth to create a cover that conveyed both the silly elements of the story and the creepiness. It’s about a man who moves to the country and is chased into the forest one night by a monster. He loses his slippers and his dignity, eventually crashing headlong into a man who’s been hunting the creature for years. Along with our hero’s trusty dog, Thor, they set out to uncover proof that the creature exists.

Sadly, the anthology of bizarre stories set in the Old West edited by my friend and fellow author, Kim Fielding, is no longer available, except in used paperbacks. I’ll have to republish my short story from it: The Sheriff of Para Siempre. This was one of my favorite of my own stories, about two young men hiring themselves out as law-enforcement in a dying mining town. It ultimately involves a man who simply won’t stay dead, and the ending is the most tragic thing I’ve ever written. As one reviewer said: “I’m a blubbering mess right now, so if I’m not making sense, you can blame it on Jamie Fessenden. Quite simply, this story broke me. It broke my heart and it made me speechless.”

Author and friend, Eli Easton, came up with a great idea for an anthology: Gothic horror romances to be released each Halloween, each with a specific theme. The first was called Gothika #1: Stitch, and Eli did the cover for it. It was gorgeous. I even made a book trailer, which looks a bit clunky, in retrospect, since it was the first time I played with Movie Maker. But I’m very proud of the music I wrote for it. (Yes, all those tens of thousands I spent on my music theory degree paid off!)

I won’t describe all the wonderful stories in these anthologies, since that would take forever, but I’ll briefly describe the stories I wrote. For Stitch, I wrote a story called Watchworks, about a watchmaker in Victorian London, who is called to the home of a wealthy gentleman for a bizarre purpose: to repair the intricate mechanical hand of a handsome young man. The hand is so lifelike, it’s impossible to tell it isn’t flesh, unless the artificial skin is removed. But as the watchmaker attempts to repair the hand, he begins to suspect more and more of the young man is clockwork. Just how much of him is still human?

For Gothika #2: Bones, I wrote a Young Adult story about two teenagers living in a Latinx neighborhood in Manchester, New Hampshire. One has a grandmother (abuelita) who runs a botánica – a shop that sells folk medicine and magical items used in vodou rituals – and when he attempts to acquire a copy of the dreaded Book of St. Cyprian for the shop, he accidentally releases a dark spirit that possesses his friend’s dog. The two boys work frantically to exorcise the spirit, before it can hurt the dog or, worse… abuelita finds out what they’ve been up to.

Don’t expect any sex with this one, but it’s fun and creepy and has some interesting stuff about local vodou practices. I had a couple of Spanish-speaking friends take me to the botánica in Manchester, so we could quiz the owner and see what she had for sale. And, yes, the Book of St. Cyprian is a real book, rumored to be so evil, anyone who reads it risks losing their soul.

Isolation (Gothika #3: Claw) is adapted from a screenplay I wrote, but was never able to film – mostly because we weren’t able to find a good location. It follows a man who once had a great relationship with his best friend and lover, but chickened out of a long-term gay relationship and married a woman. Years later, after his marriage has disintegrated, he comes back with his tail between his legs, hoping to rekindle what he and his friend once had.

But he finds his friend living deep in the woods, isolated from the town, and not at all willing to get into a relationship with him… or anyone, apparently. And he soon discovers there is something sinister prowling through the forest at night…

For Gothika #4: Spirit, the theme was ghost stories, and I delved into the history of the old mill buildings in New England, which were plagued by fires that killed massive amounts of workers – usually young women. The most famous is the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire which killed 146 workers, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women in their teens and early twenties (the youngest was 14), because the doors to stairwells and exits were locked to prevent workers from sneaking out on breaks.

For The Mill, I adapted a ballad about the Granite Mill to my fictional mill building, and had a team of ghost-hunters investigating appearances that have frightened off construction workers so often the building now lies empty and abandoned.

The last Gothika we did was called Contact, and it dealt with stories of alien abduction.

My story was called, not surprisingly, Abduction. It’s about a man who visits an old boyfriend and finds that he’s basically had a nervous breakdown and ranting about aliens abducting him and implanting things in his body. Our hero agrees to stay the night and help watch for aliens, and to his horror, he’s abducted.

The aliens don’t experiment on him, but that’s because he was abducted by different aliens than his friend was abducted by. In order to save his friend, he has to take sides in an interstellar war and befriend the commander of the ship he’s a prisoner on. Over time, he and the commander discover they have a connection…

Lately, it feels as if I’m working on a million different projects. Combine that with a particularly stressful week at work when one of my fellow techs was on vacation, parents visiting (meaning a fast and furious house cleaning), and Erich being sick for the past week with a mysterious vertigo (that two doctors have assured us isn’t a stroke or heart-related), and I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed. I purchased a brand new vacuum – it did a pretty amazing job with the blots from last weekends partying.

And the best of it is that it can clean by itself only if you program it, so is the best vacuum I ever had.

First of all, let me mention that Lou Sylvre was kind enough to invite me to be a guest blogger this week at sylvre.com. I really appreciate the opportunity to put myself out there a bit more, so if you’re interested in my adventures adapting a screenplay I’ve written into prose format, please hop on over!

The screenplay I’m adapting is as yet unnamed. The original was called At the Edge of the Forest, which is yet another example of how bad I am at titles (I really need to work on that). Despite the mediocre title, I’m fond of the screenplay, but it’s proven difficult to film. So after three years, I’ve called it quits on that film project and I’m going to write it as a short story and put it out there for people to read.

I have two other werewolf short stories, featuring a character named Devon, that were originally submitted, independently, to horror anthologies. They weren’t accepted, so I’m stringing them together, reworking them a bit, and then adding a third part to make a triptych of stories about Devon and the character, Ronnie, that he meets in the second story. The original two stories weren’t more than 6,000 words, so the whole may not be more than a short novella.

My publisher has put out a call for very short (under 2,000 words) fiction for an October collection, and I’ve had an idea kicking around in my head for a story about a man who encounters Sasquatch in the northern NH forests that I think would be perfect. I’ve written two-thirds of it, but I’m in a race to see if I can finish before they get the 31 stories they’re asking for.

I also need to reassemble my film editing workstation, so I can finish up our last two shorts, Sunny Cafe and Blue Collar Crime. Currently, everything is stacked in one corner of the basement, since we had to rip up the carpet and put tile down. And I’m still trying to sort out our epic film project, The Resurrection.

And I promised my brother I’d finish his film score by September.

Lastly, my friend, Xebic, has come up with an idea for a short film he’d like to do this summer, and he’s asked me to write it and film it. It’s a bit of a tall order, but I like the basic idea, and I’ve already been able to write about ten minutes worth of a screenplay. If the story stays under a half hour, it might be doable in a couple weekends before winter sets in.

My occult murder mystery has come to another halt at 50,000 words. It’s not that I don’t know where it’s going next (at least, for the next few scenes). I just got sick to death of it. I’ll probably go back to it in a couple months and love it again — that’s just how I am with long works. But for now, I’m putting it aside.

Now…inhale slowly…hold it…then exhale, while counting down….