Hinkley's Manor

A 1960s mansion that isn't everything it seems...

Movie

Hinkley's Manor will be available to see here once it is published.

Synopsis

Hinkley's Manor's creation in February 2016 was the culmination of multiple interests that Sean had developed over the course of 2015. To truly understand its backstory, we need to go back about a year. In the spring of 2015, the English class Sean and Maguire were in at the time had covered Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This coincided with the original production period of Maguire's Doctor Who series and Nosiphus Nightly News, which was a creative high-point for us. Poe's work planted the seed in Sean's mind that would be nurtured by other events as the year progressed.

In August 2015, Maguire and Sean made a series of videos titled Metro, based around the game franchise of the same name. Unlike Doctor Who, which had been scripted, Metro was improvised. These videos were incredibly fun to make, although Maguire made the decision to leave them unreleased. That same month, Sean discovered the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise, which opened the door to a lot of other horror media entering his regular viewing.

One afternoon around this time, Sean's father showed him several episodes of the original incarnation of The Twilight Zone, notably, the classic episode Time Enough at Last. Sean also began listening to short Internet horror stories called creepypastas, and found a few that were very well-written. He took a particular liking to The Stairs and the Doorway.

Poe's work returned as an influence with the new academic year began, which further cemented the genre in Sean's mind. This class also had us read a non-horror book that was written as a script, something he hadn't encountered before. All of these elements combined began to make him think about writing a horror story of his own, but it would take a couple more events to make it finally happen.

In December 2015, a monumentally important video series was produced by us, called Conspiracies with Nate. The atmosphere of these videos was intentionally made mysterious, and they were filmed in such a manner that made it look as if Nate was broadcasting from an undisclosed location. The set took a lot of inspiration from one of the most famous Internet horror stories of all: 1999.

The switch was finally thrown in Sean's head on February 7, 2016. That day, Sean wrote the base story for what would become Hinkley's Manor. The first draft has some of the basic plot points as well as one of the original climactic points established. However, the initial draft suffered from two problems: it was way too short, and it was chock-full with cliches. These points were later expanded and rewritten into something significantly longer.

The name Hinkley's Manor didn't emerge until mid-March, during the first expansion of the script. Much later in 2016, Nate and Jason both made their own contributions to the script, and Nathan, who along with Sean was set to play one of the two main characters, wrote some of his own lines and ideas in. Sean's father also threw in an idea. In December 2016, the Nosiphus crew began constructing the first set that we planned to use to film the finished product.

However, various events, as well as the passing of time, placed Hinkley's Manor's development on a hiatus, mostly because Sean couldn't decide exactly how to end the story. He rewrote the script from scratch a couple times to improve the dialogue and pacing since his writing style has evolved since 2016. He also began work on a novelization of the story.

Hinkley's Manor remains unfinished, and likely will be for a long time, but it is not cancelled.

Scripts

The script for this project is accessible here to authorized members.