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The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

By Michael Schilf · October 18, 2010

Screenplay Genre: Horror / Thriller

Movie Time: 92 minutes

1. INCITING INCIDENT

During his first night sleeping in a new rental house, Matt hears strange sounds and follows them to the basement. He walks down into the dark and faces part of the basement that is walled of behind glass doors, seeing his reflection change into a gruesome distorted figure. (00:10:00)

2. LOCK IN (End of Act One)

A few nights later, Matt again has visions, this time of a boy watching a bearded man carve symbols into the flesh of corpses. Matt sits up, his eyes still closed, and the door clicks open as he walks into the previously inaccessible walled off basement room. The next morning, Matt's brother discovers him standing in the room: the morgue of the former funeral home. (00:28:00)

3. FIRST CULMINATION (Midpoint)

Matt hears his cousin Mary screaming from the attic. Her leg is stuck between some rotten floorboards, but when Matt helps her up, he finds a metal box and bundle of photographs hidden under the boards. As Matt and his older cousin Wendy exam the box and photos, Matt explains that he has see the ghost of the boy in the photos everyday since they moved into the house. (00:51:00)

4. MAIN CULMINATION (End of Act Two)

The family is asleep when all of the electronics in the house go haywire, and in desperation Sarah contacts Nicholas, a Reverend and fellow cancer patient Matt befriended at the hospital. When Nicholas arrives and looks into the morgue, he sees the burnt figure of the ghost boy Jonah, and every door in the house violently opens and shuts, but Nicholas removes a fragment of Jonah's skull from the ashes in the furnace, and all activity stops. (1:13:00)

5. THIRD ACT TWIST

Nicholas leaves a frantic phone message saying that he made a mistake: Jonah's spirit was actually trying to release other evil bound spirits in the house and because Jonah has been removed from the house, they're now at the mercy of the rage of the bound spirits, and they must get out. (1:22:00)