They Beckon

"Recommend" coverage from Pipeline Entertainment. SCREAMFEST - Semi-Finalist 2018 Official Selection Diabolical Film Fest. The murders depicted in THEY BECKON are loosely based on real events; in 1832, fifty-seven Irish workers building the Pennsylvania Railroad were killed by locals and buried in an unmarked grave, undiscovered for 177 years. TIME AND SETTING: "The Mansion of the Elms" - present day upstate New York/Flashbacks to the same location in 1850. Margaret Elmwood is the last of her family living in the isolated Victorian “Mansion Of The Elms.” She awakens unexpectedly from a near-death coma, only to be smothered with her pillow at the hands of her doctor. With Margaret's death, the estate passes to the Historical Society to become a very profitable museum--particularly for the doctor's brother and town treasurer, Nick Brandt. As the doctor hastily departs, however, strange shadowy figures appear to race alongside his car, slam against the windows and, with a violent thud, crush the roof down toward the screaming doctor. Wiping his eyes from tears and sweat, and trying to make out the road in the eerie darkness, he comes face to face with an apparition of a horse’s head, blasting its hot breath from its nostrils. Screaming with terror, he loses control as his car flips and crashes to his death. When Estate Appraiser Kali Savin and her team arrive one month later with orders to “get the job done quickly," they soon discover the home, as well as the surrounding woods, are haunted by strange apparitions of human forms lurking in the shadows of the old mansion. A series of three loud pops puts the team on edge as they struggle to discover the source of the strange happenings, but when the “Cóiste Bodhar”—the Death Coach—arrives at the woodline, accompanied by the stench of a decomposing headless driver and the bloodcurdling screams of a Banshee deep in the woods, the team realizes they are in over their heads. With their cell phones and car batteries drained by the presence of the shadow figures, the team is trapped. They start to uncover the mysterious disappearance of Irish Immigrants hired to build the mansion. Investigating the dark woods, they witness residual hauntings of the murdered workers, vengeful phantom corpses, and the bloodcurdling Banshee collecting her lost souls for the Death Coach to whisk them away. With the mansion about to be turned over to the descendants of their killers, the spirits’ revenge grows more violent. Kali and her team must survive in a terrifying last stand against Shadow People, walking corpses, doppelgängers, and the curse of the Mansion of the Elms.