Act 1 — Arrival / Transition
Function
Establish the relationship in its baseline state. Make the audience care about Kendrie and Charlize before the house becomes the film’s central pressure. Introduce the house as ordinary. Plant the first signal.
Emotional State
Kendrie and Charlize enter the film with warmth and some tension — the particular energy of a move, which is both exciting and exposing. They are in love. They are also in transition, which means they are slightly more raw than usual. They have not yet found their routine inside the new space.
The audience should feel: this is real, this is good, this could go wrong in many ways — but probably not the ways we’re about to experience.
Key Sequences
Staten Island Departure
The film may open in the Staten Island apartment — the space they are leaving. This sequence should feel like a beginning: boxes, organization, Charlize directing, Kendrie absorbing the end of the old chapter. The Staten Island apartment reads as clean, theirs, still in the process of becoming a home. They are leaving it before it finished.
This sequence establishes their physical and emotional dynamic before the Bronx house enters the frame.
The Transit
The commute from Staten Island to the Bronx — ferry, train, arrival — serves as transition. See NYC Transit Sequence for full notes. The transit sequence is the film’s breath between the two spaces. It should have its own quality of time.
Arrival at the House
First approach. Exterior. The house is ordinary. This is important — do not give the audience the “haunted house shot.” The house should look like every house on the block. The audience’s dread should be sourced in what they know (they are watching a film about this house) not in what they see.
Entering the house: the ground floor first. The family present. Warmth, food possibly, the specific social texture of a Black family receiving new tenants into a family home. Melissa. Alexis, briefly. The Uncle, who arrives, eats, and leaves before it gets dark.
First Basement Visit
Kendrie goes down alone, briefly. Charlize doesn’t notice or doesn’t follow. Kendrie’s experience in the basement at this point is subtle — a quality of atmosphere she cannot name. She does not linger. She comes back up. She does not mention it.
This is the plant. The film will pay it off in Act 3.
Relationship Baseline
Before the pressure increases:
- Show Kendrie and Charlize in physical ease with each other — domestic intimacy, touch, humor
- Show the specific way Charlize takes care of Kendrie without making her smaller
- Show the specific way Kendrie’s sensitivity reads to Charlize as love, not pathology
- Establish the dynamic that will be stressed: Charlize fixes things; Kendrie feels things
What Act 1 Withholds
- The history of the house
- Alexis’s significance
- Any overt supernatural event
- The basement room’s history
The first act runs on the audience’s knowledge of the film’s premise, not the characters’. The audience is watching Kendrie and Charlize not know what we know. This is the engine of the film’s first tension.