TREATMENT

FORMAT & TONE

Feature film. Dark comedy/crime thriller. 113 pages.

THE DEMONS ARE HERE operates in the space between Jarmusch and Cormac McCarthy—deadpan human comedy pressed up against real, consequential violence, all set in a world collapsing from the outside in. The humor is behavioral and character-driven: people bickering about The Rock being twins, arguing over how to properly tie someone to a chair, and Googling whether dead bodies float. The violence, when it arrives, is sudden, ugly, and permanent. Nobody survives on charm. The virus subplot functions not as spectacle but as a slow, atmospheric pressure—a ticking clock that renders every human conflict in the story increasingly absurd and increasingly urgent.

The film employs a pseudo-documentary framework. Characters periodically address the camera in confessional-style interviews, revealing inner lives they hide from everyone around them. These interviews are raw and intimate, creating a tonal counterpoint to the escalating chaos of the plot. The effect is a story that feels both observed and lived-in—as if someone found this footage after the world ended.

SETTING

Atlanta, Georgia, and the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Christmas week. The story begins in the familiar urban sprawl of Atlanta — Waffle Houses, dive bars, strip malls — and migrates to the isolated marshlands outside Charleston, where the landscape itself becomes a character: tidal creeks, pluff mud, Spanish moss, and an emptiness that swallows sound. The transition from city to marsh mirrors the characters’ transition from the world of the living to something else entirely.

CHARACTERS

EDWIN HERSHEL GOAT (49): A contract killer in decline. Edwin dresses like a man from another decade—wide-collared shirts, vintage suits—and moves through the world with the quiet exhaustion of someone who stopped caring about outcomes years ago. He is addicted to opioids, estranged from his ex-wife Laura and their twelve-year-old son Miles, and haunted by the suicide of his teenage daughter Thea. Edwin’s suicidal ideation is not performative; he has been methodically planning his death for three years, frequenting an online forum where people "catch the bus." He steals painkillers from his dying mother’s medicine cabinet. He puts an empty gun in his mouth. His therapist thinks he’s unemployed. His mother thinks he works in insurance. His son thinks he’s embarrassing. Edwin is a man living six different lives, none of which know about the others, and he is piloted by someone who no longer knows which one is real.

BETA OLIVIA HUNT (24): A bartender with a survivor’s instincts and a poverty-forged pragmatism. Beta has been on her own since fifteen, evicted from her first apartment at seventeen. She learned early that you can feel things or you can fix things, but you cannot do both at the same time. She is the engine of every decision in the story: she’s the one who says put the body in the trunk, take the money, drive to Charleston. She is also the one who, in the middle of the night, steals the money and tries to leave everyone behind. Beta’s arc is not about becoming a criminal. It’s about a woman who has always operated in survival mode, confronting the limits of what survival costs.

LUCA LIZARD (27): Beta’s boyfriend and a guitarist who fronts a mediocre band called Raygun. Luca is charming, naïve, and fundamentally decent in ways that make him catastrophically unsuited for the situation he’s in. He grew up with a stepdad who owns a beach house. He eats Lucky Charms in a pink robe. He thinks the world owes him a surprise, and sometimes it does. Luca is the emotional center of the first half of the film — the person who still believes things can work out—and his death is the hinge on which the story turns.

SPIKE (26): Luca’s drummer and reluctant accomplice. Spike is the voice of reason that nobody listens to. He knows the band isn’t good. He knows the plan is insane. He plays electronic drums at two in the morning and leaves apology cookies for his neighbor. Spike is the first casualty of the story’s violence, and his death—shot in the neck by Edwin during a panicked standoff — is the moment the film shifts from dark comedy into something irreversible.

CHARLOTTE DÉSIRÉE BELROSE (48): The woman who owns the money. Charlotte runs a criminal enterprise out of a liquor store with her husband, Moisé, and his brother, Jean-Baptiste. She is elegant and controlled, the kind of person who gives second chances precisely so people understand there won’t be a third. Charlotte dispatches Edwin to recover the money but also sends Yessiree Bob as insurance—a decision that sets the story’s final act in motion.

YESSIREE BOB (40): Charlotte’s backup. A disfigured sadist with rotten teeth and a talent for cruelty. Bob is introduced through his private horrors — a kidnapped woman, a decapitated body, a selfie taken while spooning a corpse. He is the story’s embodiment of human evil, a counterpoint to the virus’s impersonal extinction. Bob drives to Charleston alone, rapping along to music, wearing a Kevlar vest, and carrying a sniper rifle. He is patient and methodical, and he enjoys his work.

STORY

An extraterrestrial pathogen arrives on Earth via satellite debris, scattering across the southeastern United States in what appears to be a meteor shower. The virus—eventually designated Influenza E, or IEV — is airborne, with a ninety-two percent mortality rate. Symptoms include sudden hemorrhaging from the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, followed by rapid organ failure.

The virus is not a subplot. It is the frame. Early in the story, it manifests as background noise: a radio report, Beta switches off, an old man with a nosebleed, a woman slumped over a steering wheel at McDonald’s. As the story progresses, the virus moves to the foreground — schools close, emergency alerts interrupt broadcasts, military convoys appear on the highway. By the third act, the world is ending, and the characters’ desperate fight over half a million dollars has become cosmically absurd.

The film periodically adopts the virus’s point of view. These sequences are shot low to the ground, moving through the marsh landscape with alien intentionality. The camera glides through tall grass that snaps at the base. Frogs freeze on branches. Fiddler crabs retreat into their holes. An owl erupts from its perch. The virus is depicted as a predatory presence — not intelligent, but driven, spreading through the landscape the way a wildfire moves through timber. These POV sequences escalate throughout the film, beginning slowly and curiously, then ending quickly and aggressively, mirroring the virus’s spread through the population.

The film opens in space. A radiant sphere collides with a telecommunications satellite in low Earth orbit. The satellite fractures, scattering debris across the southeastern United States. From the ground, the pieces look like shooting stars. One chunk craters the asphalt of an empty church parking lot. A security light flickers and dies.

In Atlanta, Edwin chases a portly man named Percival through a litter-strewn field. Edwin is bleeding from a knife wound in his stomach — a parting gift from a prostitute named Big Nose Kate, whom he shot after she stabbed him during a hit at a roadside motel. In a voiceover, Edwin discusses Michelle Pfeiffer’s involvement in a breatharian cult. He catches Percival and shoots him twice in the back of the head. Title card: THE DEMONS ARE HERE.

We meet Edwin in his apartment, methodically preparing an injection of Dilaudid — crushing pills, filtering through a Q-tip, finding a vein. He narrates the process with clinical detachment. This is not his first time. He bought all his supplies on Amazon Prime.

We meet Luca and Spike at a Waffle House late at night, debating whether The Rock and Dwayne Johnson are the same person. Beta emerges from the restroom, sits beside Luca with an easy, unspoken familiarity, and says two words: "Let’s go."

Across town, Johnny Doug Flowers—a one-armed man in a Santa Claus suit — robs a liquor store at gunpoint. The safe contains over half a million dollars in bound cash. Johnny can’t carry both the gun and the money with one arm. The clerk pulls a gun. Johnny runs. He escapes into the night, satchel bouncing against his chest, jingle bells ringing on his costume.

Luca, driving drunk and high on Adderall, runs a red light and hits Johnny with his car. Johnny is killed on impact. Luca, Beta, and Spike stand over the body in the empty street. Luca is paralyzed. Beta takes charge: open the trunk. They discover the satchel full of money. Beta claims it. They load Johnny’s body into the trunk. Across the street, a transgender sex worker named Candy Cocksucker watches. She catches Luca’s eye. He looks away.

The couple’s life in Atlanta is drawn in quick, lived-in strokes. Beta works at a dive bar called Graffiti. Their power bill is past due. Luca leaves WrestleMania on for cats they don’t have. In direct-address interviews, Beta recounts a harrowing adolescent sexual assault with matter-of-fact candor, establishing the damage she carries and the armor she built around it. The film treats this not as backstory but as character—the reason Beta processes threats faster than anyone around her.

Edwin’s world is equally fractured. He visits his dying mother and steals her Dilaudid. He picks up his son, Miles, from school in a car that barely runs, and Miles can’t hide his embarrassment. In therapy, Edwin deflects every meaningful question. Alone in his car, he addresses the camera: he tells his therapist what she needs to hear; his mother thinks he works in insurance; his ex-wife thinks he’s a degenerate; his son thinks he’s embarrassing. He has been running his numbers for about three years. In the apartment, he puts a gun to his mouth and pulls the trigger. Click. The gun is empty. This is not a cry for help. It is practice.

Charlotte Belrose, the liquor store’s owner, summons Edwin to her office. The money was hers. Johnny robbed her safe. Edwin owes Charlotte a debt, and this is how he repays it: find the money, bring it back, keep it clean. Charlotte’s husband, Moisé, thinks Edwin is a fuck-up. Charlotte gives him the chance anyway.

Edwin traces the stolen money through a detective contact who runs Luca’s plates, and Candy, who saw Luca at the scene. He breaks into Beta and Luca’s empty house, finds a money strap on the floor, and discovers the Charleston beach house address scrawled on a scrap of paper by the nightstand. He follows.

Meanwhile, Charlotte hedges her bet. She sends Yessiree Bob — introduced through a sequence of escalating horror: a kidnapped woman tied to a bed, a decapitated corpse, a selfie with the body, dismembered parts laid out with social-media precision. Bob is the worst thing in this story, and the story knows it. Jean-Baptiste gives Bob the Charleston address and asks if he’ll handle Edwin, too. Bob says that one’s on the house.

Beta, Luca, and Spike drive south on the interstate. The virus escalates in the margins: a radio report, a woman hemorrhaging at a McDonald’s parking lot, a convenience store cashier wearing a gas mask. At a McDonald’s, Beta overhears a youth group Bible study. The male leader, mid-sermon, delivers a line of shocking profanity that no one else reacts to—as though it was never spoken. Then his nose begins to bleed. He wipes it on his pants. Nobody notices but Beta. The virus is not just killing people. It is altering behavior before it kills.

In direct-address interviews during the drive, Spike reveals himself: a drummer who knows the band isn’t good, who plays rubber pads at 2 a.m. and leaves apology cookies for his neighbor. He doesn’t have Luca’s capacity for optimism. He just likes playing drums. He is the most grounded person in the car, and the least equipped for what’s coming.

Tensions flare on the highway. Spike wants out. Beta pulls a gun on him. Luca mediates. The gun goes in the glove compartment. Nobody trusts anyone, but they keep driving because there’s nowhere else to go.

They arrive at the beach house — a weathered structure on stilts, elevated above the marsh. It’s not on the beach. The power is off. There’s no food, no signal, no cable. Expired Saltines. A can of creamed corn from 2021. Luca’s mom calls it a beach house. Spike calls his mom a liar.

Luca and Spike dump Johnny’s body in the marsh from an aluminum rowboat, weighed down with a single cinder block and wrapped in a shower curtain. The Santa suit is visible where the curtain has come loose. They Google whether bodies float. They take a photo of the dump site for reference. The photo is useless—identical marsh grass in every direction. Neither of them acknowledges this.

That night, the three of them sit on the porch in the dark. No power, no lights. Spike drinks bourbon. Luca picks out a quiet melody on his guitar. Beta smokes in an Adirondack chair, bare feet on the railing. In the distance, sirens. Then nothing. In a direct-address interview, Beta articulates her philosophy: money isn’t about stuff. Money is about the door staying closed. Money is the distance between you and the next bad thing. Half a million dollars is ten years of not being afraid.

The first virus POV sequence unfolds. The camera moves through the marsh at water level — not like a boat, not like a person. It moves the way heat moves. Marsh grass bends and shivers in its wake. A frog freezes on a branch, then leaps. The camera drifts beneath the beach house, past the cinder blocks, past the PVC pipe, to the satchel hidden in the dark. It hovers. It waits. Then it pulls back slowly into the marsh. The insects resume.

In the middle of the night, Beta takes the money, takes the car, and leaves. She drives south toward Savannah. On the highway shoulder, she screams alone in the car—one scream, filling the interior, going nowhere. Then she turns around and drives back.

She arrives at dawn to find Edwin already inside the house, his gun to Luca’s forehead, demanding the money. The money is gone from under the house. The car was gone. Edwin puts it together before Luca does: the girl took it.

Spike, who has been listening from the hallway, emerges with Johnny’s gun. He has never held a gun before. His hands are shaking. He fires at Edwin and hits him in the left arm — a through-and-through that tears the bicep open. Edwin doesn’t flinch. He raises his Beretta and shoots Spike in the neck. Spike drops. Luca catches him as he falls. The blood is dark, arterial, and fast. Spike dies in Luca’s arms.

The aftermath reshapes every relationship. Beta and Luca duct-tape the badly wounded Edwin to a kitchen chair. Edwin, with deadpan professionalism, instructs them on proper binding technique: "You want to go above and below. Pin the forearm to the wood. Wrist bindings just cut off circulation, and then I can’t feel my hands, and then I can slip out." When Beta asks why he’s helping them tie him up, Edwin’s answer is simple: "Because if you do it wrong, I’m going to get free, and then I’m going to have to do something about it. And I am very, very tired."

Spike lies under a sheet on the floor. Blood seeps through the fabric. In a surreal moment, the blood on the hardwood moves on its own, slowly spelling out: "R.I.P. SPIKE." The virus’s presence is becoming physical, tangible, embedded in the very matter of the world.

In the bedroom, Luca confronts Beta about the money. She claims she went to buy groceries. Where are the groceries? She doesn’t answer. The betrayal sits between them. Luca is shattered—not just by Spike’s death but by the recognition that Beta was willing to leave him. They argue about what to do with Edwin. Beta wants to cut a deal. Luca wants to process that his best friend is dead under a sheet in the next room.

Beta interrogates Edwin. He tells them the truth: the money belongs to Charlotte Belrose. He is the polite option. They don’t want to meet the impolite option. He offers a way out: give him the money, he drives it back, he tells Charlotte two kids found it on a dead man and didn’t know what they had. It’s the only version of this where they walk away. Beta presses the gun to his chest. Edwin doesn’t beg. He tells her she has three rounds left in the magazine, and she’s going to need every one of them for whoever Charlotte sends next.

Beta’s arm drops. She takes the money and walks out. Luca follows. They leave Edwin taped to the chair, bleeding from his arm and his stomach, and drive into the night. Behind them, the second virus POV sequence tears through the marsh with new aggression — branches snapping, an owl erupting from its perch, the camera tracking the car’s taillights through the trees like a predator following prey along a riverbank.

Bob is already waiting on the back road, parked in the shadow of a live oak with a night-vision scope. He shoots out the Impala’s tire, then puts a sniper round through Luca’s head. Luca drops without a sound—a marionette with cut strings. Beta doesn’t scream. She says his name. Twice. Like a question.

Beta fires two blind shots over the car, grabs the satchel, and runs into the woods. She crashes through the dark on sound and instinct. The virus POV intersects her path at speed—she stumbles as it passes through her space, but doesn’t see it. She circles back to the beach house, trips on a root, splits her forehead on a rock, and tries Edwin’s car. Locked.

Inside the house, Edwin has freed himself. The chair is empty, with shreds of duct tape on the armrests. A blood trail leads to the door and disappears. Bob kicks in the front door and methodically clears the house. Beta hides in the bathroom. She fires at sounds in the hallway. Misses. Bob materializes from the kitchen doorway, three feet away. She pulls the trigger. Click. Empty. Bob hits her. She goes down. He stands over her and aims.

Edwin appears in the doorway and fires twice. Both rounds hit Bob in the chest, knocking him backward. But Bob is wearing Kevlar. He seizes Edwin’s wrist, and they grapple—but it’s not a fight. It’s Edwin holding on with one functioning arm, his left arm a dead weight, every contact whiting out his vision with pain. Bob shoves him off. Edwin falls.

Beta crawls to Edwin’s dropped Beretta. She stands. She says, "Hey." Bob turns and raises his hand. Beta shoots through his palm and into his face. Bob slides down the wall.

The house is quiet. Three bodies in various states: Spike under a sheet, Bob against the wall, Edwin on his back, staring at the ceiling. Beta sits across from Bob with the gun in her lap, trembling. Edwin tells her Bob is done. She asks how he knows. "Because you shot him through the face."

Beta tells Edwin that Luca is dead. He closes his eyes and says he’s sorry. A long silence. The marsh is quiet outside.

They sit together on the porch — Beta on the steps, Edwin propped against the railing, gray-faced, bleeding from everywhere. She drives his Ford Escape. They pass Luca’s Impala on the back road, headlights still on, Luca’s body a dark shape on the gravel. Beta doesn’t slow down. She doesn’t look away either.

On the highway, the radio delivers the final update: a national state of emergency, the National Guard deployed in fourteen states, IEV confirmed in all fifty states, a ninety-two percent mortality rate. Beta turns the radio down. "That’s not a virus. That’s an extinction event." They pass a military convoy heading north. Edwin grips the door handle to stay conscious.

They talk. Edwin has a son. Miles. Twelve. His mother is a nurse. Beta asks if Edwin can make it back to Atlanta. He doesn’t know. The virus POV now follows them on the highway — no longer creeping through marsh grass but moving down the center line, tracking the car at a fixed distance. A dead deer lies on the shoulder, blood at its nostrils. The trees lean as the camera passes—not from wind, but from displacement.

At dawn, Beta pulls into a small Greyhound station. She opens the satchel and holds out a bundle of hundreds. Edwin shakes his head. She helps him slide behind the wheel. His right hand finds it. His left arm rests in his lap. She tells him not to die on the highway. He nods once.

Beta walks toward the bus. She doesn’t look back. Edwin watches her board. He opens his wallet — a family photo: Laura, Miles, Thea. He traces Thea’s face with his thumb. He starts the engine. It takes three tries with one hand. He drives north.

On the Greyhound, Beta sits in a window seat near the back. The bus is half-empty. A woman prays silently. A teenager stares at a dead phone. Nobody speaks. Beta closes her eyes. When she opens them, she touches her upper lip. Her fingers come away bloody. A nosebleed. A thin smear of red. She stares at the blood. She wipes her nose. More blood. She doesn’t react. The bus keeps moving.

The camera pulls back. The bus shrinks on the highway. The road becomes a thin line on the earth. The landscape is everything — marsh, pine, and sky.

Black screen. The world population counter appears: 8,277,460,925. The numbers begin to tick down. Slowly at first. Then faster. The one column spins. The tens catch up. The hundreds begin to move. The counting accelerates over black. The numbers blur. The population drops.