More than anything, what Sam Wagner would like as a belated Christmas present is for the actor Ethan Hawke to come floating in to the reading of his new screenplay on Saturday afternoon.
The hatchet-faced Mr. Hawke has no fewer than seven scary movies to his credit in a long and diverse career. As a result, he has been called "Horror's Unique Scream King" and would (in Mr. Wagner's best of all possible worlds) love his script -- set in East Hampton Village and based on a mostly true story -- and offer to star in the film.
In 2004, after a holiday weekend night of partying at a half-constructed house on Middle Lane, Mr. Wagner found his live-in boyfriend, Barton Kaplan, at the bottom of the pool. (The house has new owners now who may not be aware of its creepy past, so let's not mention the address. Let's just say that Middle Lane is one of the quietest, most affluent streets in the village and this house -- finished now, with 12 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms -- is one of its most imposing.)
The county medical examiner's office classified the death as an accidental drowning, but there were questions, and later rumors, that the place was haunted by the restless spirit of the drowned man. Summer people who rented it a few years later broke their lease three weeks after moving in, telling the real estate agent the place was haunted. Lights turned on and off, they said. Doors flew open and slammed shut, a couch was found where it had not been before, and the alarm system kept going off on its own, much to the annoyance of village police. When they heard their butler screaming "Get off me! Get off me!" and found him, terrified, lying halfway up the stairway, that was it. Something had pulled him down and dragged him up the stairs, the butler swore. They couldn't see anything, but they called the broker that same night and were out by morning.
Almost two decades after Bart Kaplan died, Mr. Wagner has completed a screenplay -- embellished, perhaps, but that's a writer's prerogative -- about what really, truly, probably, possibly, happened after the medical examiner signed off. The renters' otherworldly experience is front and center in his narrative, which goes on to introduce two construction workers who jump in the pool for a swim and are killed by "a black liquid coming out of the drain."
A psychic hired by the drowned man's father to figure out what's going on concludes that there's "an evil, deadly spirit in the house," Mr. Wagner related. It's the dead man himself, the psychic announces, "trying to scare people out of the house."
Meanwhile, an arrowhead turns up near the pool with a human bone attached. "I'd be careful if I were you," warns a village resident steeped in local history. That very arrowhead murdered "a Montaukett medicine man," she adds, and "once you remove the bone, it kills people."
"I did a lot of research and got my Long Island history and details from the 17th century to write this," Mr. Wagner said this week. "I did my research on the internet and talked to a Montauk Indian who didn't want me to reveal his name." Montaukett warriors, after a battle with Narragansetts, were buried on the grounds of the house in 1653, he said, thus accounting for the mysterious bone. (There was indeed bad blood between the tribes at that time, though history does not record any such battle.)
Toward the end of the screenplay, a mother and son, along with their realtor, die a "horrible death," Mr. Wagner said. "The black liquid kills them all."
Ten people "in the business" have been invited to Saturday's private reading. The hope is that there will be one or two film-industry "angels" among them -- and, who knows, maybe Mr. Hawke himself. Stranger things have happened.
