Scripts · Horror Comedy
Death Sentence
A Hollywood cult that predicts its members' deaths. One short script. One feature. Same world.
Short Script
Death Sentence
Logline
After a skeptical investigative reporter covers Las Palabras, a Hollywood-adjacent cult that claims to predict its members' deaths, a trail of gruesome coincidences forces her toward the very certainty she set out to debunk.
Synopsis
Jessica is a driven investigative reporter pushed to become more marketable or lose her desk. When Las Palabras, a glossy Los Angeles spiritual movement with celebrities in its ranks, claims it can whisper your death sentence to you, she smells a career-making story. What follows is a found-footage dispatch from the edge of belief, equal parts cult satire and horror. Jessica and her cameraman Miguel get closer to the truth than they planned.
Achievements
Feature Script
THE Death Sentence
Logline
After a skeptical investigative reporter covers Las Palabras, a Hollywood-adjacent cult that claims to predict its members' deaths, a trail of gruesome coincidences forces her toward the very certainty she set out to debunk.
Synopsis
THE Death Sentence expands the world of the short into a feature. Jessica is an investigative reporter at a cable true-crime show called Mystery Now, pressured to become more marketable. Las Palabras is a wealthy, secretive Hollywood spiritual movement, equal parts self-help collective, media machine, and apocalyptic performance art, that claims it can whisper your final death sentence to you. Jessica and her cameraman Miguel go inside to expose it. Tyler, a PA and aspiring streamer desperate for any kind of attention, comes along. What unfolds is a found-footage descent through Los Angeles celebrity culture, cult ritual, and genuine terror. Currently in Draft 3 (September 2026). Expanded from the short script.
Writer's Notes
On the Scripts
The idea hit stepping off a plane returning from FilmQuest 2025. It started as a short: what if there was a cult in Hollywood that could whisper your death sentence to you, and an investigative reporter decided to cover it as her big break? The short came out of improv instincts, a tightly wound 19-page version of the premise. Then came Inhabitant. Then the question of whether the world could hold a full feature.
The reference that kept coming up in development was V/H/S meets Best in Show. That is still the best shorthand. The horror is real, the cult is real, and the deaths are gruesome. But the world around them is Los Angeles in the most satirical sense: celebrity, media, the attention economy, people who need to matter to a camera more than they need anything else. The cult, Las Palabras, is not scary because it is sinister. It is scary because it is seductive.
The core mechanic took time to lock down. Two Mayan-descendant twins taste a subject's blood and channel their potential fate into a listener, who can choose to write down the death sentence: a literal spoken sentence the subject will eventually hear before they die. Not the first time they hear it. Like Russian roulette with words. The question the script deliberately leaves open: does saying the sentence cause the death, or does it simply mark it? That ambiguity is the whole movie.
The short is on the festival circuit. It reached Grand Jury Finalist at Film Invasion Los Angeles and Quarter-Finalist at Nashville Film Festival. The feature is in Draft 3, September 2026, down from 137 pages in Draft 2 to 120 pages after a structural cut pass, with outside-reader notes from two readers incorporated. The next pass is a spine rewrite focused on the protagonist.