Form 02-B · First look briefing · Sample deck on file

The Lighthouse

A guilt-ridden drifter under a dead man's name and a tyrannical keeper who hoards the lamp's secret drink, brawl, and unravel on a storm-locked Atlantic rock.

Poster concept 01

Written by

Robert Eggers & Max Eggers

Genre / Format

Psychological Horror, Period Drama · approx. 98 minutes (from 98 pages at 1 page/minute)

Setting

Around 1890

Tone

Hypnotic psychological horror

By the numbers

117

Scenes

Characters

Locations

Props

Exhibit A — Taglines

> The light belongs to no one who lives to see it.

> Two keepers, one lamp, and a wind that will not turn back.

> Should pale death come for the man who looks too long.

Synopsis

Around 1890, a young laborer who calls himself Ephraim Winslow takes a four-week posting on Pilot Rock, a bleak stone island off the Maine coast, under Thomas Wake, an old wickie who guards the lighthouse lamp like a jealous lover and forbids his junior from ever entering the lantern room. The work is punishing and absurd: hauling coal, swabbing floors, stoking a fog siren that blasts loud enough to shake the body, and drinking from a fouled cistern. Young keeps a carved ivory mermaid he found in his mattress and rolls cigarette after cigarette while Old recites the same grim grace, sings the same chore-song, and limps off to commune with the light alone. A one-eyed seagull torments Young at every door. A nude sea-woman surfaces in his dreams and on the rocks. When the relief tender fails to arrive and the weathervane swings against them, the two men are sealed in by a storm, by drink, and by the lie each is hiding. Whether the island is real or a confession Young can't stop telling becomes the question neither can survive answering.

Themes

Isolation and madness in confinement

Two men, one acre of stone, and a storm that never breaks: the film tightens from labor to delirium without ever leaving Pilot Rock. By the time Old insists weeks have passed since the missed tender, time itself has stopped being trustworthy, and Young can no longer tell entrapment from hallucination.

Domination, ritual, and the struggle for the forbidden light

Old rules through chores, songs, and superstition, never letting Young near the lantern he tends bare-chested and alone. The locked hatch and the ring of brass keys turn the whole story into a contest over a single threshold neither man will share.

Guilt, hidden identity, and Promethean punishment

Young is not Winslow; the real Winslow he watched drown under a log drive, then took his name. The dead logger surfaces in every vision until the confession comes due, and the man who reaches into the light is left broken on the rocks for the gulls to devour.

Repressed and curdled male desire

The scrimshawed mermaid, the supply-shed shame, and the near-kiss that detonates into a brawl all trace a longing the two men can neither name nor escape, fusing lust, disgust, and violence into the same heat.

Scope at a Glance

117

Total scenes

Unique locations

Principal cast

Exterior scenes

Night shoots

VFX/FX scenes

Estimated shoot days

Company moves

approx. 30-40 meaningful set moves implied by the constant cross-cutting between quarters, tower, fog signal house, and the island's exterior pockets (most cluster on a single built island, easing actual travel)

Complexity Read

The real pressure is relentless storm-and-water exteriors at night layered with a trained aggressive seagull, mermaid prosthetics, two nude-and-drunk lead performances, a stunt fall down spiral stairs, and supernatural lens/tentacle effects, all squeezed onto one weather-exposed island set.

Atmosphere

This is a film soaked through. Every surface in it is wet, salted, or rotting: warped mildewed floorboards in the galley, a horsehair mattress with a hole worn into it, a brick cistern skinned over with mold and frothy sludge the men have been drinking. The frame is a tall narrow box, black-and-white and grainy, and the air inside it never dries out. The dominant sound is not music but the foghorn, blasting close enough to feel, shaking through Young's body while Old stands unmoved beside him. Watch this and a week later you remember pressure before you remember plot, the sense of two men screwed down into a stone island the size of a coin in a vast ocean, with one rotating beam at the top that only one of them is allowed to touch. The pace is punishing and circular, built out of chores that never end. Coal up the path in a squeaking wheelbarrow, oil drums dragged up the iron spiral one agonizing Clunk at a time, brasswork polished while Old sings the same mocking verse over and over. The film wants the audience to feel labor as a weight, then it lets that labor curdle. Old slaps Young across the face out of nowhere over a dead seabird. A kitchen chair rigged to a failing block and tackle drops Young fifty feet to the ground. The tone is not gothic atmosphere for its own sake, it is comedy and dread fused so tightly you stop being able to tell whether the next beat is a fart joke or a damnation. Old pisses in his chamber pot and farts as a display of power. Three scenes later Young is beating a one-eyed gull to a pulp against the cistern edge and the weathervane spins from west to east, stranding them. Then reality starts to slip its moorings. The sea suddenly chokes with forty-foot logs and a drowned man in a mackinaw coat drifts toward Young. A nude woman washes up on the rocks, opens her eyes, and has gills at her ribs and a fish's tail. Young peers through the iron grates and sees a tentacle slither across the ironwork as white fluid drips down. Old insists weeks have passed when Young is sure it was a day. The film never tells you which man is mad, or whether the island exists at all, or how long they have truly been here. By the climax the two are drinking honey and turpentine because the booze ran out, laughing as a wave bursts the window and floods the galley around them, the fire axe still buried in the kitchen table where it will stay until someone uses it. What lingers is the texture cluster: the scrimshawed ivory mermaid pulled from a slit in the mattress, the ticking clock and its monotonous plink, the locked rolled-shut desk Old guards with the smallest brass key, and at the top of the stairs a six-foot Fresnel lens that opens its doors like wings.

Tonal Descriptors

01salt-rotted02claustrophobic03drunk and circular04foghorn-deafened05pungent06mythic07pitch-black comic08superstitious09sweat and kerosene10maddening11forbidden12feral

Reference Points

Sacha Vierny's deep-focus monochrome for Resnais

the velvety blacks and immense grey gradients that make a small interior feel like a cathedral and a void at once.

Winslow Homer's Maine seascapes

the slate water, the breaking surf, the lone laboring figure against an indifferent ocean; the painterly weight of cold spray.

Sailors' scrimshaw and the carved ivory mermaid

the handmade, eroticized object as a charm; production design should treat every prop as something a bored, lonely man could have touched a thousand times.

Prometheus Bound, the Greek myth

the man chained to a rock and the bird returning to tear at his liver; the ending is this image literally, so let the whole film carry its sense of divine, disproportionate punishment.

Béla Tarr's long takes of weather and toil

the patience to hold on mud, wind, and a man pushing a barrow until the labor becomes existential rather than incidental.

Early flicker-rate silent cinema and German Expressionism

the 1.19:1 boxed frame, the hard sourceless shadows of clockwork chains creeping across stone, faces lit from below by a single lamp.

Music & Sound

The score should barely behave like score. The single recurring cue the script names is the eerie light music, weird, haunting, ancient, first stated as the camera booms up through the clockwork and otherworldly patterns swirl across the ironwork, then withheld for long stretches, then brought back to run unbroken from Old's death to the final image. Everything else is built from the foghorn and the room. The foghorn is the film's heartbeat and its instrument of torture, blasting loud, close, and painful in the fog signal house, bellowing louder than ever as the tender vanishes, a drone that should physically wear the audience down the way it wears down Young. Against that, brass-bright sea shanties and diddling carry the human noise: Tis Brasswork sung as mockery during the floor-swabbing tirade, Hurrah, we're homeward bound when the two finally drink together, Old's Blood Red Roses bellowed at the waves. Let the objects do the scoring when music stays out. The clock ticks monotonously through whole scenes and its plink of dripping water onto Young's sleeping face is its own motif, a metronome of entrapment that ends only when Young smashes the clock with his fist into glass and blood. The wheelbarrow squeaks. The clockwork chains clink and clank and echo ominously up the stone. A seagull taps at the bunkroom window and is gone the instant Young turns. The lead counterweight rises through the spiral on its chain. These small mechanical and animal sounds should feel louder and more meaningful than any orchestra, because in a place this empty they are all there is. Dialogue is its own dense sonic layer and should be treated as music, not information. The period Maine and Canadian-logger dialect, Old's possessed Shakespearean Hark, Triton, Hark curse summoning the sea king, his withering I make the truth as I see fit, the recurring grace beginning Should pale death with treble dread. Mix it close and unflinching so the brogue and the bellowing become texture. The strangest cue note in the script is celestial, a whispering male-and-female sound off the spinning lens. Save that, and the squid-and-light dripping, for the supernatural peaks so they land as rupture, not ambience.

Soundtrack References

There Will Be Blood · 2007

Jonny Greenwood

steal the dissonant scraping string drones that turn a man's labor and obsession into physical dread without ever sounding like a horror cue.

The Witch · 2015

Mark Korven

the same director's earlier film: the nyckelharpa and waterphone shrieks, the choral terror, the sense of a folk world that genuinely believes in its own curses.

The Shining · 1980

Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind

the synth-and-Penderecki dread of two men and a haunted structure, the way silence and a single sustained tone hold an audience hostage.

Under the Skin · 2013

Mica Levi

steal the queasy, sliding strings for the mermaid and the light, music that makes the erotic and the alien sound like the same unbearable thing.

Color Palette

Coal Soot#1a1714

the black smudge of the tender out of the fog, the furnace mouth Young feeds while reeling from the siren, the coal scattered across the storm-mud path; this is a black-and-white film, so its blacks must be true and crushing.

Cistern Mold#5b5a4a

the putrid green-grey film on the water tank, the frothy sludge the men drink, the rotted shingle hole Young spies through; the color of everything slowly going off.

Fresnel Amber#d8a24a

the immense heat of the lens Old toasts bare-chested, the rotating eight-beam starburst Young yearns up at, the one warm forbidden glow in a monochrome world.

Whitewash & Whale-Ash#cfc7b4

the tower paint Young splashes himself with before the rig fails, the carved ivory mermaid, the chalk that sinks beautifully through the foul cistern water.

Bruise & Storm#3c4450

Young's healing week-old black eye, the leaden sky over Pilot Rock, the slate sea under the Nor'easter where the barometer falls past STORM off the chart.

Similar Moods

The Witch · 2015

the same airless period dread, a closed world where superstition has real teeth and isolation rots the people inside it from within.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God · 1972

a man's grandiosity and madness swelling in a hostile elemental nowhere, the leader as self-mythologizing tyrant losing his grip on reality.

Persona · 1966

two figures alone whose identities bleed and merge until you cannot tell where one ends, shot in stark, intimate black-and-white.

Eraserhead · 1977

the monochrome industrial dread, the relentless mechanical drone as score, sexual horror and bodily disgust played with deadpan, unblinking strangeness.

Scenes

1EXT

DAY

pp. 1-1

ATLANTIC OCEAN

dread

A tiny lighthouse tender chugs out of an endless wall of fog, a black smoke smudge in a vast ocean.

Characters: None
Props: lighthouse tender (small steam boat)
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: period steam boat on open ocean
Notes: Opens on BLACK with foghorn and main title card. Black-and-white 35mm, 1.19:1 aspect ratio, mono mix per the script's front matter.
Camera: Extreme wide shot, locked off, boat tiny and low in frame
Lighting: Flat diffuse daylight through fog, no shadows
Mood: Dread

2EXT

pp. 1-1

LIGHTHOUSE TENDER. PROW - LATER

tension

The rotten, rusty prow of the tender carves through the waves as the third-rate engine rumbles.

Characters: None
Props: lighthouse tender (small steam boat)
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: practical boat at sea
Notes: None
Camera: Low tight angle on the prow, slight upward tilt
Lighting: Overcast marine light, hard glints on wet iron
Mood: Tension

3EXT

pp. 1-1

LIGHTHOUSE TENDER. DECK - SUNSET

ominous arrival

Two ghostly silhouettes stand on the bow as a flash of light and a foghorn blast reveal the bleak stone island of Pilot Rock.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: lighthouse tender (small steam boat)
Wardrobe: Two men in dark keeper uniforms and caps (seen as silhouettes)
VFX/Stunts: seagull flock around the tower
Notes: First reveal of Pilot Rock, the lighthouse tower, and the screeching seagulls. The men are intentionally indistinct, 'they could just as easily be ghosts.'
Camera: Wide shot from behind and below the two figures
Lighting: Strong backlight from low dusk sun, figures in silhouette
Mood: Ominous arrival

4EXT

pp. 1-2

PILOT ROCK. SHORE - SUNSET

labor and unease

Two relief mates hand provisions across the surf to the two uniformed men, one lagging behind under the heavier load, past a doorless boathouse with the lifeboat dory inside.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: transfer boat; provisions / supply sacks; dory (lifeboat)
Wardrobe: Two men in dark keeper uniforms and caps
VFX/Stunts: difficult supply hand-over across surf
Notes: Establishes the doorless boathouse and the poorly-mended dory on its launch runners, the only escape vessel.
Camera: Wide shot, slightly elevated, taking in shore and boathouse
Lighting: Fading dusk, long flat shadows on wet rock
Mood: Unease

5EXT

pp. 2-2

PILOT ROCK. NEAR THE LIVING QUARTERS - SUNSET

foreboding

The two departing wickies, craggy and leaden, shuffle past their relief without bothering to exchange a glance.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: gunny sacks; rope-handled ditty boxes; clay pipe
Wardrobe: Departing keepers: same dark uniforms, bearded, reeking of tobacco and salt
Notes: Establishes the one-story clapboard shack joined to the lighthouse by a long breezeway, and the wickies' worn appearance as a mirror of the men's fate.
Camera: Wide shot, figures crossing the frame in profile
Lighting: Last dusk light, muted and gray
Mood: Foreboding

6EXT

pp. 2-3

PILOT ROCK. NEAR THE LIVING QUARTERS - LATER

introduction / no turning back

Young flinches as the foghorn shakes through his body while Old, unmoved, jams an unlit clay pipe upside-down in his mouth and limps off, happy to be home.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: clay pipe (upside down)
Wardrobe: Young: ill-fitting keeper uniform, small mustache, healing week-old black eye; Old: weathered keeper uniform, feral beard
Notes: Full first character descriptions of Young (early 30s, haunted, beaten-dog quality) and Old (60s-70s, an old Pan, a Satyr). They watch the tender vanish into the fog.
Camera: Medium two-shot, slightly low
Lighting: Cold flat dusk, no warmth
Mood: Inevitability

7INT

EVENING

pp. 3-3

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

isolation settling in

Young drops his supplies onto warped, mildewed floorboards and surveys the run-down galley as the wind moans through the sole window.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: heavy supply sacks; coal range; farmhouse sink with water pump
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the galley/kitchen. The O.S. dribbling water motif begins, leading Young deeper into the quarters.
Camera: Wide interior shot, eye level
Lighting: Weak window light, lamp-lit corners falling to shadow
Mood: Isolation

8INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 3-3

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR

secret curiosity

Young's hand creeps shifty-eyed along Old's fine rolled-shut desk to test the lock, which holds fast.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: fine desk; ship in a bottle; desk lock; potbelly stove; government book chest; clock
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes Old's locked desk (a recurring object of obsession) and the ticking clock motif. The O.S. dribbling water continues.
Camera: Medium shot favoring the hand on the desk
Lighting: Single low lamp, warm pool fading to black
Mood: Curiosity

9INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 3-4

LIVING QUARTERS. STAIRCASE

creeping unease

Young climbs the narrow creaking stairs toward the growing sound of dribbling water.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: None
Camera: Low angle looking up the stairwell at the climbing figure
Lighting: Faint lamp glow from below, darkness above
Mood: Creeping unease

10INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 4-5

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

dread / forbidden desire

Young digs a small scrimshawed ivory mermaid out of a hole in his mattress and rubs his thumb over her carved breasts with hungry curiosity.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: cast-iron single beds; chamber pot; carved ivory mermaid; horsehair mattress stuffing
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young bumps his head on the low ceiling. Old pisses in his chamber pot and farts as a display of power, then limps off whistling 'Tis Brasswork.' Young discovers the carved mermaid hidden in the mattress, the central charm-object of the film.
Camera: Close shot over the figure's hands, carving in focus
Lighting: Single bedside lamp, warm tight pool
Mood: Forbidden hunger

11INT

NIGHT

pp. 5-5

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

punishing labor

Young shovels coal into the glowing mouth of the furnace, dripping sweat and reeling each time the fog siren blows excruciatingly loud.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: steam foghorn engine; furnace; coal shovel; coal
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: steam-powered foghorn machinery; intense furnace fire
Notes: Establishes the fog signal house and the foghorn-stoking labor that recurs throughout.
Camera: Medium low shot, furnace mouth toward camera
Lighting: Hard orange-equivalent furnace glare, single source
Mood: Punishing

12INT

NIGHT

pp. 5-6

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY/VESTIBULE

secret indulgence

Old, buried headfirst in a built-in cabinet with his butt out like a wagging dog, pulls out a sea-glass liquor bottle and grins with relief.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: built-in cabinet; wooden crate; sea-glass liquor bottle
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young watches from the staircase. First sight of Old's hidden liquor stash.
Camera: Wide shot, watcher visible deep in background
Lighting: Single lamp, comic-grotesque shadow
Mood: Secret indulgence

13INT

pp. 6-9

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY - LATER

power struggle

Young pointedly empties Old's hooch into the sink and toasts 'to four weeks' with water, only to retch violently from the foul cistern taste.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: kerosene lamp (bent); tin and chipped china cups; homemade hooch / liquor; scrod and potatoes; mess plates; hand-rolled cigarette; Instructions to Light-Keepers manual
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Marked '- LATER' after an OMITTED slug. Establishes the recurring grace ('Should pale death with treble dread...'), Old's insistence that he alone tends the light, Young's teetotaling, and the chore list. The grog tastes of the fouled cistern, foreshadowing Young's cistern duty.
Camera: Two-shot across the table, slightly low
Lighting: Single bent lamp, warm pool, faces half in dark
Mood: Power struggle

14EXT

NIGHT

pp. 9-9

PILOT ROCK

ominous interlude

Extreme wide shot: the lighthouse flashes and the foghorn blasts over the black island.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: rotating lighthouse beam
Notes: Follows an OMITTED slug. A transitional establishing beat.
Camera: Extreme wide shot, locked off
Lighting: Lighthouse beam as sole light, rest in darkness
Mood: Ominous

15INT

NIGHT

pp. 9-10

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

rising resentment

Enraged by the manual and the relentless foghorn, Young kicks the chair over and the rulebook tumbles to the ground.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: furnace; coal shovel; Instructions to Light-Keepers manual; chair
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young curses the rules 'Son-of-a-bitch' at the manual dated July 1881.
Camera: Medium shot, action across the frame
Lighting: Furnace glow from one side, deep shadow
Mood: Rising resentment

16INT

NIGHT

pp. 10-10

LIGHTHOUSE. TOWER STAIRS

enchantment

The camera booms up through the clockwork as a lead weight rises through the iron spiral stairs and otherworldly patterns of light swirl hypnotically across the ironwork.

Characters: None
Props: clockwork gears; lead counterweight on chain; cast-iron spiral staircase
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: swirling hypnotic light patterns through ironwork
Notes: First statement of the eerie 'light' music cue that recurs and closes the film. Establishes the magic of the lantern mechanism.
Camera: Low angle craning straight up the spiral stairwell
Lighting: Swirling refracted light from the lantern above
Mood: Enchantment

17INT

NIGHT

pp. 10-11

LIGHTHOUSE. LANTERN ROOM

obsessive devotion

Bare-chested and slick with sweat in the immense heat of the Fresnel lens, Old toasts the light with his tin cup: 'To ye, me beauty!'

Characters: OLD
Props: third-order Fresnel lens; tin cup; grog / liquor; clay pipe
Wardrobe: Old strips off jacket and opens union suit, then bare-chested; faded three-masted ship tattoo on chest and crooked stick-and-poke tattoos
Notes: Contains a '- LATER' beat in which Old becomes bare-chested. His near-erotic relationship to the lamp is established. His tattoos and alcoholic's gut are revealed.
Camera: Medium shot, the man and lens sharing the frame
Lighting: Intense glow off the Fresnel lens, sweat catching it
Mood: Obsessive devotion

18EXT

NIGHT

pp. 11-11

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

yearning

Young stares up, primal and yearning, at the rotating eight-beam starburst of the light while his match repeatedly fails in the wet wind.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: cigarette; matches; signal shed with protruding trumpet
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: rotating eight-beam starburst light
Notes: Establishes Young's primal longing for the light, mirroring Old's. The protruding fog trumpet on rickety struts is described.
Camera: Low angle, man small beneath the radiating light
Lighting: Rotating starburst beams as key, otherwise night
Mood: Yearning

19INT

pp. 11-12

INT/EXT. BOATHOUSE/SHORE - MOMENTS LATER

nightmare / guilt surfacing

Hypnotized by the light on the water, Young wades neck-deep into a sea suddenly choked with forty-foot logs, where the hobnail-booted body of a dead man drifts toward him among floating cant hooks.

Characters: YOUNG; MERMAID
Props: cigarette; forty-foot logs; cant hook (peavey); wool mackinaw coat; leather caulk boots with hobnailed soles
Wardrobe: Drowned body in wool mackinaw coat and hobnailed leather caulk boots
VFX/Stunts: river log-drive flooding the sea; underwater mermaid swim; near-drowning
Notes: First hallucination/dream proper: the log-drive drowning vision and the menacing mermaid swimming at camera. Plants the dead logger in the mackinaw coat and the cant hook, the seeds of Young's confessed crime.
Camera: Tight on the wading man at water level, body drifting in
Lighting: Cold lighthouse beam raking the water surface
Mood: Nightmare

20INT

MORNING

pp. 12-13

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

rude awakening

Young jolts awake to water dripping onto his face as a drunk Old disrobes in the mirror, blaming the leak on shingles.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: leaking ceiling; mirror
Wardrobe: Old drunk, pants around his ankles
Notes: Marked MORNING. The leaking roof and Young's chore list (cistern, lamp oil, shingles) are set up. Quick-cut transition from the previous nightmare.
Camera: Wide two-shot, mirror reflection included
Lighting: Weak gray dawn through a small window
Mood: Rude awakening

21EXT

DAY

pp. 13-13

PILOT ROCK. PATHWAY

grinding labor

Young hauls a heavy bag of chalk up the island incline as the wind blows like hell.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: bag of chalk
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: high wind
Notes: None
Camera: Wide shot, low on the slope below the climber
Lighting: Flat overcast daylight
Mood: Grinding labor

22EXT

DAY

pp. 13-13

PILOT ROCK. CISTERN

disgust

Young opens the brick water tank to a putrid stench, sees the mold and frothy sludge he's been drinking, and pours in chalk that sinks beautifully through the water.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: brick cistern / water tank; bag of chalk; mixing stick; cigarette; handkerchief
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the cistern as a location, later the site of the gull massacre.
Camera: High angle over the man's shoulder into the tank
Lighting: Flat daylight, dark water absorbing it
Mood: Disgust

23EXT

DAY

pp. 13-14

LIVING QUARTERS. ROOF

voyeuristic unease

From the rickety roof ladder Young peers through a rotted hole in the shingles and watches Old asleep below, softly humping his sweaty mattress.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: cedar shake shingles; rickety rung ladder; scraper
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: high-wind roof work / fall hazard
Notes: Establishes the leaky roof hole through which Young later spies. Young watches Old's reflexive thrusting through the rot.
Camera: Over-the-shoulder from the roof, down through the hole
Lighting: Bright flat daylight above, dim interior below
Mood: Voyeuristic unease

24EXT

DAY

pp. 14-14

SUPPLY SHED

discovery

Young pulls open the sagging door of the supply shed to reveal it crammed with barrels of dried fish, tools, tapers and casks.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: barrels of dried fish; tools; tapers; wooden crates; casks and kegs; rope
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the supply shed, later the site of Young's masturbation scenes and his stash.
Camera: Medium shot from outside, man in the doorway
Lighting: Bright exterior daylight, shed interior in gloom
Mood: Discovery

25EXT

DAY

pp. 14-14

COAL HOUSE

petty frustration

Young opens the coal house door to heaps of coal, and the door falls clean off its hinges.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: coal; broken door
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: None
Camera: Medium shot, door caught falling
Lighting: Flat daylight
Mood: Petty frustration

26EXT

pp. 14-14

COAL HOUSE - LATER

labor

Young overloads a wheelbarrow with coal.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: wheelbarrow; coal
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The squeaky coal wheelbarrow becomes a recurring image.
Camera: Medium shot, slightly low over the barrow
Lighting: Flat overcast daylight
Mood: Labor

27EXT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 14-14

PILOT ROCK. PATHWAY

precarious toil

Young pushes the overfull, squeaking coal wheelbarrow down the rock, one wrong step from spilling it all.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: wheelbarrow; coal
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: None
Camera: Wide shot, slightly ahead and below on the path
Lighting: Flat daylight
Mood: Precarious toil

28EXT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 14-15

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

first confrontation with the gull

A one-eyed seagull guarding the signal-house door lunges at Young, who hurls coal and misses, while Old watches from the tower catwalk above.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD; ONE-EYED GULL
Props: wheelbarrow; coal; clay pipe
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: aggressive trained seagull lunging
Notes: First appearance of the ONE-EYED GULL, the film's recurring animal antagonist, here with its missing eye revealed. Old watches from the catwalk, establishing his surveillance.
Camera: Wide shot tying the men and the distant watcher
Lighting: Flat daylight, hard rim on the gull's wings
Mood: Confrontation

29INT

DAY

pp. 15-15

LIGHTHOUSE. OIL ROOM

intimidation

Young stares up the towering spiral staircase from the oil room as the light's clockwork chains dangle and creep sinister shadows across the stone wall.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: oil drums; clockwork weight chains; iron spiral staircase
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the oil room at the base of the tower stairs.
Camera: Low angle from beside the man up the spiral
Lighting: Hard side light casting long chain shadows
Mood: Intimidation

30INT

DAY

pp. 15-16

LIGHTHOUSE. TOWER STAIRS

sisyphean strain

Young lugs an immense oil drum up the endless iron steps, the repeated 'Clunk' marking each agonizing rest.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: oil drum
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: None
Camera: Tight angle on the man on the stairs, drum heavy
Lighting: Dim filtered daylight through tower glass
Mood: Sisyphean strain

31INT

DAY

pp. 16-18

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM

domination / forbidden threshold

Caught reaching for the locked lantern-room hatch, Young is taunted by Old, who blows pipe smoke in his face, tosses him a brass oil canister, and unlocks the lantern with the largest of his ring of keys.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: oil drum; locked lantern-room hatch; clay pipe; three-gallon brass oil canister; brass key ring on watch chain
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the machine room and the locked lantern-room hatch. Old's ring of brass keys and his rule 'You don't go in there!' are central setups for the climax.
Camera: Tight two-shot, the hatch visible above them
Lighting: Single hard lamp, smoke diffusing it
Mood: Domination

32INT

NIGHT

pp. 18-21

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

menace / superstition

Old slaps Young hard across the face out of nowhere and turns dead serious: 'Bad luck to kill a sea bird.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: scrod and potatoes; liquor / dram; hand-rolled cigarette
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old recites the grace again, tells the tale of his last keeper who went mad raving about sirens and an enchantment in the light, and warns it's bad luck to kill a seabird. Plants the second-keeper backstory and the gull superstition.
Camera: Tight two-shot across the table
Lighting: Single warm lamp, deep surrounding dark
Mood: Menace

33INT

NIGHT

pp. 21-21

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

haunting / restlessness

A seagull taps at the window and is gone the instant Young turns, leaving the carved mermaid nestled waiting in his sheets.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL
Props: carved ivory mermaid; Instructions to Light-Keepers manual; cigarette; clock
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: seagull tapping window
Notes: Young rubs the mermaid carving reflexively. The gull's window-tapping motif begins.
Camera: Medium shot from across the bunkroom
Lighting: Lone bedside lamp, window a faint gray square
Mood: Haunting

34INT

NIGHT

pp. 21-22

SUPPLY SHED

shameful release

Hidden in the shadows of the shed, Young masturbates as the camera booms down and the image cuts to black.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: First of the supply-shed masturbation scenes.
Camera: High wide shot booming down on the figure
Lighting: One faint shaft of light, the rest black
Mood: Shameful release

35EXT

pp. 22-22

SUPPLY SHED - A BIT LATER THAT NIGHT

suspicion / the uncanny

Young spots a man's silhouette hugging the lens in the beam, then sees Old on the catwalk pulling up his suspenders as if dressed after a night with a woman.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: cigarette; lantern (in Old's hand)
Wardrobe: Old pulls suspenders over his shoulders
VFX/Stunts: man's silhouette inside the light beam
Notes: First sense that Old has a sexual/mystical communion with the light. Young skulks and hides, wary of being watched.
Camera: Wide shot, watcher foreground, tower deep background
Lighting: Glowing lantern beam, figures backlit
Mood: Suspicion

36EXT

DAY

pp. 22-23

PILOT ROCK

endurance

In an extremely wide shot Young struggles a tarp-covered coal wheelbarrow through a storm of mud, his black eye now healed, marking the passage of time.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: wheelbarrow; coal; oilcloth tarp
Wardrobe: Young's shiner has healed
VFX/Stunts: storm and mud
Notes: Follows two OMITTED slugs. Time has passed; the healed black eye is a continuity marker. Audio pre-lap of Old accusing Young of neglecting his duties.
Camera: Extreme wide shot, man tiny in the landscape
Lighting: Stormy diffuse daylight, no shadows
Mood: Endurance

37INT

pp. 23-23

MACHINE ROOM - LATER

accusation

Young freezes mid-polish, rag against the brass, as a fuming Old accuses him: 'Don't deny it.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: polishing rag; brasswork
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Part of a rapid intercut accusation sequence about neglected duties.
Camera: Tight two-shot, slightly canted toward the younger man
Lighting: Single hard lamp, brass catching it
Mood: Accusation

38INT

DAY

pp. 23-25

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

humiliation / submission

Old points in horror at an unchanged floor and unleashes a torrential tirade demanding Young swab it again, ten times more, smiling, while Young finally breaks and grabs the mop, resigned.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: mop and pail; floor
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The famous floor-swabbing tirade. Old breaks into 'Tis Brasswork.' Young mutters an accusation that Old is 'molesting' him with the chores.
Camera: Wide two-shot taking in the floor between them
Lighting: Flat daylight through a small window
Mood: Humiliation

39INT

pp. 25-25

OIL ROOM - LATER

drudgery

Old watches Young polish the brasswork harder and harder while singing the next verse of 'Tis Brasswork.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: brasswork; polishing rag
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Continuation of the brasswork montage.
Camera: Over-the-shoulder past the watcher onto the worker
Lighting: Single dim lamp, brass glinting
Mood: Drudgery

40EXT

DAY

pp. 25-26

PILOT ROCK

breaking point of frustration

The wheelbarrow tips and coal scatters everywhere in the storm; Young stands still, wanting to scream, as Old's 'Tis Brasswork' carries on in voiceover.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: wheelbarrow; coal
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: storm
Notes: None
Camera: Wide shot, spilled coal and man together
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight, rain visible
Mood: Breaking point

41INT

NIGHT

pp. 26-26

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

simmering tension

The two men eat scrod and potatoes in tense silence as rain and wind hammer the flimsy walls and thunder claps to black.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: scrod and potatoes
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: storm, thunder
Notes: None
Camera: Two-shot across the table, window between
Lighting: Warm lamp plus cold lightning bursts
Mood: Simmering tension

42EXT

DAY

pp. 26-28

LIGHTHOUSE TOWER

betrayal / near-death

Fifty feet up, whitewashing the tower from a kitchen chair rigged to a failing block and tackle, Young plunges to the ground when the busted pulley wheel finally flies off.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: kitchen chair; block and tackle / pulley; whitewash bucket; horsehair paintbrush stick; logbook (referenced)
Wardrobe: Young splashed with whitewash
VFX/Stunts: 50-foot rigging fall stunt; block-and-tackle failure
Notes: Old lowers Young on the failing rig, possibly deliberately. Young hears about Old's 'logbook' for the first time. Ends with Young plunging to the ground; cut to black.
Camera: Wide vertical shot up the tower, fall in frame
Lighting: Bright flat daylight on white render
Mood: Near-death

43EXT

pp. 28-28

FOOT OF THE LIGHT TOWER - LATER

menace renewed

Young comes to amid the shattered chair, and the one-eyed gull perches on his leg pecking at the fresh meat until he finally kicks it away.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL
Props: shattered kitchen chair; whitewash
Wardrobe: Young covered in whitewash
VFX/Stunts: aggressive seagull pecking
Notes: Young survives the fall. The one-eyed gull torments him again; he kicks it, escalating the bird conflict.
Camera: High wide shot looking down at the fallen man
Lighting: Flat daylight, hard ground texture
Mood: Menace renewed

44INT

EVENING

pp. 28-29

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR/VESTIBULE

secrecy / surveillance

Old finishes a logbook entry with a flourish, rolls his desk shut and locks it with the littlest key, as Young watches hidden in the shadows of the vestibule.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: logbook; tiny spectacles; fine desk; smallest brass key on chain
Wardrobe: Old in delicate spectacles worn at a cant
Notes: Establishes that Old locks his logbook in the desk with the smallest key. Young's spying intensifies.
Camera: Wide shot, watcher concealed in foreground dark
Lighting: Single desk lamp, surrounding gloom
Mood: Surveillance

45INT

NIGHT

pp. 29-33

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

wary intimacy / confession beginnings

Young finally offers his name, 'Ephraim Winslow,' and Old needles him about his past as a timber man on the run.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: hardtack; nail keg (seat); liquor; clay pipe; cigarette
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young gives the false name Ephraim Winslow and his timber/Hudson Bay backstory. Old reveals he abandoned a wife and 'little 'uns' for the sea. Key exposition of Young's invented identity.
Camera: Tight two-shot, slightly low
Lighting: One warm lamp, heavy surrounding dark
Mood: Wary intimacy

46INT

pp. 33-34

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR - LATER THAT NIGHT

ominous blessing

Old toasts Young the 'God fearin' man,' wishing his cinders always stay burning and that fear never abandons him, as Young's freshly lit cigarette mysteriously goes dead.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: rocker; knitting; potbelly stove; cigarette; liquor
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old explains gulls hold the souls of dead sailors and that a dead cigarette cinder means someone is thinking bad thoughts of you. His curse-like toast foreshadows Young's doom.
Camera: Wide two-shot, stove glow centering them
Lighting: Potbelly stove glow plus low lamp
Mood: Ominous blessing

47INT

pp. 34-35

LIGHT STATION. VARIOUS - A DAYS WORK

routine / mounting secrecy

A montage of daily toil: Young sweeps, cleans the fog trumpet and winds the clockwork while Old repeatedly locks his desk and the lantern room behind him.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: broom; fog trumpet; clockwork mechanism; fine desk; lantern-room lock; tobacco pouch
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Montage spanning the whole light station. Young's tobacco pouch falls while cleaning the clockwork, setting up the next scene's pretrieval. Old's locking of desk and lantern recurs.
Camera: Series of medium shots implied in one composite frame
Lighting: Mixed daylight and lamp across the station
Mood: Mounting secrecy

48INT

NIGHT

pp. 35-35

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

restless craving

Sweaty and restless, Young realizes his tobacco pouch is missing beneath pinned clippings of Sears catalogue goods and pornographic playing cards.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: carved ivory mermaid; Sears and Roebuck catalogue clippings; Tenderloin music hall program; pornographic playing cards; tobacco pouch (missing)
Wardrobe: Young in his underwear
Notes: The missing tobacco pouch drives Young up to the machine room. The mermaid carving is again in his bed.
Camera: Medium shot, the pinned wall behind the bed
Lighting: Single bedside lamp
Mood: Restless craving

49INT

NIGHT

pp. 35-37

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM

horror / the unknowable

Peering through the iron lens-deck grates, Young glimpses Old's vibrating torso and pumping arm, then white viscous fluid drips down and a huge translucent squid tentacle slithers across the ironwork.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: spinning clockwork; tobacco pouch; chair; Fresnel lens deck
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: giant squid tentacle; dripping viscous fluid; supernatural light
Notes: Young retrieves his pouch and overhears Old whispering 'The light... seed... Veritas...' The squid tentacle and dripping fluid mark the supernatural climax of Old's communion with the lamp.
Camera: Low angle up through the iron grating
Lighting: Unearthly glow from the lens above
Mood: The unknowable

50INT

DAY

pp. 37-37

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

dread / contamination

Young pumps water that turns rusty, then nearly black with a dark film, ignoring the tap-tap-tap at the window until a plaintive gull cry calls him outside.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL
Props: farmhouse water pump; cup
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The water turning black, the window-tapping, and the gull cry lead directly to the cistern massacre.
Camera: Medium shot, pump foreground, window behind
Lighting: Flat gray daylight through the window
Mood: Contamination

51EXT

DAY

pp. 37-38

PILOT ROCK. CISTERN

violent rage / damning act

After the one-eyed gull attacks his face, Young seizes it by the legs and beats it against the cistern edge over and over into a bloody pulp of feathers.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL
Props: brick cistern; dead gulls; weathervane
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: brutal seagull killing; blood; spinning weathervane
Notes: Young kills the one-eyed gull, breaking Old's taboo. Immediately the weathervane spins from west to east, the omen of the changed wind that strands them. Pivotal turning point.
Camera: Medium shot, slightly low, motion-blurred swing
Lighting: Harsh flat daylight
Mood: Violent rage

52INT

pp. 38-39

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM - LATER

unsettling vulnerability

Young finds Old sobbing into his pillow and blankets, a strangely vulnerable and unsettling sight, and doesn't know what to do.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: pillow and blankets; handkerchief
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old appears to weep in his sleep. Young tries to report the open cistern but trails off.
Camera: Wide shot from the doorway across the room
Lighting: Soft gray window light
Mood: Unsettling vulnerability

53INT

DAY

pp. 39-40

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM

foreboding / withheld guilt

Old, writing in his logbook, warns that the changed wind is the calm before a Nor'easter and orders Young to board up the signal-house windows.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: brasswork; polishing rag; logbook
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old promises relief is coming in the morning and that Young is getting off the island 'tomorry' Winslow. The approaching storm is set up. Young won't meet Old's eye after killing the gull.
Camera: Two-shot, the avoided eyeline between them
Lighting: Weak filtered daylight, single lamp
Mood: Foreboding

54EXT

DAY

pp. 40-40

SIGNAL HOUSE

uneasy truce

Young boards up the signal-house windows with Old's help as Old promises a surprise in voiceover.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: boards; nails
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Storm preparation. Old (V.O.) teases a surprise, leading to the lobster pot.
Camera: Medium two-shot at the boarded window
Lighting: Overcast daylight
Mood: Uneasy truce

55EXT

DAY

pp. 40-40

PILOT ROCK. SHORE

fleeting camaraderie

Young hauls a wooden lobster pot dripping from the water and both men smile, a rare shared moment of pleasure.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: rope; wooden lobster pot
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The lobster pot is the 'surprise'; later it holds the one-eyed corpse head. A rare bonding beat.
Camera: Medium two-shot at the water's edge
Lighting: Overcast daylight, water glinting
Mood: Fleeting camaraderie

56INT

NIGHT

pp. 40-42

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

surrender to drink / bonding

Over a satisfying lobster supper Young finally relents and drinks, declaring 'Damn! Like comin' home,' and the two fall into rounds of grog and song.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: lobster shells; grog / liquor cups
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Contains a '- LATER' beat. Young finally drinks; the descent into shared drunkenness begins. The 'last before relief' framing introduces the doubt about how much time has passed.
Camera: Two-shot across the lobster-strewn table
Lighting: Single warm lamp, cozy pool of light
Mood: Surrender

57INT

pp. 42-44

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR - LATER

intimacy / unease at the shared name

Drunk and confiding, Old reveals his name is Thomas Wake, which visibly disturbs Young, who then toasts 'To my friend Tom.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: liquor; clay pipe; cigarette
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Marked '-PARLOR. LATER.' Old refuses to let Young near the light and reveals his Christian name Thomas. Young is troubled by the name (foreshadowing he too is a Thomas). Key reveal.
Camera: Tight two-shot, near profiles together
Lighting: One low lamp, faces emerging from dark
Mood: Unease

58INT

NIGHT

pp. 44-45

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

drunken collapse

Too drunk to get his boots off, Young wrenches one free, cracks his head on the wall lamp, and passes out as kerosene soaks his hair.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: boots; wall-mounted kerosene lamp
Wardrobe: Young's pants around his ankles
Notes: Young blacks out drunk; this is the night they may have slept through the tender's arrival.
Camera: Wide shot, man sprawling onto the bed
Lighting: Knocked kerosene lamp, light spilling crooked
Mood: Drunken collapse

59INT

MORNING

pp. 44-45

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

miserable hangover

Desperate for water and brutally hung over, Young finds both his and Old's chamber pots full of piss and shit.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: empty pitcher and basin; chamber pots
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old is asleep sprawled on the steps. Sets up the chamber-pot dumping disaster.
Camera: Medium shot, slightly high over the pots
Lighting: Weak gray dawn through a small window
Mood: Miserable hangover

60EXT

pp. 45-45

PILOT ROCK - LATER THAT MORNING

battering the elements

The arrived gale nearly knocks Young off his feet as he carries the full piss pots, hungover and battered by the wind.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: full chamber pots; cigarette
Wardrobe: Young in oilskins
VFX/Stunts: strong gale
Notes: The storm has arrived in force.
Camera: Wide shot, man buffeted in the open
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight
Mood: Battered

61EXT

pp. 45-45

PILOT ROCK. CLIFFS - LATER

humiliating futility

Young flings the chamber-pot contents off the cliff and the wind blasts it all straight back into his face.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: chamber pots
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: wind-blown splash-back gag
Notes: Establishes the cliffs location. 'Fuck!' Young drops the pots onto the rocks.
Camera: Medium shot at the cliff edge, splash-back caught
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight, hard spray
Mood: Humiliating futility

62EXT

pp. 45-45

PILOT ROCK. PATHWAY - LATER THAT MORNING

degradation

Young hauls coal in the rain, his face covered in shit.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: coal
Wardrobe: Young's face covered in shit
VFX/Stunts: rain
Notes: None
Camera: Wide shot, rain filling the frame
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight, rain streaks
Mood: Degradation

63INT

pp. 45-45

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE - LATER THAT MORNING

labor

Young stokes the running siren's fire.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: furnace; coal; fog siren
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: None
Camera: Medium low shot at the furnace mouth
Lighting: Hard furnace glow, single source
Mood: Labor

64EXT

pp. 45-47

PILOT ROCK - LATER THAT MORNING

terror / forbidden allure

Wiping seaweed from a beautiful nude woman washed up on the rocks, Young discovers gills at her ribs and a fish's tail; she opens her eyes, smiles, and reaches for his embrace.

Characters: YOUNG; MERMAID
Props: empty wheelbarrow; seaweed
Wardrobe: Nude mermaid entangled in seaweed
VFX/Stunts: mermaid prosthetic tail and gills; living mermaid reveal
Notes: The MERMAID's full living appearance. Young flees screaming across the island. Climax of his erotic-horror visions.
Camera: High shot looking down over the man at the figure
Lighting: Overcast daylight, skin luminous against dark rock
Mood: Forbidden terror

65INT

pp. 47-47

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR - MOMENTS LATER

dismissal

Wild-eyed and breathless from screaming, Young is brushed off by Old, who only complains he smells of shit and orders him to swab before the tender comes.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old ignores Young's terror; the routine of waiting for the tender resumes.
Camera: Two-shot, the dismissive turn emphasized
Lighting: Weak gray daylight
Mood: Dismissal

66INT

pp. 47-47

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY - LATER

false order

The galley sits as clean as it can ever be.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Brief transitional shot preparing for relief day.
Camera: Wide static shot of the empty room
Lighting: Flat window daylight
Mood: False order

67INT

pp. 47-47

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM - LATER

anticipation

The bunkroom is orderly, mattresses rolled, as the clock ticks on.

Characters: None
Props: rolled mattresses; clock
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Packed and ready for departure.
Camera: Wide static shot of the empty bunkroom
Lighting: Soft gray window light
Mood: Anticipation

68EXT

pp. 47-48

PILOT ROCK. NEAR THE SHORE - LATER

abandonment

In topcoats with their gunny sacks and ditty boxes, the two men stand staring out to sea waiting for a tender that never comes as the rain begins to pour.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: topcoats; gunny sacks; ditty boxes
Wardrobe: Both in topcoats, packed for relief
VFX/Stunts: rain, wind
Notes: The tender fails to arrive, the first hard sign they are stranded.
Camera: Wide shot from behind, men facing the empty sea
Lighting: Flat overcast daylight, rain starting
Mood: Abandonment

69INT

NIGHT

pp. 48-48

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

dawning entrapment

Drenched and motionless at the table, Young finally breaks the long silence: 'They didn't come.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: cigarette
Wardrobe: Both drenched
VFX/Stunts: biblical storm outside
Notes: The men are stranded by the storm.
Camera: Two-shot across the table, slightly low
Lighting: One lamp, cold storm flashes from the window
Mood: Dawning entrapment

70EXT

NIGHT

pp. 48-48

PILOT ROCK

elemental fury

Huge waves crash against the island.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: huge crashing waves
Notes: Transitional storm shot.
Camera: Wide shot, towering wave filling the frame
Lighting: Faint moon and lighthouse spill on the foam
Mood: Elemental fury

71EXT

NIGHT

pp. 48-48

PILOT ROCK. CLIFFS

elemental fury

Enormous waves crash on the cliffs.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: enormous crashing waves
Notes: Transitional storm shot.
Camera: Wide low angle up the cliff face
Lighting: Pale spill catching the spray, rest in dark
Mood: Elemental fury

72EXT

NIGHT

pp. 48-50

PILOT ROCK. CLIFFS

mad ritual / power challenged

Old stands like a magician before the deluge, counting waves and dousing the sea with liquor while bellowing to Father Neptune to abate, until a massive wave knocks him off his feet.

Characters: OLD
Props: oilskins; liquor bottle
Wardrobe: Old in oilskins
VFX/Stunts: massive waves knocking Old down; ritual on the cliffside in storm
Notes: Old's wave-quelling ritual, invoking Neptune. The dory wracks against the boathouse behind him. Establishes his self-mythology as a sea-sorcerer.
Camera: Wide low shot, man dwarfed by the wave
Lighting: Storm-night gloom, foam catching faint light
Mood: Mad ritual

73INT

NIGHT

pp. 50-51

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

rising dread

Shirtless and rag-eared, Young resists drinking from Old's liquor bottle just as a soaking, crazed Old appears in the doorway shouting that the damp has gotten to the provisions.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: barometer; coal shovel; Old's liquor bottle; cigarette; rag earplugs
Wardrobe: Young shirtless; Old soaking wet
Notes: Barometer falls from RAIN to STORM. Young nearly drinks but resists. News of the spoiled provisions begins the rationing thread.
Camera: Wide shot, doorway behind the seated man
Lighting: Single lamp, doorway a darker void
Mood: Rising dread

74EXT

pp. 51-51

PILOT ROCK. PATHWAY - LATER

shared struggle

The two trudge together through the storm.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: storm
Notes: Transitional.
Camera: Wide shot, the two crossing in profile
Lighting: Storm-night gloom
Mood: Shared struggle

75INT

pp. 51-53

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY - LATER

unraveling reality

Old insists it has been weeks, not a day, since they missed the tender, and that they're stranded with 'some damned lunatic,' leaving Young terrified he is losing his mind.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: salt cod (rotted)
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Time becomes unreliable: Old says weeks have passed. The 'Ol Striker marooned seven months' tale. Core ambiguity of the film stated outright.
Camera: Tight two-shot across the table
Lighting: One low lamp, deep shadow
Mood: Unraveling reality

76EXT

NIGHT

pp. 53-54

PILOT ROCK. BEHIND THE QUARTERS

manic compulsion

Old digs like a madman in the rain and unearths a grave-sized hole, declaring 'Here she lies' over a buried wooden crate.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: two shovels; wooden crate
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: digging in storm
Notes: Contains a '- LATER' beat. The grave-sized hole dug here becomes Young's pit for Old in the climax. The crate holds the hidden booze 'rations.'
Camera: Medium shot down at the man and the pit
Lighting: Low lantern, rain catching its light
Mood: Manic compulsion

77EXT

pp. 53-54

PILOT ROCK. BEHIND THE QUARTERS - MOMENTS LATER

dark irony

They pry the crate open to reveal ten full bottles of booze, and Young deadpans, 'Rations.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: wooden crate; ten bottles of booze
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Marked '-MOMENTS LATER.' The hidden liquor cache replaces real provisions, sealing their alcoholic spiral.
Camera: High shot down over the open crate
Lighting: Low lantern, bottles glinting
Mood: Dark irony

78INT

NIGHT

pp. 54-55

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

brewing violence

As Old recounts a scurvy-and-near-cannibalism sea horror, the camera reveals Young secretly pocketing a dinner knife.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: liquor; logbook ledger; dinner knife
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old's scurvy story contradicts his earlier 'broke me leg' claim; Young grows suspicious and pockets the dinner knife, the weapon he later uses on the locks and the mermaid carving.
Camera: Two-shot, composed to reveal the palmed knife
Lighting: One warm lamp, surrounding dark
Mood: Brewing violence

79INT

pp. 55-62

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM - LATER THAT NIGHT

curse / domination

Their drunken 'What? What?' spiral collapses into Old's possessed Shakespearean curse summoning Triton and the sea king to dissolve Winslow into the sea itself.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: empty bottles; liquor
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The 'Hark, Triton, Hark!' monologue. Young's drunken slips reveal a foreman named Winslow and a cant hook, seeding his secret. Young capitulates, praising Old's cooking.
Camera: Low angle on the looming old man
Lighting: Single low lamp, huge cast shadow
Mood: Curse

80EXT

NIGHT

pp. 62-62

PILOT ROCK

apocalyptic atmosphere

Strobing flashes punctuate the wind, rain, waves and foghorn of the cataclysmic storm.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: lightning flashes; cataclysmic storm
Notes: Montage of storm flashes.
Camera: Wide shot, lightning across the whole frame
Lighting: Lightning strobes as sole light
Mood: Apocalyptic

81INT

NIGHT

pp. 62-62

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM

descent into madness

Hypnotized by the light through the lens deck, Young holds the dinner knife up to it and grins like a jack-o'-lantern, possibly insane.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: dinner knife; Fresnel lens deck
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young's obsession with the light deepens; he begins plotting to get inside the lantern.
Camera: Low angle up at the grinning man and knife
Lighting: Strange light from the lens deck above
Mood: Descent into madness

82INT

MORNING

pp. 62-63

LIVING QUARTERS. BREEZEWAY

stealth / transgression

Boots stuffed in his pockets, Young creeps stocking-footed toward the tower like a burglar.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: boots
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Establishes the breezeway connecting quarters and tower. Young sneaks to break into the lantern.
Camera: Wide shot down the length of the breezeway
Lighting: Cool early dawn through side windows
Mood: Transgression

83INT

pp. 63-63

TOWER STAIRS - MOMENTS LATER

tension

Young slinks up the tower stairs.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Transitional.
Camera: Tight angle on the man ascending the spiral
Lighting: Faint dawn through tower glass
Mood: Tension

84INT

pp. 63-63

MACHINE ROOM - MOMENTS LATER

thwarted scheming

Trying to pick the lantern-room lock, Young snaps the dinner knife in two, leaving a thin, needle-like blade and a new idea.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: dinner knife (breaks); lantern-room lock
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: The broken knife becomes a lockpick for Old's desk in the next beat.
Camera: Close shot over the man's hands at the lock
Lighting: Single dim lamp
Mood: Thwarted scheming

85INT

pp. 63-63

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR - MOMENTS LATER

frustrated discovery

Young pries open Old's desk only to find the logbook already gone, the lock already undone.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: fine desk; broken dinner knife; desk lock
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old (O.S.) snores upstairs while Young finds the logbook missing from the desk.
Camera: Medium shot over the man at the open desk
Lighting: Cool gray dawn through a window
Mood: Frustrated discovery

86INT

DAY

pp. 63-65

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNKROOM

thwarted murder / standoff

Creeping toward the sleeping Old with the broken knife aimed at his sweaty throat, Young is stopped by a betraying floorboard groan and Old's single opening eye: 'Queer way to wear yer shoes.'

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: logbook; spectacles; brass keys on chain; pocket watch; broken dinner knife; leaking ceiling pail
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young nearly murders Old in his sleep; caught, he hides the knife. The dripping water/plink motif and the brass keys are foregrounded. Young taunts that Old is no longer human.
Camera: Tight angle over the sleeping man up at the assailant
Lighting: Weak gray daylight, single eye catching it
Mood: Standoff

87EXT

DAY

pp. 65-65

PILOT ROCK. PATHWAY

alcoholic surrender

Young pushes a wheelbarrow holding nothing but a liquor bottle floating in rainwater, muttering and watching over it like a beloved thing.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: wheelbarrow; liquor bottle
Wardrobe: Young in oilskins
VFX/Stunts: tempest
Notes: Coal abandoned for booze; Young's priorities have fully collapsed into drink.
Camera: Wide shot, man and barrow in the storm
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight, rain texture
Mood: Alcoholic surrender

88INT

DAY

pp. 65-66

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

intoxicated toil

Shirtless in an oilskin hat, Young shovels coal and takes long swigs from the bottle as the fire roars.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: furnace; coal shovel; liquor bottle
Wardrobe: Young shirtless, oilskin hat on
VFX/Stunts: roaring furnace fire
Notes: None
Camera: Medium low shot at the furnace
Lighting: Hard furnace glare, single source
Mood: Intoxicated toil

89EXT

DAY

pp. 66-66

PILOT ROCK. SHORE

lust and guilt fused

Hauling the lobster-pot rope in the merciless gale, Young's mind floods with images of the mermaid, the phallic lighthouse, writhing tentacles, and the back of a mackinaw-collared head.

Characters: YOUNG; MERMAID
Props: lobster pot rope; cant hook (image)
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: intercut hallucination imagery
Notes: Erotic-horror montage intercutting the mermaid, the lighthouse-as-penis, tentacles, and the drowned logger. Quick-cuts into the shed.
Camera: Medium shot with ghosted superimposed imagery
Lighting: Storm-flat daylight, dream layers fainter
Mood: Lust and guilt fused

90INT

DAY

pp. 66-68

SUPPLY SHED

shame / breaking the charm

Howling like an animal in a trap, Young hurls the carved mermaid so it breaks in two, then crawls over and stabs the broken pieces in a fury with the dinner knife.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL; MERMAID
Props: carved ivory mermaid (breaks); dinner knife; lobster pot
Wardrobe: Young shirtless, oilskin hat on, shivering
VFX/Stunts: intercut imagery of mermaid sex and a man drowning
Notes: Young masturbates furiously, breaks the mermaid carving ('I fixed you... I'll get yer gullet!'), and intercut on the rocks the lobster pot reveals the shriveled one-eyed corpse head with crabs in the eye socket. The carving he believes is Old's sea-charm.
Camera: High shot down on the man and the broken carving
Lighting: One shaft of light, heavy surrounding dark
Mood: Breaking the charm

91INT

NIGHT

pp. 68-72

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

intimacy curdling into violence

Drunken singing and jigging escalate into a vicious play-fight, a near-kiss, and then a real brawl that sends the cabinet of dishes crashing to the floor.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: liquor bottles; clay pipe; plates and dishes; moldy cabinet; soapbox
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: brawl, smashing dishes and cabinet
Notes: Contains multiple '- LATER' and '-PARLOR. LATER.' beats. The diddling/dancing contest, the haunting ballad, the almost-kiss, the brawl, and Old forcing Young to drink in one draft ('Any word but aye be mutiny').
Camera: Wide shot, the crashing cabinet in frame
Lighting: One swinging lamp, lurching shadows
Mood: Intimacy curdling

92INT

pp. 72-75

LIVING QUARTERS. BUNK ROOM - LATER, THAT SAME NIGHT

confession / guilt

Feral-eyed and still, Young confesses he watched his foreman Ephraim Winslow slip into the log jam and drown, then stole his identity, only to turn and find Old gone.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: liquor
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Builds from the earlier '-PARLOR. LATER' drinking. Young admits he is Thomas Howard, not Ephraim Winslow, and confesses to letting the real Winslow die in the log drive with a cant hook nearby. Old's disembodied voice asks 'Why'd y'spill yer beans, Tommy?' Central revelation of the film.
Camera: Slow medium shot, the empty space revealed
Lighting: Single low lamp, deep shadow
Mood: Confession

93INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 75-75

KITCHEN/BREEZEWAY DOORWAY

eerie pursuit

Old's voice echoes through the kitchen/breezeway doorway.

Characters: OLD
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old (O.S.) only; a transitional echo as his voice leads Young toward the tower.
Camera: Static medium shot of the empty doorway
Lighting: Faint lamp spill, the doorway black
Mood: Eerie pursuit

94INT

pp. 75-75

LIGHTHOUSE. TOWER STAIRS - MOMENTS LATER

lured into the trap

Young climbs the tower stairs as the clockwork chains clink and Old's whisper 'Why'd y'spill yer beans?' echoes down.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: clockwork chains
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Old's voice (O.S.) draws Young up the tower.
Camera: Low angle up the spiral past the climber
Lighting: Faint spill from above, chains catching it
Mood: Lured

95INT

pp. 75-76

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM - MOMENTS LATER

threshold of nightmare

The catwalk door flies open and rain blasts into the machine room as Young passes through it.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: catwalk door
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: wind and rain through door
Notes: Transitional into the catwalk hallucination.
Camera: Medium shot at the bursting doorway
Lighting: Storm light flooding through the door
Mood: Threshold of nightmare

96EXT

NIGHT

pp. 76-76

LIGHTHOUSE. CATWALK

supernatural terror / identity dissolution

Young turns over a body on the catwalk to find his own dead doppelganger, then a naked Old seizes his wrist and opens eyes that blaze like the lighthouse beacon into Young's face.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: mackinaw coat; hobnailed leather boots
Wardrobe: Young's dead doppelganger in mackinaw coat and hobnailed boots; Old naked
VFX/Stunts: doppelganger corpse; Old's eyes shining like the beacon
Notes: Hallucination of Young's own corpse and Old's beacon-eyes. The walk-drag audio recurs. Identity merger with the dead Winslow and the light.
Camera: Tight shot on the three figures, eyes toward camera
Lighting: Beacon-bright eyes as key, storm gloom around
Mood: Identity dissolution

97EXT

DAWN

pp. 76-76

PILOT ROCK

flight

Young runs through the storm at dawn.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: storm
Notes: Transitional, leading to the boathouse escape attempt.
Camera: Wide shot, man running across the frame
Lighting: Pale storm-dawn light
Mood: Flight

98INT

pp. 76-77

INT/EXT. BOATHOUSE - MOMENTS LATER

trapped / no escape

As Young desperately drags the dory to launch, Old swings a fire axe through the air, smashing the lifeboat right beside him.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: dory (lifeboat); cork life vest; oars; fire axe
Wardrobe: Young throws on a cork life vest
VFX/Stunts: huge waves; axe smashing the dory
Notes: Old destroys the only escape boat with the fire axe, the weapon of the climax. 'DON'T LEAVE ME!'
Camera: Wide shot, the axe-blow and dory together
Lighting: Dim storm-dawn through the boathouse mouth
Mood: No escape

99EXT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 77-77

PILOT ROCK

pursuit

Old chases Young across the island wielding the axe.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: fire axe
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: axe chase
Notes: Young flees into the quarters.
Camera: Wide tracking shot of the chase
Lighting: Storm-flat dawn light
Mood: Pursuit

100INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 77-77

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

violent standoff

Old swings the axe at Young, misses, and buries it deep in the kitchen table, collapsing in exhaustion.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: fire axe; kitchen table
Wardrobe: Both soaking wet
VFX/Stunts: axe buried in table
Notes: The axe in the table becomes a fixture of the final confrontation. Young accuses Old of smashing the lifeboat.
Camera: Medium shot, axe-in-table the centerpiece
Lighting: One low lamp, wet sheen on skin
Mood: Violent standoff

101INT

CONTINUOUS

pp. 77-80

PARLOR

accusation / mutual unmasking

Young flaunts that he found the one-eyed junior man's head in the lobster pot and throws the broken ivory mermaid at Old's feet, then begins a triumphant jig, declaring himself free of Old's designs.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: broken ivory mermaid; dinner knife; stove
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young accuses Old of killing his second keeper with the mermaid sea-charm; Old counters that Young's confession has driven him mad, takes the dinner knife and breaks it in the stove, and suggests the whole island may be a figment of Young's imagination. Water pours through the ceiling.
Camera: Wide shot, the jig and the cast-down carving
Lighting: Stove glow plus low lamp, water glinting
Mood: Mutual unmasking

102INT

pp. 80-81

LIGHTHOUSE. OIL ROOM - LATER

deranged camaraderie

Still in his cork vest, Young mixes honey and turpentine into a brass canister and the two giddily fight over the 'thieves' oil' like children.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: honey; brass kerosene canister; tin of turpentine; rebar stirrer; cork life vest; cigarette
Wardrobe: Young still in cork life vest
Notes: With the booze gone they drink homemade turpentine-honey 'thieves' oil.' The reconciliation is delirious and doomed.
Camera: Medium two-shot over the canister
Lighting: Single dim lamp, brass catching it
Mood: Deranged camaraderie

103INT

NIGHT

pp. 81-81

FOG SIGNAL HOUSE

impending doom

The barometer needle falls past STORM into a blank space below the chart.

Characters: None
Props: barometer
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Barometer off the chart, signaling the apocalyptic peak of the storm.
Camera: Close-up on the barometer dial
Lighting: Single lamp on the dial, rest in shadow
Mood: Impending doom

104EXT

NIGHT

pp. 81-81

THE SEA

apocalypse

Gigantic waves crash under thunder and lightning; the end is near.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: gigantic waves, thunder, lightning
Notes: Wide elemental shot.
Camera: Wide shot, mountainous waves filling the frame
Lighting: Lightning flashes over the swells
Mood: Apocalypse

105EXT

NIGHT

pp. 81-81

LIGHTHOUSE

annihilation looming

Ferocious 50-foot waves assail the lighthouse while water rushes over the roof of the living quarters.

Characters: None
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: 50-foot waves engulfing the lighthouse and quarters
Notes: The structures are nearly overwhelmed.
Camera: Wide shot, tower and quarters under the wave
Lighting: Storm-night gloom, foam catching faint light
Mood: Annihilation looming

106INT

NIGHT

pp. 81-82

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

madness / oblivion

The two laugh hysterically over cups of thieves' oil, oblivious as a wave bursts through the window and floods the room around them.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: cups of thieves' oil; fire axe (in table); cork life vest
Wardrobe: Young still wears the life vest
VFX/Stunts: wave crashing through window, flooding the room
Notes: Their insane laughter as water floods in; ends on HOLD and BLACK. The axe remains in the table.
Camera: Wide shot, the bursting window in frame
Lighting: One lamp, water reflecting its light
Mood: Oblivion

107INT

MORNING

pp. 82-82

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY

ruin / numb detachment

Sitting in the sink drinking turpentine straight from the tin amid the wrecked, soaking kitchen, Young deadpans 'This place is a sty.'

Characters: YOUNG
Props: tin of turpentine; cork life vest; fire axe (in table)
Wardrobe: Young in undershirt and trousers, still wearing the life vest
Notes: Storm appears to be passing. Old is O.S. only here. The quarters are destroyed, by storm and by them.
Camera: Wide shot, man in the sink amid ruin
Lighting: Weak gray dawn through a broken window
Mood: Numb detachment

108INT

pp. 82-83

LIVING QUARTERS. PARLOR - LATER

betrayal / breaking point

Wading the flooded parlor, Young finds Old's open logbook floating by, reads the damning entries, and smashes the ticking clock with his fist, leaving glass and blood.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: cork life vest; Old's logbook; newspaper clippings and tintypes; locks of children's hair; clock
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: flooded room
Notes: Young reads the logbook's mementos (Old's children's hair) and the secret entries recommending his severance without pay. He smashes the clock, ending the ticking motif. The camera never reveals the full entries here.
Camera: Medium shot, man between logbook and clock
Lighting: Cold gray daylight through a small window
Mood: Breaking point

109INT

pp. 83-90

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY - MOMENTS LATER

final rupture / mutual hatred

Young reads aloud the logbook's recommendation of 'severance without pay,' and after Old's withering 'I make the truth as I see fit' speech, the two lunge for each other's throats.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: Old's logbook; clay pipe; matches; kitchen table (bloodied)
Wardrobe: Old in baggy unbuttoned union suit, vest with watch chain, and cap
VFX/Stunts: throat-grappling fight begins
Notes: Young lights Old's pipe, then explodes in the epic 'you smell like piss and jism' tirade. He reads the damning log entries aloud. Old delivers the 'I am truth / yer a dog' monologue and they attack each other, leading directly into the transformation fight.
Camera: Two-shot across the bloodied table
Lighting: One low lamp, hard shadows
Mood: Final rupture

110EXT

AFTERNOON

pp. 90-94

PILOT ROCK. NEAR THE HOLE

domination / the worm turns

Young walks the beaten, leashed Old on all fours to the grave-sized hole and begins burying him alive in the muddy water as Old recites a Promethean curse, before Young panics and digs him back out to steal the brass keys.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: rope leash; shovel; brass keys; grave-sized hole
Wardrobe: Old crawling on all fours, covered in mud
VFX/Stunts: burying a man alive in mud and water
Notes: Aftermath of the brawl: Young has beaten Old to a pulp, makes him 'bark,' leashes him, and buries him in the very hole they dug for the booze. He digs Old back out, takes the brass keys from his vest, drops him in the mud, and walks off as gulls gather. Old is left for dead but survives for the final ambush.
Camera: High wide shot down on the pit and the two men
Lighting: Overcast afternoon daylight
Mood: The worm turns

111INT

AFTERNOON

pp. 94-94

LIGHTHOUSE. OIL ROOM

thwarted at the threshold

Hands on the railing at last, Young is ready to ascend to the lantern, but stops, patting his empty breast pocket for a smoke.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: staircase railing
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Young's craving for tobacco diverts him from the light, sending him back to the galley and into Old's final ambush.
Camera: Medium shot at the base of the spiral stairs
Lighting: Weak filtered daylight through tower glass
Mood: Thwarted at the threshold

112INT

pp. 94-96

LIVING QUARTERS. GALLEY - MOMENTS LATER

murder / grim resolution

A mud-caked, barely-alive Old buries the axe in Young's shoulder, but Young bashes him with the iron kettle and drives the axe into Old's head with a blood-curdling crunch, then calmly rolls a cigarette and toasts.

Characters: YOUNG; OLD
Props: pouch of tobacco; fire axe; iron kettle; turpentine; cup; cigarette
Wardrobe: Old covered in mud, barely alive
VFX/Stunts: axe to the shoulder; fatal axe blow to the head; blood splatter
Notes: Old ambushes Young with the axe ('THE LIGHT B'LONGS TO ME!'); Young kills him with the axe to the head. Young recites the 'Should pale death' grace one last time. The light music begins and runs to the end.
Camera: Medium shot, violence shadowed, the calm aftermath clear
Lighting: One hard lamp, deep concealing shadow
Mood: Grim resolution

113INT

NIGHT

pp. 96-96

LIGHTHOUSE. BREEZEWAY

final pilgrimage

Crawling, trembling and bleeding, Young works his way through the breezeway toward the tower.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Young bleeding from the axe wound
Notes: Transitional; Young at last heads for the light.
Camera: Low wide shot down the breezeway at the crawling man
Lighting: Faint glow from the tower end, rest in dark
Mood: Final pilgrimage

114INT

pp. 96-96

LIGHTHOUSE. TOWER STAIRS - MOMENTS LATER

approach

Young drags himself slowly up the tower stairs.

Characters: YOUNG
Wardrobe: Standard
Notes: Transitional.
Camera: Low angle up the spiral at the climbing man
Lighting: Faint spill from above
Mood: Approach

115INT

pp. 96-96

LIGHTHOUSE. MACHINE ROOM - MOMENTS LATER

the forbidden attained

Using the stolen key, Young opens the lantern-room hatch and is hypnotized by the swirling light above.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: brass key; lantern-room hatch
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: swirling light
Notes: Young finally unlocks the lantern with the key taken from Old.
Camera: Low angle up at the man and the opened hatch
Lighting: Swirling light flooding from the lantern above
Mood: The forbidden attained

116INT

NIGHT

pp. 96-98

LIGHTHOUSE. LANTERN ROOM

transcendence / annihilation

The six-foot Fresnel lens stops turning and opens its doors like wings; Young reaches his burning hand into the light, screams at what he cannot fathom, and falls backward down four stories of stairs.

Characters: YOUNG
Props: Fresnel lens
Wardrobe: Standard
VFX/Stunts: lens opening like wings; blinding supernatural light; fall down four stories of stairs
Notes: The climactic encounter with the light. Young touches the flame, is overwhelmed by an unfathomable vision, and tumbles to the bottom of the tower. FADE TO WHITE.
Camera: Wide low shot, lens and man against the blaze
Lighting: Blinding supernatural light from the lens
Mood: Annihilation

117EXT

DAWN

pp. 98-98

PILOT ROCK

Promethean punishment / final horror

Naked and broken on the rocks with burnt-out eye sockets, Young groans as the one-eyed gull pulls at his liver and dozens of seabirds descend to eat him alive.

Characters: YOUNG; ONE-EYED GULL
Wardrobe: Young naked, eyes burnt-out bloody sockets, wrapped in seaweed
VFX/Stunts: seabirds eating a living man; burnt-out eye sockets
Notes: The Promethean ending: the one-eyed gull returns to tear at Young's liver as a swarm of birds devours him alone on Pilot Rock. THE END.
Camera: High wide shot looking down at the body and birds
Lighting: Cold gray dawn light
Mood: Final horror

Locations

the sea

The vast, fog-bound Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine; open water with gigantic storm waves, where the lighthouse tender first appears and where the final cataclysm rages.

EXT2 scenes

DAYNIGHT

Set Requirements

•Open-ocean fog effects
•gigantic mechanical/practical storm waves
•lightning

Key Visual Moments

S1A tiny lighthouse tender chugs out of an endless wall of fog, a black smoke smudge in a vast ocean.
S104Gigantic waves crash under thunder and lightning; the end is near.

lighthouse tender

A small, rotten, rusty third-rate steam boat (a lighthouse tender) that ferries keepers to and from Pilot Rock, with a crooked smoking chimney and sputtering engine.

EXT2 scenes

DAYDUSK

Set Requirements

•Period working steam tender
•prow and deck shooting platforms
•black smoke effect

Key Visual Moments

S2The rotten, rusty prow of the tender carves through the waves as the third-rate engine rumbles.
S3Two ghostly silhouettes stand on the bow as a flash of light and a foghorn blast reveal the bleak stone island of Pilot Rock.

pilot rock shore

The rocky, surf-battered landing shore of Pilot Rock where boats are beached and supplies handed over, and where the nude mermaid and lobster pots wash up.

EXT5 scenes

DUSKDAY

Set Requirements

•Beached transfer boat
•wet rocks and surf
•lobster pot rigging
•mermaid wash-up staging

Key Visual Moments

S4Two relief mates hand provisions across the surf to the two uniformed men, one lagging behind under the heavier load, past a doorless boathouse with the lifeboat dory inside.
S55Young hauls a wooden lobster pot dripping from the water and both men smile, a rare shared moment of pleasure.
S64Wiping seaweed from a beautiful nude woman washed up on the rocks, Young discovers gills at her ribs and a fish's tail; she opens her eyes, smiles, and reaches for his embrace.
S68In topcoats with their gunny sacks and ditty boxes, the two men stand staring out to sea waiting for a tender that never comes as the rain begins to pour.
S89Hauling the lobster-pot rope in the merciless gale, Young's mind floods with images of the mermaid, the phallic lighthouse, writhing tentacles, and the back of a mackinaw-collared head.

pilot rock living quarters

The run-down one-story clapboard shack adjoining the lighthouse by a long breezeway. Includes the galley/kitchen (coal range, farmhouse sink with pump), the parlor (rocker, potbelly stove, Old's locked desk with a ship in a bottle, ticking clock, book chest), the narrow creaking staircase, the cramped low-ceilinged bunkroom (two cast-iron beds, chamber pots), the vestibule, the roof, and the breezeway.

BOTH45 scenes

EVENINGDUSKNIGHTMORNINGDAWNDAY

Set Requirements

•Distinct rooms: galley/kitchen, parlor, staircase, bunkroom (low ceiling), vestibule, breezeway
•exterior roof with rotting cedar shakes and a peep-hole
•Old's lockable roll-top desk
•ticking clock (breakaway for smashing)
•wall-mounted kerosene lamp (breakaway)
•leaking ceiling rigged for water and flooding
•breakaway cabinet of dishes
•kitchen table rigged for an axe
•long breezeway connecting to the tower

Key Visual Moments

S5The two departing wickies, craggy and leaden, shuffle past their relief without bothering to exchange a glance.
S6Young flinches as the foghorn shakes through his body while Old, unmoved, jams an unlit clay pipe upside-down in his mouth and limps off, happy to be home.
S7Young drops his supplies onto warped, mildewed floorboards and surveys the run-down galley as the wind moans through the sole window.
S8Young's hand creeps shifty-eyed along Old's fine rolled-shut desk to test the lock, which holds fast.
S9Young climbs the narrow creaking stairs toward the growing sound of dribbling water.
S10Young digs a small scrimshawed ivory mermaid out of a hole in his mattress and rubs his thumb over her carved breasts with hungry curiosity.
S12Old, buried headfirst in a built-in cabinet with his butt out like a wagging dog, pulls out a sea-glass liquor bottle and grins with relief.
S13Young pointedly empties Old's hooch into the sink and toasts 'to four weeks' with water, only to retch violently from the foul cistern taste.
S20Young jolts awake to water dripping onto his face as a drunk Old disrobes in the mirror, blaming the leak on shingles.
S23From the rickety roof ladder Young peers through a rotted hole in the shingles and watches Old asleep below, softly humping his sweaty mattress.
S32Old slaps Young hard across the face out of nowhere and turns dead serious: 'Bad luck to kill a sea bird.'
S33A seagull taps at the window and is gone the instant Young turns, leaving the carved mermaid nestled waiting in his sheets.
S38Old points in horror at an unchanged floor and unleashes a torrential tirade demanding Young swab it again, ten times more, smiling, while Young finally breaks and grabs the mop, resigned.
S41The two men eat scrod and potatoes in tense silence as rain and wind hammer the flimsy walls and thunder claps to black.
S44Old finishes a logbook entry with a flourish, rolls his desk shut and locks it with the littlest key, as Young watches hidden in the shadows of the vestibule.
S45Young finally offers his name, 'Ephraim Winslow,' and Old needles him about his past as a timber man on the run.
S46Old toasts Young the 'God fearin' man,' wishing his cinders always stay burning and that fear never abandons him, as Young's freshly lit cigarette mysteriously goes dead.
S48Sweaty and restless, Young realizes his tobacco pouch is missing beneath pinned clippings of Sears catalogue goods and pornographic playing cards.
S50Young pumps water that turns rusty, then nearly black with a dark film, ignoring the tap-tap-tap at the window until a plaintive gull cry calls him outside.
S52Young finds Old sobbing into his pillow and blankets, a strangely vulnerable and unsettling sight, and doesn't know what to do.
S56Over a satisfying lobster supper Young finally relents and drinks, declaring 'Damn! Like comin' home,' and the two fall into rounds of grog and song.
S57Drunk and confiding, Old reveals his name is Thomas Wake, which visibly disturbs Young, who then toasts 'To my friend Tom.'
S58Too drunk to get his boots off, Young wrenches one free, cracks his head on the wall lamp, and passes out as kerosene soaks his hair.
S59Desperate for water and brutally hung over, Young finds both his and Old's chamber pots full of piss and shit.
S65Wild-eyed and breathless from screaming, Young is brushed off by Old, who only complains he smells of shit and orders him to swab before the tender comes.
S66The galley sits as clean as it can ever be.
S67The bunkroom is orderly, mattresses rolled, as the clock ticks on.
S69Drenched and motionless at the table, Young finally breaks the long silence: 'They didn't come.'
S75Old insists it has been weeks, not a day, since they missed the tender, and that they're stranded with 'some damned lunatic,' leaving Young terrified he is losing his mind.
S78As Old recounts a scurvy-and-near-cannibalism sea horror, the camera reveals Young secretly pocketing a dinner knife.
S79Their drunken 'What? What?' spiral collapses into Old's possessed Shakespearean curse summoning Triton and the sea king to dissolve Winslow into the sea itself.
S82Boots stuffed in his pockets, Young creeps stocking-footed toward the tower like a burglar.
S85Young pries open Old's desk only to find the logbook already gone, the lock already undone.
S86Creeping toward the sleeping Old with the broken knife aimed at his sweaty throat, Young is stopped by a betraying floorboard groan and Old's single opening eye: 'Queer way to wear yer shoes.'
S91Drunken singing and jigging escalate into a vicious play-fight, a near-kiss, and then a real brawl that sends the cabinet of dishes crashing to the floor.
S92Feral-eyed and still, Young confesses he watched his foreman Ephraim Winslow slip into the log jam and drown, then stole his identity, only to turn and find Old gone.
S93Old's voice echoes through the kitchen/breezeway doorway.
S100Old swings the axe at Young, misses, and buries it deep in the kitchen table, collapsing in exhaustion.
S101Young flaunts that he found the one-eyed junior man's head in the lobster pot and throws the broken ivory mermaid at Old's feet, then begins a triumphant jig, declaring himself free of Old's designs.
S106The two laugh hysterically over cups of thieves' oil, oblivious as a wave bursts through the window and floods the room around them.
S107Sitting in the sink drinking turpentine straight from the tin amid the wrecked, soaking kitchen, Young deadpans 'This place is a sty.'
S108Wading the flooded parlor, Young finds Old's open logbook floating by, reads the damning entries, and smashes the ticking clock with his fist, leaving glass and blood.
S109Young reads aloud the logbook's recommendation of 'severance without pay,' and after Old's withering 'I make the truth as I see fit' speech, the two lunge for each other's throats.
S112A mud-caked, barely-alive Old buries the axe in Young's shoulder, but Young bashes him with the iron kettle and drives the axe into Old's head with a blood-curdling crunch, then calmly rolls a cigarette and toasts.
S113Crawling, trembling and bleeding, Young works his way through the breezeway toward the tower.

fog signal house

An odd building with a huge protruding fog trumpet on rickety struts, housing the steam-powered foghorn engine, a coal-fed furnace, and a barometer. Site of Young's relentless coal-stoking labor.

BOTH9 scenes

NIGHTDAY

Set Requirements

•Working steam foghorn engine with flywheel and piston
•glowing coal furnace
•protruding fog trumpet on struts
•barometer practical gauge
•boardable windows

Key Visual Moments

S11Young shovels coal into the glowing mouth of the furnace, dripping sweat and reeling each time the fog siren blows excruciatingly loud.
S15Enraged by the manual and the relentless foghorn, Young kicks the chair over and the rulebook tumbles to the ground.
S18Young stares up, primal and yearning, at the rotating eight-beam starburst of the light while his match repeatedly fails in the wet wind.
S28A one-eyed seagull guarding the signal-house door lunges at Young, who hurls coal and misses, while Old watches from the tower catwalk above.
S54Young boards up the signal-house windows with Old's help as Old promises a surprise in voiceover.
S63Young stokes the running siren's fire.
S73Shirtless and rag-eared, Young resists drinking from Old's liquor bottle just as a soaking, crazed Old appears in the doorway shouting that the damp has gotten to the provisions.
S88Shirtless in an oilskin hat, Young shovels coal and takes long swigs from the bottle as the fire roars.
S103The barometer needle falls past STORM into a blank space below the chart.

lighthouse tower

The tall, crumbling stone lighthouse tower joined to the quarters by the breezeway. Contains the oil room at the base, the immense cast-iron spiral staircase with clockwork weight chains, the machine room with the locked lantern-room hatch, the lantern room with its six-foot third-order Fresnel lens, and the exterior catwalk. The whitewashed exterior is also climbed and painted.

BOTH23 scenes

NIGHTDAYDAWN

Set Requirements

•Multi-story cast-iron spiral staircase (rigged for a tumbling stunt fall)
•clockwork mechanism with rising lead weight and dangling chains
•oil room with drums
•machine room with lockable lantern hatch
•lantern room with practical six-foot Fresnel lens that opens like wings
•exterior catwalk/observation deck
•whitewashable tower exterior with block-and-tackle rigging
•supernatural light and tentacle effects

Key Visual Moments

S16The camera booms up through the clockwork as a lead weight rises through the iron spiral stairs and otherworldly patterns of light swirl hypnotically across the ironwork.
S17Bare-chested and slick with sweat in the immense heat of the Fresnel lens, Old toasts the light with his tin cup: 'To ye, me beauty!'
S29Young stares up the towering spiral staircase from the oil room as the light's clockwork chains dangle and creep sinister shadows across the stone wall.
S30Young lugs an immense oil drum up the endless iron steps, the repeated 'Clunk' marking each agonizing rest.
S31Caught reaching for the locked lantern-room hatch, Young is taunted by Old, who blows pipe smoke in his face, tosses him a brass oil canister, and unlocks the lantern with the largest of his ring of keys.
S37Young freezes mid-polish, rag against the brass, as a fuming Old accuses him: 'Don't deny it.'
S39Old watches Young polish the brasswork harder and harder while singing the next verse of 'Tis Brasswork.'
S42Fifty feet up, whitewashing the tower from a kitchen chair rigged to a failing block and tackle, Young plunges to the ground when the busted pulley wheel finally flies off.
S43Young comes to amid the shattered chair, and the one-eyed gull perches on his leg pecking at the fresh meat until he finally kicks it away.
S49Peering through the iron lens-deck grates, Young glimpses Old's vibrating torso and pumping arm, then white viscous fluid drips down and a huge translucent squid tentacle slithers across the ironwork.
S53Old, writing in his logbook, warns that the changed wind is the calm before a Nor'easter and orders Young to board up the signal-house windows.
S81Hypnotized by the light through the lens deck, Young holds the dinner knife up to it and grins like a jack-o'-lantern, possibly insane.
S83Young slinks up the tower stairs.
S84Trying to pick the lantern-room lock, Young snaps the dinner knife in two, leaving a thin, needle-like blade and a new idea.
S94Young climbs the tower stairs as the clockwork chains clink and Old's whisper 'Why'd y'spill yer beans?' echoes down.
S95The catwalk door flies open and rain blasts into the machine room as Young passes through it.
S96Young turns over a body on the catwalk to find his own dead doppelganger, then a naked Old seizes his wrist and opens eyes that blaze like the lighthouse beacon into Young's face.
S102Still in his cork vest, Young mixes honey and turpentine into a brass canister and the two giddily fight over the 'thieves' oil' like children.
S105Ferocious 50-foot waves assail the lighthouse while water rushes over the roof of the living quarters.
S111Hands on the railing at last, Young is ready to ascend to the lantern, but stops, patting his empty breast pocket for a smoke.
S114Young drags himself slowly up the tower stairs.
S115Using the stolen key, Young opens the lantern-room hatch and is hypnotized by the swirling light above.
S116The six-foot Fresnel lens stops turning and opens its doors like wings; Young reaches his burning hand into the light, screams at what he cannot fathom, and falls backward down four stories of stairs.

supply shed

A full, dilapidated storage shack with a door that nearly falls off, crammed with barrels of dried fish, tools, tapers, parcels, crates, casks and rope. Rain leaks through holes in the roof. Site of Young's hidden masturbation.

BOTH4 scenes

DAYNIGHT

Set Requirements

•Stocked stores (barrels, casks, tools, rope)
•leaking roof
•sagging door
•shadowed hiding space

Key Visual Moments

S24Young pulls open the sagging door of the supply shed to reveal it crammed with barrels of dried fish, tools, tapers and casks.
S34Hidden in the shadows of the shed, Young masturbates as the camera booms down and the image cuts to black.
S35Young spots a man's silhouette hugging the lens in the beam, then sees Old on the catwalk pulling up his suspenders as if dressed after a night with a woman.
S90Howling like an animal in a trap, Young hurls the carved mermaid so it breaks in two, then crawls over and stabs the broken pieces in a fury with the dinner knife.

coal house

A small shed heaped with coal, its door falling off its hinges, from which Young loads the wheelbarrow.

EXT2 scenes

DAY

Set Requirements

•Heaps of coal
•breakaway door off its hinges
•wheelbarrow loading area

Key Visual Moments

S25Young opens the coal house door to heaps of coal, and the door falls clean off its hinges.
S26Young overloads a wheelbarrow with coal.

pilot rock exterior

The bleak, acre-sized stone island of Pilot Rock generally, including its muddy pathways, the area behind the quarters where the grave-sized hole is dug, and the open rock where the lighthouse flashes. Site of wheelbarrow hauling, the wave ritual aftermath, Old's burial, and Young's final devouring.

BOTH18 scenes

NIGHTDAYDAWNAFTERNOON

Set Requirements

•Muddy island pathways
•grave-sized hole rigged for burial in water and mud
•spinning weathervane atop the tower
•storm wind, rain and lightning effects
•flock of seabirds for the finale

Key Visual Moments

S14Extreme wide shot: the lighthouse flashes and the foghorn blasts over the black island.
S21Young hauls a heavy bag of chalk up the island incline as the wind blows like hell.
S27Young pushes the overfull, squeaking coal wheelbarrow down the rock, one wrong step from spilling it all.
S36In an extremely wide shot Young struggles a tarp-covered coal wheelbarrow through a storm of mud, his black eye now healed, marking the passage of time.
S40The wheelbarrow tips and coal scatters everywhere in the storm; Young stands still, wanting to scream, as Old's 'Tis Brasswork' carries on in voiceover.
S47A montage of daily toil: Young sweeps, cleans the fog trumpet and winds the clockwork while Old repeatedly locks his desk and the lantern room behind him.
S60The arrived gale nearly knocks Young off his feet as he carries the full piss pots, hungover and battered by the wind.
S62Young hauls coal in the rain, his face covered in shit.
S70Huge waves crash against the island.
S74The two trudge together through the storm.
S76Old digs like a madman in the rain and unearths a grave-sized hole, declaring 'Here she lies' over a buried wooden crate.
S77They pry the crate open to reveal ten full bottles of booze, and Young deadpans, 'Rations.'
S80Strobing flashes punctuate the wind, rain, waves and foghorn of the cataclysmic storm.
S87Young pushes a wheelbarrow holding nothing but a liquor bottle floating in rainwater, muttering and watching over it like a beloved thing.
S97Young runs through the storm at dawn.
S99Old chases Young across the island wielding the axe.
S110Young walks the beaten, leashed Old on all fours to the grave-sized hole and begins burying him alive in the muddy water as Old recites a Promethean curse, before Young panics and digs him back out to steal the brass keys.
S117Naked and broken on the rocks with burnt-out eye sockets, Young groans as the one-eyed gull pulls at his liver and dozens of seabirds descend to eat him alive.

pilot rock cistern

A porridged brick water tank holding the keepers' fouled drinking water, full of mold and sludge. Site of the dead gulls and the brutal killing of the one-eyed gull.

EXT2 scenes

DAY

Set Requirements

•Brick cistern with openable hatch
•stagnant mold/sludge water
•bloody dead-gull staging
•rigged edge for the gull-beating

Key Visual Moments

S22Young opens the brick water tank to a putrid stench, sees the mold and frothy sludge he's been drinking, and pours in chalk that sinks beautifully through the water.
S51After the one-eyed gull attacks his face, Young seizes it by the legs and beats it against the cistern edge over and over into a bloody pulp of feathers.

boathouse

A small dilapidated boathouse with no door at the shoreline, sheltering the poorly-mended dory lifeboat on its launch runners. Site of the doomed escape attempt and the axe smashing of the dory.

BOTH2 scenes

NIGHTDAWN

Set Requirements

•Doorless boathouse over launch runners
•poorly-mended dory rigged to be smashed
•crashing waves
•oars and cork life vest

Key Visual Moments

S19Hypnotized by the light on the water, Young wades neck-deep into a sea suddenly choked with forty-foot logs, where the hobnail-booted body of a dead man drifts toward him among floating cant hooks.
S98As Young desperately drags the dory to launch, Old swings a fire axe through the air, smashing the lifeboat right beside him.

pilot rock cliffs

The high cliffside edge of Pilot Rock above the crashing surf, where Young dumps the chamber pots and where Old performs his wave-quelling ritual in the storm.

EXT3 scenes

DAYNIGHT

Set Requirements

•Cliff edge over surf
•wind-blown splash-back rig
•enormous crashing waves for the ritual

Key Visual Moments

S61Young flings the chamber-pot contents off the cliff and the wind blasts it all straight back into his face.
S71Enormous waves crash on the cliffs.
S72Old stands like a magician before the deluge, counting waves and dousing the sea with liquor while bellowing to Father Neptune to abate, until a massive wave knocks him off his feet.

Cast

YOUNG

A new assistant lighthouse keeper in his early 30s, tall and athletic but starved, with deep-set haunted eyes, a healing week-old black eye, a small vain mustache, and a severe crooked expression. Calls himself Ephraim Winslow but is really Thomas Howard, a drifter and former timber man with a sordid past. Has a beaten, caged-dog quality.

A guilt-ridden ex-logger hiding under a dead man's name spirals from resentful menial laborer into obsessive, murderous madness, kills his keeper, finally reaches the forbidden light, and is destroyed and devoured for what he sees.

102 scenes·5 wardrobe changes

OLD

A crusty, weathered lighthouse keeper of indeterminate old age (haggard 60? spry 70?), feral-bearded and hunched with hands like vises, missing front teeth, a limp, and wild shining eyes. An old Pan, a Satyr. His Christian name is Thomas Wake; a lifelong sailor turned wickie who abandoned a wife and children for the sea and now guards the light obsessively.

The tyrannical, light-hoarding keeper torments and mythologizes his way over his assistant, is exposed as a controlling fraud who sabotages his juniors' records, and is ultimately beaten, leashed, buried, and axed to death by the man he tried to break.

58 scenes·3 wardrobe changes

ONE-EYED GULL

An aggressive, one-eyed seagull with a gruesome empty, twisted eye socket. It guards doorways, taps at windows, scavenges Young's wounds, and torments him repeatedly. Said to hold the soul of a dead sailor; in the script's logic it is linked to Old's murdered one-eyed second keeper.

A recurring avian antagonist and omen whose killing by Young breaks the seabird taboo, turns the wind, and returns at the end to lead the flock that devours him.

7 scenes

MERMAID

A beautiful nude sea-woman with gills slicing her ribs and a fish's tail, who appears washed up on the rocks, in Young's dreams, and in his fevered visions. The carved ivory mermaid trinket is her totem.

The embodiment of Young's lust, guilt, and the island's enchantment, she recurs through dream, corpse, and hallucination until she becomes one of the shifting forms in the final death-grapple.

4 scenes

Production Design · Props

carved ivory mermaid

Hero

6 scenes

Scrimshawed ivory figurine found in the mattress; Young's obsession and the supposed sea-charm. Needs a breakaway version for the shed-stabbing destruction and broken pieces for the climax.

S10S33S48S89S90S101

Old's logbook

Hero

9 scenes

Old's locked record book containing mementos, children's hair, and the damning entries recommending Young's severance. Camera withholds the entries until late. Multiple handling close-ups.

S42S44S47S53S78S85S86S108S109

dinner knife

Hero

6 scenes

Government-property knife Young pockets, breaks while picking the lantern lock into a thin needle-like blade, uses to stab the mermaid carving, and is finally taken and broken by Old.

S78S81S84S86S90S101

fire axe

Hero

7 scenes

Used to smash the dory, buried in the kitchen table for much of the finale, and ultimately the murder weapon driven into Old's head. Needs safe stunt/breakaway versions.

S98S99S100S106S107S109S112

brass key ring on watch chain

Hero

4 scenes

Half-dozen brass keys (largest opens the lantern, smallest the desk) that Old guards; Young steals them from Old's vest to finally enter the light.

S31S86S110S115

clay pipe

Hero

9 scenes

Old's ever-present pipe, often unlit and worn upside down; a signature character prop. Young lights it for him in the final confrontation.

S5S6S17S28S31S45S57S91S109

Instructions to Light-Keepers manual

Hero

3 scenes

The 1881 keeper's manual Young invokes about alternating watches; source of his grievance and Old's dismissive 'my log is the only book on this rock.'

S13S15S33

liquor / grog (bottles and cups)

Hero

17 scenes

Old's homemade hooch and the hidden cache of ten bottles; central to the men's bonding and disintegration. Tin and chipped china cups recur.

S12S13S17S32S45S46S56S57S58S73S76S77S78S79S87S88S91

scrod and potatoes

3 scenes

The repeated grim supper; food styling for several meal scenes.

S13S32S41

wheelbarrow

Hero

7 scenes

The squeaky coal wheelbarrow hauled across the island; later carries only a liquor bottle. A recurring image of labor.

S26S27S28S36S40S64S87

coal and coal shovel

12 scenes

Endless coal for the foghorn furnace; the engine of Young's punishing labor.

S11S15S25S26S27S28S36S40S62S63S73S88

ticking clock

Hero

6 scenes

The monotonously ticking parlor clock; a sanity/time motif Young finally smashes with his fist. Needs a breakaway.

S8S10S33S48S67S108

cork life vest

4 scenes

Worn by Young during the escape attempt and kept on through the flooding and turpentine-drinking aftermath.

S98S102S106S107

wooden lobster pot

Hero

3 scenes

Old's 'surprise' catch; later reveals the shriveled one-eyed corpse head with crabs in the eye socket.

S55S89S90

cant hook (peavey)

Hero

3 scenes

The iron-hooked logging tool tied to Young's confessed crime; appears in the drowning vision, the lust montage, and his confession.

S19S89S92

wool mackinaw coat and hobnailed leather boots

3 scenes

Worn by the drowned logger / Young's doppelganger; a recurring marker of the dead Winslow across visions.

S19S89S96

chamber pots

4 scenes

Used for the bunkroom pissing and the disastrous cliff-dumping that blows back in Young's face.

S10S59S60S61

third-order Fresnel lens

Hero

2 scenes

The immense six-foot jeweled lens, object of obsession; in the climax it stops, opens like wings, and emits the unfathomable light. Major practical/VFX build.

S17S116

turpentine / thieves' oil

4 scenes

Honey-and-turpentine 'thieves' oil' the men drink after the booze runs out; Young drinks it straight near the end.

S102S106S107S112

tobacco pouch and hand-rolled cigarettes

7 scenes

Young's constant cigarette-rolling; the lost-and-found tobacco pouch repeatedly drives his movements, including the fatal detour from the light.

S13S32S47S48S49S111S112

fire axe in the kitchen table

3 scenes

Cross-reference: the same fire axe buried in the table; tracked separately as a fixed set element across the flooding scenes before it is pulled for the final murder.

S100S106S107

iron kettle

1 scene

Young bashes Old in the face with it before the final axe blow.

S112

Poster Concepts

Character-Driven

Two Wickies, One Beam

“Two men. One light. No relief is coming.”

Two men in dark keeper uniforms and caps stand on the bare rock at dusk, one a half-step behind the other, both turned away from us toward the tower whose single beam splits the frame between them. The men are deliberately indistinct — they could just as easily be ghosts. Vast empty sky above eats two-thirds of the poster.

Character-Driven

The Old Pan in the Lamp Heat

“He has tended this light longer than you have been alive.”

Tight on a feral-bearded old keeper, bare-chested and gleaming with sweat in the immense heat of the lens, a faded three-masted ship tattooed across his chest, a tin cup half-raised. His shining eyes catch the lamp. The light source is below the frame so the glow rakes up his face like firelight.

Character-Driven

The Beaten-Dog Stare

“You signed on for four weeks.”

A starved, haunted younger man with a small vain mustache and a healing black eye stares dead at the lens, pushed hard to the left edge so a slab of empty wet sky fills the right. A one-eyed gull is a small pale smear over his shoulder, out of focus, watching too.

Symbolic/Metaphorical

The Charm in the Mattress

“Every man on this rock keeps something hidden.”

A small scrimshawed ivory mermaid carving lies alone, lit hard from one side, resting in a nest of horsehair mattress stuffing. A thumb-smear of grime across her carved breasts. Everything else is black. Hairline crack already running through the ivory, foreshadowing the break.

Symbolic/Metaphorical

The Weathervane Turns East

“The wind changed the day he broke the rule.”

A rusted weathervane on the cistern, shot from below, caught mid-swing as the wind changes from west to east. Behind it the lighthouse leans into a bruised, churning sky. A few black gull shapes scatter from the spin. The vane is the omen that strands them.

Symbolic/Metaphorical

The Ring of Keys

“One door he was never meant to open.”

A fist clutches a heavy brass ring of keys on a watch chain, the largest key thrust toward us. Behind the keys, soft and out of focus, the locked lantern-room hatch and a swirl of light leaking through its seams. The keys are sharp; the forbidden door is a blur.

Scene-Based

Neck-Deep Among the Logs

“The sea keeps better records than any logbook.”

A man wades neck-deep in a black sea suddenly choked with forty-foot floating logs, a single cant hook bobbing near him, the lighthouse beam laid flat across the water toward a drowned shape drifting in. Looking up, near the surface, the pale form of a mermaid swimming straight at camera.

Scene-Based

The Magician of the Cliff

“He believes he can command the sea. The sea has not agreed.”

A keeper in slick black oilskins stands like a conjurer on the cliff edge, one arm flung up, a liquor bottle in hand, hurling drink at a monstrous incoming wave that towers over him. Behind, the boathouse and the leaning lighthouse. He is tiny; the wave is everything.

Scene-Based

The Floor That Must Be Swabbed Again

“Do it again. Ten times more. And smile.”

Top-down on a kneeling man with a mop and pail on warped, mildewed floorboards, a second pair of boots planted at the frame's edge pointing down at him. The cramped galley walls press in; a kerosene lamp throws a long shadow of the standing figure across the wet boards.

Minimalist/Typographic

1.19:1

“Keep the light. Tell no one why.”

A tall, narrow rectangle of pure black with one vertical shaft of white light running floor to ceiling, dead center — the boxy aspect ratio made literal. The faintest scratch of a tower base at the bottom. Almost nothing else.

Minimalist/Typographic

The Foghorn Made Visible

“It never stops. Not for sleep. Not for sanity.”

Concentric rings of distressed letterforms ripple outward from a small black foghorn trumpet in one corner, the title word repeated and warping as it travels across an otherwise blank pale field, like a sound you can see. The rings grow looser and more broken toward the edges.

Minimalist/Typographic

Two Initials, One Name

“They learn each other's name too late.”

A black field. Two large serif initials face off across the center, nearly mirror images, a hairline of light between them like a blade. A reader senses two men, a rivalry, and a secret the type won't say. No figures at all.

Mood/Atmospheric

Fog Eats the Island

“No one is coming back for them.”

A near-abstract wall of grey fog with the lighthouse tower barely resolving as a darker smudge, a faint flash of its beam half-born in the murk. Down low, the tiniest black shape of the supply tender vanishing. Mostly grain, mist, and the feeling of being unseen.

Mood/Atmospheric

The Lamp Like a Heartbeat

“The light is alive. It has chosen.”

Swirling hypnotic patterns of light cast through cast-iron clockwork — gears, chains, and a rising counterweight — smeared across a stone wall into something almost living. No people. The mechanism of the light as an organism that breathes.

Collage/Ensemble

The Logbook of a Drowned Man

“Two keepers. One survives the telling.”

An open, water-damaged logbook splayed at center, its pages dense with cramped ink. Tucked into and overflowing it: a lock of children's hair, a snapped ivory mermaid in two pieces, a single black gull feather, a snapped dinner-knife blade, a tintype too smeared to read. A flat lighthouse beam crosses the whole spread. The tale told in pinned objects.