Produced by Bryan Singer (X-Men: Days of Future Past), the synopsis goes like this: Mia Medina (Michelle Ang) has finally found the perfect subject for her PhD thesis film on Alzheimers Disease. For the next several months, cameras will record the everyday life of mother Deborah Logan (Jill Larson) and her daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay).
But as the days progress, strange things begin to happen around Deborah that are not consistent with any findings about Alzheimers. It becomes apparent that theres something besides Alzheimers that has taken control of Deborahs life. Its an evil that is far worse than the debilitating disease with which she was first diagnosed.
“?I’d always been terrified of the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease,” Robitel explains to Shock when speaking about the inspiration for the film. “I remember hearing stories as a kid about an uncle who was found wandering his yard at night, several blocks away from his house. He would ultimately fall out of a third balcony window and die. This man was a bright and shining light and an active member of the community, but by the end he couldn’t tie his own shoe. The idea that a disease could steal our minds, while we were healthy in every other sense of the word, terrified me. As I started to research the subject, I learned that because many of us are living longer, one in four of us will face some type of dementia before we die. Alzheimers deals with two of our most primal fears: Losing our minds and our own inevitable mortality. Things really congealed for me when I got into some brainstorming sessions with my brilliant co-writer Gavin Heffernan. We realized how much inherent drama and fear there was in the sickness and we allowed ourselves to imagine, ‘What if a small percentage of these cases of Alzheimer’s was something else entirely… ‘ There’s a line in the film that Alzheimer’s is ‘never about one person,’ and this is gravely true – ultimately it’s the caretaker who endures the greatest hardships as the disease progresses, pulling its victim from a fully-functioning adult into a sort of latter-day infancy. These were all fascinating ideas to play with for a new twist on a possession movie.”
?”I was very lucky to have a tremendous team of producers. Bryan was key in the development process and Christa Campbell and Lati Grobman were instrumental in getting the film set up and financed,” Robitel added. Singer has produced a few horror projects in the past, including Trick ‘r Treat and Mockingbird Lane.
“There was a really disturbing clip that I ran across in my research. In it, a lovely middle-aged woman suffering from mid-stage disease was interviewed for a 60 Minutes type show… she talks quite lucidly about what it’s like to have the disease,” said Robitel. “She explains she’ll come home from work, and have a cup of tea, and her mind goes completely blank…like snow… She had developed a system for staving off dementia, often writing notes to herself on mirrors for things she’d surely forget. The dread and fear of knowing she’s slowly losing her mind and there’s nothing she or any of the doctors can do to stop it, was palpable and then the interview cuts to her only two years later. She is in an adult highchair, pale to the point of albinism, she can barely communicate much less recognize her brothers and sisters. Her emotions range from anger, despair, sadness and eerie giggling laughter from moment to moment, changing on a dime. I put this clip in front of Bryan Singer, who I know loves anything medical, and I said I’m going to make a possession movie that uses this as a jumping off point…I could see his eyes go wide with excitement as he saw all the possibilities. In terms of development, he was very hands on with his company Bad Hat Harry making Gavin and I go through many revisions of the idea trying to strike the delicate balance between medical documentary and horror film. Bryan was also a huge stickler for logic. We really tried to give the audience just enough so they understood and weren’t lost by the narrative but weren’t deluged with ‘rules.’ What I always wanted to do was start in one space, with a very grounded medical documentary and by the end, turn the movie completely on its head as we careen into full horror movie realm. It was a very difficult tonal balance to strike, particularly for a first film.”
