Knitting Out

Writer's Statement

Stephen King's "Carrie" meets "Suspiria" and "May". Tullah is a suburban horror/romantic tale about a lonely girl with strong beliefs who grows up isolated from society. It is a female-centred horror drama with supernatural elements, and it shows how far one can go for her/his beliefs and superstitions. I hope this script can transport you to Tullah’s world, a nightmarish world. This is the short version of a feature. Her fractured state of mind uncovers many demons that personify real horrors that lurk inside us all. The virginity curse was, for some and for many years, a real belief, and it is not hard to imagine how trauma and superstition can affect the human mind, even nowadays. You will find that the female main character Tullah, suffers from an unusual obsession. It starts with an innocent obsession over a man, and moreover, with an idea, a belief that she is cursed after she lost her virginity with this man, who then rejects her. And this idea is the true monster. This idea is the horror. Because I believe that ideas can be metaphysical materialised in a sort of alternative plan of reality, and it is as powerful as a physical weapon. Although this is the idea I would like to transmit, it is also related to me personally because, just like Tullah, I live in a very small village in the south of Portugal, where people's mentalities and superstitions also got stuck in time. This script was written to translate a feeling that has no name. The feeling that I’ve been holding almost my whole life, the feeling of being stuck, isolated, suffocating in a small village in the middle of nowhere, where everybody knows everyone and nothing ever happens, in Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Europe, without opportunities to thrive. We grow up to die here, love and reborn, and we live by our beliefs. Reaching fame through Art is rarely achievable. We remain invisible and never discovered, and it is a scary feeling.