HORROR-COMEDY FEATURE PITCH
In an isolated research facility on a gated, fog-drenched hilltop
where creatures of the dark grow in unhallowed gardens
one gentle, nurturing GROUNDSKEEPER is tasked with rescuing his cherished PUGS’ souls
by fighting tooth and nail to send the DIRTMOUTHS back to HELL.
TONE
Pure fun and madness, DIRTMOUTHS is a wild, occult horror-comedy with heart and heavy stakes.
Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) is an almost angelic, deeply conflicted gardener who must transform into a savage warrior to kill old school, animatronic and stop-motion monsters in a zero-CG throwback to the 1980s golden age of creature cinema.
The tone evokes Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II as well as the wild spirit of the Coen Brothers’ classic Raising Arizona, taking place inside a scaled-down, supernatural version of Jurassic Park.
CHARACTER
Like Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, the Groundskeeper is a humble nurturer. He lives a simple life caring for a flourishing garden. He's lost his family, and all he has left now are his two moody pugs.
But inside the Groundskeeper hides a relentless guardian. When his dogs are snatched by strange creatures, he becomes a blood-soaked, one-man natural disaster who won't hesitate to kill everyone and everything that gets in his way.
STORY
When the Night Groundskeeper awakens at dusk for his evening duties, the scientists and experts in the isolated Nocturnal Wildlife Preserve have ALREADY lost control of their experiments, and the ones who haven't run off into the jungle have DIED.
As the Groundskeeper races to gather his family and his two precious PUGS to escape the grounds, he realizes – the dogs are MISSING.
He leads his wife and kids narrowly to safety, but then – terror in his eyes – he turns back toward danger and locks himself INSIDE the property, trapped within a garden of botanical experiments called DIRTMOUTHS – Lovecraftian creatures that start out as cute little teeth, but quickly evolve into something more horrifying.
He knows the dogs are still alive... but they’ve been TAKEN.
He can hear their lonely, ethereal cries echoing on the breeze.
Somewhere in the misty night grounds — somewhere unknowable — his stout, cherished pups, DIANE and JAVIER, are trapped in LIMBO.
Now he must join with a SMALL GROUP OF SURVIVORS to make it through the night and rescue his pugs’ SOULS from the quickly multiplying DIRTMOUTHS. Each perilous hour is crawling with botanical abominations from unholy soil, yet the ill-equipped Groundskeeper only becomes more determined, more skilled and more hungry for DIRTMOUTH BLOOD.
What’s left of the Groundskeeper’s sanity will be cracked to pieces in one final rampage to pull Diane and Javier BACK across the illimitable GULF OF DEATH.
Writer-Director Breehn Burns is the artist who designed SAM for the cult horror film Trick 'r Treat. He was supervising producer on Netflix's Invader ZIM: Enter The Florpus and showrunner on Bravest Warriors.
Producer & Actor Pen Ward created the eight-time Emmy Award winning Cartoon Network series Adventure Time as well as Frederator's Bravest Warriors and Netflix's Midnight Gospel.
