Over the course of the 12 minute film, we see them chatting back and forth on their laptops. The flirt factor ramps up until one night, they're drinking and talking online and he makes a request of her that she's not comfortable with.
This type of thing happens a lot. Especially since the pandemic started and relationships went online from IRL (in real life). In the script I wrote, Julia, the shy accountant, goes along with mild flirting realizing it can't go anywhere because David lives across the country.
Or so he says.
I write Suspense. I like to write stalker behavior. I once had a man pursue me from afar, writing letters, showing up at my place of work as a singer in a band, watching me. He eventually revealed to my boss that we were having an inappropriate relationship and I'd taken advantage of the fact he was disabled. He tried to get me fired. I'd never spoken to this man in person. I'd seen him in the audience. He was persistent. My boss was a friend and was horrified the man followed me around and called me "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" a song I sang in my act that he apparently liked.
I still have the letters.
Years later, I would live as a newlywed in Whistler BC in Canada with my amazing husband when a man he fired threatened to cut out my tongue with a broken Coke bottle in retaliation. We hoped it was an idle threat but got the RCMP involved. The thought of having my tongue cut out was horrifying to say the least and not just because I earned a living as a singer but the idea that another person could violate me this way...
I'm especially sensitive to this type of terrorism because at the age of 22, I lived in a basement apartment and one summer night a man came through my bedroom window after me. The police assumed he was drunk from a street festival a few blocks away, had been watching me through my windows and decided to drag a neighbor's hose around the house to reach my bedroom window. I was reading in bed when I saw spray hitting the wall, then lower to my bed and me. It was coming from behind me. I turned to see a hose and a man's hand holding that hose. I jumped out of bed to see him coming through the window. He'd taken the screen off the window in preparation for this while I was in the other room.
He was a young man in his early twenties, blonde hair, thin, with a bandana tied across his lower face. Our eyes met as he advanced towards me, hose in hand. I reacted, thank God. I said "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" four words I remember so clearly decades later. But, because I was terrified and my mouth had frozen up, they came out slurred almost like I was deaf and this was as clearly as I could speak.
I had no idea until that point I couldn't speak properly and am still not sure why that happened but in the short moment when he heard my words, his eyes widened in surprise and I took that moment to shove him back out the window. The hose was still in his hand and it went out the window with him. I never looked to see where he fell. I slammed my window, locked it (at least I thought I did) and ran from the drenched room where he'd knocked over a precious lamp of my grandmother's and a mirror and things were broken and on the floor from the struggle of getting him out the window.
I ran into the living room, grabbed the phone and called 911. I gave my address and stayed on the line with the operator but then, the light went out in the bedroom, putting my apartment in darkness. My heart jumped into my throat. Had the window not locked properly? Oh God! He was coming for me. The operator told me to pick up something heavy to throw as he came through the door and get ready to run out the front door. The police were only blocks away. I reached for a clay teapot on my coffee table and waited for him to come through the door.
He didn't. A knock on the door a minute later revealed the police had arrived. Checking the bedroom with them revealed the lamp had shorted with the water. The window was locked just as I'd thought. A police dog followed his scent a few blocks but when he crossed a busy street, they lost him.
That summer, I slept with all windows shut and locked, drapes closed. Every blonde man I saw on the street, I looked into his eyes to ask "Are you him?" I still sit with my back against the wall in public.
I hope he got older and realized what a horrible thing this was. I hope he never tried this again with someone. I hope he grew out of what the (men) police officers called "probably drunken mischief".
These incidents are likely why and how I wrote CHAT. And why I write Suspense with stalkers where the woman takes charge and the stalker loses big in the end. It's my way of taking back the power, continuing on with those 4 words that might have saved my life that night.
What are you doing?
Even writing this blog has my heart racing and nausea close to the surface. I'm not reading it back or editing the page for that reason so there may be typos.
If my story speaks to you, please consider joining our crowdfunding campaign and supporting our film that has one woman being targeted and winning in the end. The story is meant as a cautionary warning that tables can turn at any moment and you might lose at your own game.
CROWFUNDING SITE for CHAT with more information:
KIM HORNSBY is an awarded author and screenwriter in the Seattle area where she writes novels and screenplays from a desk overlooking a tree-lined lake.
Find more about Kim on her website
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