Fertile Ground
Emily (Leisha Hailey) and Nate Weaver (Gale Harold) are a happily married couple living in New York City. Nate is a recognized artist, Emily a fashion designer and the two are expecting their first child. Emily suffers a terrible miscarriage during a dinner party and she is informed that the scarring left on her womb means that she will never be able to conceive again."Starting Over"To give them both a fresh start, Nate and Emily move out into the countryside to Nate's family home which has been uninhabited for some time. Enchanted by it, Emily agrees to move in with Nate to start her life all over again. Emily decides to re-start her fashion design business while Nate, an artist, decides to start painting again."Moving In"As Emily and Nate settle into their new country house, Emily begins seeing things that may or may not be real such as a handprint that appears on a window pane, and keeps reappearing after she cleans it again and again. A few days later, when Emily is horrified when a skeleton is discovered during an inspection of the house plumbing but it is obvious that the body is very old so no danger can be attached to the house. Nate decides to use the large outdoor shed as a studio while Emily takes one of the old bedrooms as her workshop."New Life"After Emily discovers an old trunk filled with baby things in the cellar she pays a visit to the local Historical Society and is told that the house has a past she and Nate were unaware of. Several suspicious deaths have occurred at the property and a female relative of Nate's vanished without trace when the house was new. Nate grows distant as he starts painting again and he refuses to let Emily see his new work. Tense and isolated, Emily starts to see visions of a woman covered with blood and faints. After seeing the doctor, who thinks she is suffering from trauma, she gets a phone call to tell her that she is actually pregnant."Old Secrets"Ordered to spend the bulk of her pregnancy in bed resting due to the high risk of miscarriage, Emily starts to get bored and frustrated by Nate who is working longer and longer hours and seems uninterested in her or the coming baby. Emily's visions continue and she thinks that she can see the missing aunt of Nate's walking about the property."Strange Happenings"Emily's nightmares and visions become more and more frequent as Nate continues to confine himself to the shed to work on his paintings and Emily becomes more bored and distant. When Nate is around, he is seemingly angry most of the time which concerns Emily. She begins to see Nate as a different person, whom was his great-great gradfather whom lived in the house in the 1870s and was said to have murdered his pregnant wife."The Gathering"Organising a party so she can see her city friends, Emily believes that Nate's female agent is having an affair with her husband. Soon afterwards the agent somehow falls through the window in Emily's studio and is hospitalized. Nate thinks Emily may have pushed her as he saw her in the room after the woman fell and tells Emily's best friend, Brittany, that he is concerned for Emily's health. When the couple receives a call to tell them that the agent has died, Nate storms out."Revelations"Left alone over the next two days, Emily reads through a folder of press cuttings left by a man from the historical society who has been trying to reach her and discovers that all the women who died at the house were killed by their husbands. She has another vision of the dead woman and believes that Nate is coming back to kill her. She calls Brittany who tells her that she will come and pick her up. Terrified, Emily hides in her bedroom with a knife when she hears Nate come back into the house. She tries to stab him with the knife but instead stabs her friend- who had driven back with Nate. She and Nate then fight resulting in Emily killing Nate.At the hospital, a scan reveals that Emily is not pregnant although she believes that she is.... apparently the phone call from the doctor and the visions of the ghosts were indeed all in her head, a symptom of true psychosis triggered by her previous miscarage. The final shot shows Emily in a padded room at the local insane asylum, rocking her imaginary child in her arms.
insanity, horror, murder, haunting