When a new arrival at a mental institution joins other patients in tracking down what they believe is a conspiracy involving the hospital staff, a mysterious basement, and shared hallucinations, she becomes part of mind-shattering and deadly events that could consume her.

SYNOPSIS:

September 2020. Alicia, 27, a patient at a mental hospital called the Mathminder Institute, runs in terror from her room. She grabs the night watchman’s keys and rushes to the door to Level Zero, the hospital basement. Before she can open the door, a figure with long legs and sharp, skeletal fingers steps out of the wall and slashes her throat.

The next morning, Mimi Liu, 30—who hallucinates smells—joins the Institute as hospital staff clean up Alicia’s apparent suicide. Mimi has her first group therapy session and gets to know her group. Ruth, 37, sees miniature people who make others believe she’s a thief. Gerald, 55, has conversations with his dead wife. Tasha, 67, hears an old Russian folk tune and dances to it. Julian, 34, sees magnified bacteria and viruses. All have seen “Mr. Long Legs,” and all are suspicious of the Institute and Level Zero. After a night in which they all have hallucinations tied to Mr. Long Legs, Mimi joins the group’s investigative plans. Mimi and Julian get the chief doctor’s keys. Ruth goes into Level Zero and doesn’t return. Mimi and Julian confront the doctors. Ruth reappears, warning, “They’re coming!”

Monstrous humanoids swarm from Level Zero and tear almost everyone to pieces. Mimi and Julian end up in an otherworldly valley between stones. Ruth leads them to a sheer rock wall. Tasha and Gerald end up in a cavern full of coffins, and another Ruth leads them to a different rock wall. The corpses of two doctors, animated like puppets, explain that a century ago, Dr. Mathminder attracted “Great Ones” with the power of a nightmare from childhood, the source of Mr. Long Legs. Ever since, the Great Ones have used the Institute to help harvest nightmares and people. The Culled—people killed and transformed for sustenance—burst from the coffins around Tasha and Gerald. They kill Tasha, crush Ruth, and stream through the cavern’s rock wall, into the otherworldly valley, and through the sheer rock wall. Gerald, Mimi, and Julian go through the sheer wall, into a crater directly beneath the Institute. Floating high above, giant jellyfish-like creatures, the Great Ones, use their tentacles to feed on the remaining Ruth and the Culled. At the crater’s center, Mr. Long Legs kills Gerald. Mimi attacks him, and he vanishes, leaving Mimi and Julian to speak with the mangled remains of the chief doctor. He explains that Julian’s hallucinations—bacteria and viruses—are the new “boogeyman” to replace Mr. Long Legs, the nightmare that will draw and sustain the Great Ones for the next century. Great Ones lift Mimi and Julian to a door that leads to the Institute. They escape as the Institute crumbles into the crater. Sometime later, Mimi and Julian sit on a train. Outside, Great Ones travel with them, surrounded by bacteria and viruses like those from Julian’s hallucinations.

From the Walls was an Official Selection in the Moody Crab FF, 2022, the Shockfest FF, 2021, and the Lit Scares International Horror Festival, 2021.