Lake House Whisper

After years apart, five lifelong friends reunite for a weekend of fun. What they get is anything but.

Lake House Whisper opens on a dream. Troy and his friend Phil are drinking beers while a news report plays about the Theta murders. Five sorority pledges were found handcuffed to chairs and killed with a chainsaw, and a drawing of the theta symbol was left at the scene. Phil goes to get another beer, and a man with no face cuts Phil's face and peels it back. Troy rounds the corner, gets stabbed in the face, and wakes up.

Troy's girlfriend Ashley left him a few months back. He drives his lifelong friends up for a weekend away: Brian and his girlfriend Kate, and Phil and his girlfriend Mary. Mary found the place through her parents, who went there after they got married. It is a four hour drive, there is no cell service, and theirs is the only cabin open on the lake because the others are closed for the winter. The owner lives in the front cabin, so the group stays in the back one.

Troy, Brian and Kate head straight into the water. Phil wants to fool around with Mary, but she is not in the mood, and he storms off. Later Mary screams. The camp owner walked in on her while she was napping. He says he only stopped by to see if they were settling in, and he is carrying rope he says is for tying things up for the winter. The friends think he is creepy. While Troy and Brian gather firewood, Kate tells Mary that things have been off with Brian since they moved in together. Out in the woods, Brian shows Troy a ring. He plans to propose to Kate at dinner the next night. Troy warns him that Kate bails when a relationship gets serious.

At the campfire Troy tells a scary story. Legend says a man with no face lives on the lake. He ties a girl to a chair, cuts down the side of her face with a knife and peels it back. The friends play beer pong, and the camp owner watches them from his cabin. The next morning Troy wakes up with a cut he does not remember getting.

Mary takes Brian and Troy kayaking up a river off the lake. The owner warns them about downed trees. Kate stays behind with Phil. Once they are alone, it comes out that Kate and Phil have been sleeping together. Afterward Phil tells Kate he loves Mary and will not leave her. Out on the water, Troy and Brian joke about getting banned from Vegas, and a beaver dam turns them back.

When the kayakers get back, Kate says Phil went to lie down on the porch. The porch chairs are knocked over, and they find Phil dead with strangle marks on his neck. There is no service, and the car will not start because the battery is gone. Someone points out that it is just like Troy's story, except Phil still has his face. They cover Phil's body. Kate breaks down and tells Brian she has been sleeping with Phil, the same weekend Brian meant to propose. She asks him not to tell Mary. Troy, the fastest of the group, sets out on foot for the town 20 miles away to get help. One of the cabin doors will not lock, so the others hide upstairs.

Brian starts drinking and tells Mary that Kate cheated on him, without saying who with. Kate goes downstairs for the rest of the beer and does not come back. Brian tells Mary he was going to propose. Mary kisses him, and he turns her down. About four hours after he left, Troy staggers back badly wounded and tells Brian to run as a masked killer attacks. Brian wants to go back for Kate, but Mary tells him Kate is dead, and they flee into the woods. Brian rules out the camp owner because the killer is much bigger. Mary starts to suspect Troy, pointing out that the killer matches his faceless man story. They split up, and Brian goes back to the camp.

Brian fights the masked killer and swings a cribbage board at him, but he ends up stabbed on the couch. Mary walks in and complains that the killer hit her head too hard against a tree. Her attack was faked. The killer takes off his mask, and he looks exactly like Phil. He is Phil's twin. The two were abandoned at an orphanage as children. Phil was adopted by a rich family, and the twin was kicked out at 18 and spent ten years working with nothing to show for it. Then he found Phil and wanted his life. Mary is his partner. On their third anniversary she went to surprise Phil and caught him with Kate. She ran off and ran straight into the twin. The plan was only ever to kill Phil, but the others came back from kayaking early. The camp owner, they say, was just a creep.

The twin plans to take Phil's place. Mary calls the police from the landline in the main cabin so they can pin every murder on Troy, and they leave Brian to die. Bloopers from the shoot play at the end.

Release & Reception

StabMovies.com announced Lake House Whisper on December 16, 2016 as its first team-up with Deadly Sin Productions, and the teaser went up on YouTube the day before. On February 23, 2018 it announced a March 30, 2018 release, calling it the first StabMovies.com film not written or directed by Joshua Patrick Dudley. The full movie went up on YouTube on the evening of March 29, 2018, the same day the site posted Lake House Whisper Premieres NOW!

Dave Allen said the film had a premiere in a movie theater.

Haggett later said he liked the story and thought it was entertaining but was not happy with the picture quality, since a few scenes were out of focus. Allen felt he played Brian a little too goofy but was proud of his last scenes, when everyone was exhausted and his character felt most real.

Cast

Crew

Production

Lake House Whisper was written by Mark Haggett under his company, which StabMovies.com calls Deadly Sin Productions. Dave Allen calls it Deadly Sins Productions. StabMovies.com announced the team-up on December 16, 2016, calling it an original horror short. When the release date was announced on February 23, 2018, the site called it an original feature film. Haggett said it was his first real attempt at putting a production together that was not just himself.

Haggett cast the film through auditions, except for Dave Allen and, as Allen remembers it, the actor who played Phil, who were both his friends. Only Ryanne Harms and Sidney Atkin came to the in-person auditions, so the rest was cast from video auditions. Allen said Ron Young, who works a lot in the Boston area, came up to play the camp owner. Haggett's younger brother Christopher Jaques played the killer as a stunt double.

Almost the whole film was shot in one weekend at Haggett's grandmother's camp in Poland, Maine. Dave Allen remembers it as a camp Haggett had through family. Haggett said 50 to 55 script pages were shot in two days, and he got about four hours of sleep across the two nights. A couple of extra scenes, mostly car scenes and a scene outside an apartment, were shot in one day in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the ADR was also recorded.

Greg Boyea was supposed to shoot most of the film, but there was a misunderstanding about how much camera experience he had. Haggett ended up filming a lot of it himself, his brother filmed a lot of it in his first time behind the camera, and Boyea shot about two scenes. Haggett has said he was stressed, may have been a hard director to work with, and would have needed two weeks to do it right. There was no time to reshoot scenes he was unhappy with.

Allen remembers a few rough spots. Haggett brought food for everyone without knowing one actress was a vegetarian. During one fight Haggett really hit the stunt killer by accident. Later, when Brian swings a cribbage board at the killer, Allen was so worried about hurting him that his swing came out weak. By the final scene they had been shooting for what felt like 20 hours straight, and Allen added a line to the killers during the reveal that made it into the film.

During the shoot Haggett's uncle was out back cutting down a tree, and Haggett had to stop and help him so it would not fall on the shed. Since he wrote the script, he already knew his lines.

Haggett wanted it to be a feature. Allen says it ended up running a little under an hour. Joshua Patrick Dudley was not involved in the shoot. He helped in post production with the music and came up with the opening dream sequence.

Filming locations

• Haggett's grandmother's camp, Poland, Maine: The lake, the cabins, the woods and nearly the whole film
• Gloucester, Massachusetts: Car scenes, a scene outside an apartment, and ADR recording

Effects and makeup

Mark Haggett did the special effects makeup. He singled out the throat slit he did on Ron Young, saying the photos of it look gruesome. Allen said the film has a lot of blood and throat slits.

The killer wears a faceless mask and a hood. Haggett described the dream sequence killer as a person with no face who looked a bit like Freddy Krueger.

The killers

Deaths

The film's credits list the music by Greg Boyea.

Mark Haggett says Joshua Patrick Dudley did the score. Dudley gave him sound bites and music to use, and that is most of what you hear. Haggett said he scored a little of one of the first scenes himself but thinks not much of his own score was kept. Dave Allen also said you hear a lot of Dudley's original tracks in the film.

STABFLIX

Watch the film

Bonus features and videos

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Lake House Whisper Teaser

StabMovies.com

The teaser that went out before the short.

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Behind the Mask, Part 7: Lake House Whisper

StabMovies.com

The documentary episode about making this one.

Gallery

Pictures