After rescuing a boy locked inside a farmhouse, a deadbeat salesman must then save his young daughter when she is kidnapped by the boy…a blossoming killer, held captive by his own parents. 

SYNOPSIS:

“Wouldn’t you do everything you could for someone you loved?”

This is a question posed throughout The Hiding. Two very different fathers are pushed to extremes in order to protect their families when one child kidnaps the other.

It’s 1961, and a small rural community is left reeling from the abduction of two young children. While the overwhelmed village police search for the missing, the people, fearful and angry, try to get on with their lives.

Alex Summers is a travelling salesman who has always put work ahead of family. This leaves him divorced and estranged from his young daughter, Nancy. After Alex is asked to take care of Nancy just for one day, he reluctantly agrees. But he is forced to take Nancy with him to work, hitting the winding roads that connect the county villages.

Alex wants Nancy to stay out of his way while he struggles to make any sales. But during their time spent together on the road, Alex begins to regret the years he spent absent and makes a promise to spend more time together, as father and daughter.

When Alex and Nancy arrive at a seemingly empty farmhouse, Alex instead discovers a boy chained to a bed. Alex rescues the captive boy, Freddie, and is warned that two more children remain trapped inside the house. With the homeowners now approaching, Alex is forced to make a split-second decision. Alex leaves Freddie and Nancy together and returns to the house.

Alex searches the entire house and makes a grim discovery. Not only are there no other children inside, but Freddie was already home. He never was the victim of a kidnapping. He is in fact a blossoming killer, responsible for the recent disappearances. His deeply religious parents kept him captive and attempted to “pray the evil away” in the vein hope that it would stop him from hurting more children.

But now Freddie is loose. And he’s taken Nancy with him into the woods.

As Alex tries to make his escape from the deranged homestead, the evangelical farmer, Ed and his wife, Gwen return and he soon finds himself captive and at their mercy.

While Freddie leads Nancy into the woods, to his “favourite hideout” he battles his own compulsion to kill those who reject his attempts at friendship. He wants to be good, but he is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Back at the farmhouse, Alex must now escape from Ed and Gwen, the parents covering for their murderous son. They wrestle with their own conscience. “I’m a man of faith, but I am also a father who would do anything to protect his son”, Ed explains. His and Gwen’s solution is to simply leave Alex to die.

But Alex finds an unlikely ally in Freddie’s older brother, Ray. Loving his brother as only a brother can, but desperate for the bloodshed to end, Ray helps Alex flee from his own parents and together they race to catch up with the young killer before Nancy unwittingly “upsets” Freddie.

When Freddie and Nancy finally arrive at his hideout – an abandoned signal box along the railway tracks – he discovers that Nancy has been leaving a trail of candy for her father to follow. He feels betrayed.

While Ray and Alex follow the tracks to the signal box, Ed takes off in Alex’s car and races ahead, arriving just as Freddie turns on Nancy. She escapes and recognises her father’s car. She believes she is saved. But Ed steps from the car and, for the first time, is forced to confront the realities of his son’s vicious nature, and his own part in nurturing it. Freddie kills Nancy.

Alex and Ray find the empty signal box and split up to search the woods. However, Ray already knows where to look. He locates his father and brother as they attempt to bury Nancy’s body. But Ray has a better idea – hiding her in the trunk of Alex’s car. Ray wants the killing to stop, but knows this comes at the expense of surrendering his brother to the force of the law, and “a brother’s love is a brother’s love.” So instead, Ray’s plan is to direct the law towards Alex…and the body in his car.

Suspicion falls on Nancy’s own father long enough for Freddie and his family to escape. And long enough for the community to take out their anger and hatred on the innocent salesman…by burying him alive.

The Hiding has received positive coverage and placed as a Finalist in the 13Horror.com Film and Screenplay Contest, a Semi Finalist in the Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards and We Screenplay Feature Contest, was Long Listed by the UK Film Festival, and is currently a Quarterfinalist in the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship Competition.

THE HIDING