After casting an incantation to resurrect a deceased parent, a teenage witch discovers she has unwittingly summoned malevolent spirits that will haunt her for eternity. 

SYNOPSIS:

Title: A Bitter Frost

Author: D.T. Yang

Genre: Young Adult, Supernatural, Horror (Feature)

Logline: After casting an incantation to resurrect a deceased parent, a teenage witch discovers she has unwittingly summoned malevolent spirits that will haunt her for eternity.

Comparable Films: The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Craft

Synopsis:

Ailey Frost didn’t know how to be true to herself until after she died. That’s when the young witch suffered a near-death experience (a fire that consumes her home in the city) that prompted her father to move the family back to his bucolic hometown. Now residing in a woodland community riddled with the cursed air of 17th-century witch trials, Ailey casts a spell that has the reputed power to resurrect the spirit of deceased loved ones. But ghosts and witchcraft are just a myth, right? That’s what Ailey’s father (Robert) believes until a malevolent cadre of spirits emerge from the netherworld to prove him dangerously wrong.

Desperate for guidance to end the ghostly assaults, Ailey and her father seek out Tessa Sermon, a professor at an obscure, occult university in town. The professor tells the duo that after the summer turns to fall in three days (the effective duration of the spell), the ghostly specters will remain with Ailey for eternity. When Robert chastises Ailey for playing such a dangerous game with the paranormal, Ailey mentions that she did so to assist a spirit in finding peace by heading into “the light.”

During an encounter with a murderous poltergeist, a guilt-riddled Robert surmises that a “friendly” spirit that haunts the area may be Ailey’s cousin, who ten years ago due to his negligence, drowned by the lakeshore. Ailey indicates that spirits only choose to haunt because they are trapped in a cycle of anger or grief and there is no easy way to break that cycle; you cannot tell a spirit in denial that they are deceased since the trauma pushes them away from entering the light. Robert, still somewhat cynical of the spiritual realm, struggles with Ailey to stop the spiritual disturbances, the father voicing his assumption that Ailey attempted the incantation so she could meet her mother (who perished during childbirth).

After several fierce battles with the witch specters, Ailey reveals to Robert the truth; her spell was cast, not to bring back her deceased mother, but to resurrect the spirit of her father. Robert is revealed to have been dead since the house fire at the start of the story (Ailey has been interacting with her father’s ghost). The young sorcerer tells Robert that he had been haunting her after his mortal demise, constantly expressing remorse and guilt for the death of his niece via drowning years ago. The young witch’s attempt at conjuring was an ill-fated effort at communicating and convincing her regret-riddled father to forgive himself and enter the light.

While Robert flees in denial of his own death, Tessa Sermon explains to an anguished Ailey that she has discovered that Ailey did not, in fact, cast a resurrection spell. Instead, the spell was a curse as Ailey inadvertently summoned an astral doorway that has separated the enchantress’s spirit from her own body. Ailey discovers that all the while she believed she was resurrecting lost spirits to the plane of the real world, she was actually placing her spirit inside of the ghost realm and everyone (including Tessa Sermon) she communicated with is a deceased soul caught in purgatory.

With hope running out, and the clock ticking towards the deadline on the spell, Ailey realizes that she is almost certain to have her soul trapped in a ghostly wasteland while her physical body perishes in the real world. Facing eternal damnation of her soul, Ailey reunites with the “friendly” spirit of her deceased cousin who absolves and redeems her father’s guilt and brings Robert’s soul to the light (but leaving Ailey’s soul marooned in purgatory).

After a heartbreaking goodbye, Ailey accepts her fate, grateful to have been able to grant her father the insight to find peace in heaven. In a turn of events, before her father’s ghost fades into a peaceful bliss, Robert (formerly skeptical of spirituality and witchcraft) casts the same spell Ailey initially summoned, re-opening the astral doorway and allowing Ailey to leap through, merging her astral form back inside her physical body and allowing her spirit to escape the ghost realm.

Before she completes her journey to hell and back, Ailey finally gets to meet her mother as both mother and father are reunited in the afterlife. Before they rise to the heavens, her parents indicate the only genuine truth in this universe; that the love of family transcends all, whether in life or in death.