Haunted Love

A good-hearted teen artist grapples with her burgeoning psychic abilities to reveal a hauntingly romantic tale spanning three generations of her family’s past and must break a spell keeping her family apart.

Comps: THE GIFT meets THE QUIETUDE

FRANCESCA (17/Afro-Latina; desperate) does what she can to survive in this 1946 private colonial hacienda. The employer’s wife, jealous of her husband’s affection for the housemaid, threatens Francesca to not jeopardize her employment opportunity. A tonic bottle holds the key for an abortion – Francesca downs the tincture. That night, she runs in a stupor to the patio fountain but collapses…and dies.

Present Day… The aspiring painter ELIZA (13/Afro-Latina; heartfelt) paints bland landscapes. Break conventions and maybe you’ll be accepted, the art schools tell her. Discouraged and wanting to take care of her mother, she flies with her mom, CLAUDIA (39/Latina; doting), newly separated, to Claudia’s home country, Colombia. Believing her husband doesn’t love her, Claudia seeks to start a new life with her remaining family and write a South American fusion cookbook.

Eliza and Claudia move into the family estate with Claudia’s AUNT TERESA (71/Latina; snappy, money-hungry, and status-seeking) and UNCLE GABRIELLE (85/Latino; misunderstood invalid), a mute and wheelchair-bound man with suicidal ideologies. Upon moving in, Eliza disregards an apparition, a see-through woman hovering by the fountain. Peculiar activities unfold – light bulbs pop, the water in the fountain turns blood red, the coy fish curl up and die, and Eliza dreams of a ghost. Dismissive of this nonsense, Teresa, focuses the family’s attention on an upcoming party to honor Gabrielle.

Searching for culinary ingredients, Claudia and Eliza visit the local market. There, BRUJA PAULINA (59/Afro-Latina; enigmatic), recognises a fellow seer and recites an incantation and taps Eliza’s eyes, expediting Eliza’s burgeoning psychic gifts. Shocked and scared, Claudia and Eliza flee the market. Eliza commonderes a tattered, dusty room in the house as her painting studio, and she begins a bold new project, far from usual basic landscapes with a mysterious woman as the subject: Francesca.

Eliza’s jaw drops when she stumbles upon an ephemeral ghost making love to her uncle Gabrielle. Fearful, Eliza enlists Claudia to help, and they turn to Paulina, the only witch doctor they know. But Paulina’s price? Blood, a revenge death. Psychic herself, Paulina intuitively knows that Eliza’s family murdered one of her ancestors. Desperate to help her daughter and family, Claudia takes the spell from the Bruja and dismisses her revenge lust.

Back at the estate, Claudia and Eliza enact the invocation, but during it, Uncle Gabrielle crawls out of the sacred brick dust circle, thus breaking the spell. Horrified that the spirit of his lover could be banished from him forever, Gabrielle breaks the vase of oleander and laps up the toxic water attempting suicide. To his dismay, the family intercedes in time to save his life, but the mute Gabrielle cannot explain himself.

Claudia goes on to add more recipes to her cookbook, she even accepts a date with a new potential husband to the Carnival ball. Meanwhile, more good news! The Boston School of Art preliminarily accepts Eliza to their boarding program based on her new work-in-process portrait of Francesca, as long as Eliza completes it. Days later, Eliza is brought to tears when she finds the canvas soiled in cooking grease, her chances of attending her dream program destroyed. Aunt Teresa nonchalantly confesses to its destruction: It must’ve gotten ruined from the water leak. I had the maid put it in the trash. But as Teresa sashays away carelessly, a DARK SHADOW swishes around her.

In perfect timing, Claudia’s husband & Eliza’s father, DERRICK (40/African-American; an officer and a gentleman) barges in unannounced, flowers and candy in hand.

The dark shadow swishing around Teresa shoots out of her body and toward Eliza. But as a psychic, Eliza’s body repels the spirit. It zooms to its next best host: Claudia. Now possessed, Eliza’s mother acts differently, more aristocratic and entitled. She suddenly forbids Eliza from attending art school and sends Derrick packing. It’s clear to the now exhausted Teresa that this is the spirit of her mother, LILIANA (67/Latina; vain) jumping bodies in pursuit of a younger one.

Going through some of Gabrielle’s old things in her studio, Eliza intuits the life after death that Francesca shared with her uncle: cradling him as a baby, his first kiss, and how Francesca’s spirit helped raise Gabrielle. Gabrielle’s in love with her! But possessed, Eliza’s mother acts differently dosing her tonic with the oleander water that delivered its lethal blow.

It’s all hands on deck to exorcise Liliana’s ghost from her mother. With the help of Paulina, Liliana’s ghost swooshes out of Claudia, but attacks Francesca’s spirit hovering over Gabrielle. The fantams fight, and a recovered Teresa, jealous that her mother’s ghost left her to possess Claudia, races into the room and lunges toward Claudia with a dagger. During the tumult, Teresa impales herself instead and dies. Though horrified, they continue the ritual and cast Liliana’s ghost into a painting of her that they then incinerate, thus abolishing her forever.

That night, Gabrielle shimmers into radiant luminescence before Francesca's ghost. They embrace. They kiss. Together at last.

Eliza then discovers a photo on her phone that Francesca took. It’s of Eliza’s painting before it was destroyed—proof of her opus was saved. She’s going to art school.