Netherwood

Netherwood Synopsis

A sensuous, vivid and unsettling modern gothic tale about a couple who move to the seaside town of Hastings and find themselves living in the former home of a notorious local occultist over whom the shadow of former town resident Aleister Crowley looms large. Ideal for fans of Andrew Michael Hurley or Francine Toon.

Exhausted by the pressures of life in London, Justine and Adam move to Hastings. With Adam’s failed career as an artist and a recent miscarriage causing rifts in their marriage, Justine wants this to be a fresh start for them. As they try to settle into their new seaside home, they find a bolted door in their basement, behind which is a cave. Adam feels a strange but enchanting pull to the cave while apprehension begins to claw at Justine.

Inside the cave, they find a witch bottle and with this discovery, the couple begin to uncover disturbing rumours about the home’s previous owner, John Malachy. A sinister figure, Malachy was known for his obsession with chaos magic, and association with Sacred Disease - a band that rose to fame in the 80s that supposedly experimented with blood magic and occult forces and was made a scapegoat in the media due to their association with satanism.

Justine and Adam seek answers from James Blackwood, a local occultist and former member of Sacred Disease. He warns them to leave things be and not to tamper with ancient rituals, dark magic and secrets long buried in the past. But John Malachy is long dead and surely everything the media said about him was only superstition?

Despite Blackwood's warning, Adam can’t resist opening the witch bottle. With this, a sinister chain of events begins to unfold. Justine notices that Adam’s behaviour changes and the obsession he once had with his art is reignited but begins to veer into something unnatural. Justine herself wakes night after night, haunted by the screams of a young woman that seem to come from the cave beneath the house.

When Justine once again finds herself pregnant, and people in the town begin to turn up dead or missing, the lines between truth, reality and the mystical all begin to blur. The ghosts of John Malachy and the one and only Aleister Crowley himself loom large and a dark sacrificial reckoning closes in on both Justine and Adam.