My pitch for a horror TV episode that will never get done, alas.

I’m not giving this concept away for free (it’s based off of this), but I will be very reasonable about letting somebody film this. Seriously, this I’m inclined to be cheap about. It’s not like I know how to write scripts, after all.

Scene: An airplane, prior to takeoff. It’s getting towards dusk, and there’s been a slight delay in the flight.

Our protagonist is a woman, mid-thirties, who is visibly slightly anxious about the flight. We see her unwrap and open up a new bottle of medication (it got through TSA, this is a television show, run with it), then take a single pill. She makes small talk with people in her row… and then she sees a monstrous form, just for a moment, and from the corner of her eye.

This escalates throughout the rest of the episode. There’s never any physical proof of the monster, and the people she’s sitting with become more and more apprehensive as the Protagonist keeps trying to ask, ‘Look, is there a monster?’ At one point, the person who seemed most sympathetic to her problems snaps at the Protagonist, and in the middle of the ensuing outburst, the monster suddenly appears!

Only, it’s a flight attendant. In fact, in the tense scene that follows it’s a different flight attendant every few seconds, and when the Protagonist interacts with one we have quick cuts or whatever they’re called. When the frame is centered on the Protagonist, we hear spooky music and see the monster: when the focus changes to a side-shot or whatever, there’s no music, and the monster is revealed as being a very confused and apprehensive flight attendant.

Eventually the Protagonist loses her crap, insisting that the flight is full of monsters who aren’t real, aren’t human, and can’t be trusted! She tries to leave, but they actually try to stop her (note in a side conversation that it’s because they’re waiting for the paramedics to get there). She handles that badly, just before she does something violent to somebody there’s a call on her phone. It’s the pharmacy! She needs to stop taking that medication! It’s the wrong kind, and it’ll mess up her head!

And she… backs off. The Protagonist lets the finally-arrived paramedics take her off the airplane, and the person who snapped at her earlier takes the time to sincerely apologize for treating her badly. Everybody’s trying to be nice, now, because they realized that the Protagonist was begging for help as best she could, and not getting any.

The last scene shows being loaded in the ambulance. Above her the flight she was on takes off in the dusk… and the last shot shows every light on and in the plane go out as it flies into the night.

No explanation. Just a fade to black.