“When a family moves from their home in Downey, California to a rustic country house in Texas, they begin to feel an ominous presence pervading through the house and lands surrounding it.

After coming in contact with the darkness first hand, the family is thrust into a crucible of madness that sends them into a spiral of terror and threatens to tear them apart.

Can they thwart the unspeakable evil of their stalker? Or will the vengeance of Mister Stichs leave them splintered, and clawing for sanity?”

Mister Stichs is my vision to bring one of my Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtracks from an idea into a feature film.

My name is Keith Richie and I am a professional software developer.  When I’m not writing software, I love to make music! I first became obsessed with electronic music in the early 80’s by being exposed to the fascinating music of John Carpenter, and later Tangerine Dream which are two of my biggest influences.

My first exposure to the music of John Carpenter is when I saw the first two Halloween movies as a teenager.  I was completely engrossed in the music.  When I discovered that he was the man behind both the writing / directing and scoring of his early movies, I decided THAT was what I wanted to do when I grew up.

As far as the music side of things, I’ve recently started to really push that side of my life, but I never moved forward with learning the skills to create a proper story or screenplay and the film making side of things.   This isn’t to say I didn’t make a couple of attempts at one time, but with a full time job it was difficult to sacrifice the time and energy to learn all of these crafts to be successful later in years.  Regardless I carried on with a portion of my vision… creating what I called Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtracks.

The Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtrack series of releases I have made are audio stories intended to spark the imagination.  I would have a story in mind, and I would just create an abstract album with a small backing story behind it.   Think of them as short stories or screenplays for films that currently do not exist.  My plan is to release a new horror/Halloween themed Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtrack every couple of years or so.

My first “Official” Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtrack is called March of the Inanimate (or MOTI for short) which was releasd in October 2014.  I have recently updated and released it as March of the Inanimate – Repossessed. When I released the original version of MOTI, I wrote some small segments of the story and published them on my music site so you could hear the music and read the short story attached to it.  I had eventually hoped to do with MOTI what I intend to do for Mister Stichs, but I feel the idea/music and story behind Mister Stichs will provide a higher chance of success.

As I started to work on the music that eventually became Mister Stichs, I knew that I wanted to have the story written by someone with some actual writing experience, and someone who’s passion was for writing, so I discussed this with my good friend Dalton McCay. Dalton had shown me a novel he was working on and I liked his style and passion he put into his work.  I asked Dalton if he would be interested in writing a short backstory for Mister Stichs.

What I pitched to Dalton about the story was fairly brief, as I had the basic idea in my head about what I wanted it to be about, but I wanted to give him the flexibility to take the idea in the direction he felt was inspiring and exciting to read.  I basically gave him three rules:

• It would be about a family moving to a farmhouse, and there was some family trauma causing distress in their life that brought them there where they would discover “The Thing”
• I described what “The Thing” was, what it looked like, and some basic rules about it. (Can’t share that with you now… so stay tuned!)
• I needed 10-12 distinct small sections/chapters that I would then go compose the music to.

And off he went.

In the meantime I started developing themes that I would incorporate into the eventual short story he would write.  All written with the code name of “Shapes”.  I sampled out “Shapes 1” to people back in April 24, 2016 with the following synopsis:

Shapes 1 is the working title of a new song that will possibly appear on a follow up album to my Horror/Halloween themed album March of the Inanimate.

I’m always working on new material, and I want to get a head start this year to possibly have a new Horror / Halloween themed album ready for the 2016 Halloween season. When I released March of the Inanimate, I unfortunately didn’t get it released till nearly the end of October 2014. I always knew I wanted to do a follow up album to it, but this time ensure it was ready “before or right at the starting of the Halloween season.

This is of course a very early draft, with only the basic melody and outline of the song in place, but feel it’s ready to start getting some early feedback. With 4-5 months to go before the official start of the 2016 Halloween season, I want to be sure everything is prepared for a suitable launch time.

If you are a fan of John Carpenter, you’ll know that “The Shape” is the pseudonym for Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. It could also be applied to various elements from Carpenter films such as the androids in Halloween III or the leper victims of the Elizabeth Dane under the cover of The Fog. I may carry this theme throughout the album, or I may not. Who knows, but it’s an interesting concept to say the least.

I continued on creating various “Shapes” melodies as Dalton continued to draft out the short story.  We met together near the beginning of July 2016 to see where the story was and to cover the basic outline of the story he had come up with.  With that outline and draft in mind, I arranged the existing themes I had built up to match the tone and feel to the short story at hand, and additionally created a few more tracks to match major events in the story.  We then solidified the album title as Mister Stichs.

I moved forward with releasing the music and giving Dalton the direction to “Take your time” with the story.  I wanted to make sure the story was long enough and fulfilling to readers.  And then I thought, why sell ourselves short?

So I decided to take Mister Stichs in the direction I always wanted to do with one of my Original ‘N’otion Picture Soundtracks. To turn it into a feature film.

With that in mind, Dalton and I will move forward with creating a full novella or novel, which ever it comes to. From that we’ll adapt it into a screenplay.  We will then take our idea and work to acquire the right people to produce a feature film.  Fortunately I know a few folks in the film industry to help us get there.

It’s going to be a long, adventurous (and I’m sure very stressful at times) ride so I hope you follow along and see it through to it’s end.

– Keith Richie