Shallow Ground
Shallow Ground is a 2004 horror film written and directed by Sheldon Wilson and starring Timothy V. Murphy, Stan Kirsch, Lindsey Stoddart, Patty McCormack, and Rocky Marquette. A naked teenage boy (Rocky Marquette) appears at a soon-to-be abandoned sheriff's station, drenched in blood, on the one-year anniversary of the murder of a local girl that remains unsolved. Sheriff Jack Shepherd (Timothy V. Murphy) searches for the boy's true identity and intentions, while dealing with his guilt over failing to save the girl or solve her murder.
| Shallow Ground | |
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| Directed by | Sheldon Wilson |
| Produced by | Jason Ninness Martin Mathieu John P. Tarver Sheldon Wilson |
| Written by | Sheldon Wilson |
| Starring | Timothy V. Murphy Stan Kirsch Lindsey Stoddart Patricia McCormack Rocky Marquette Tara Killian |
| Music by | Steve London |
| Cinematography | John P. Tarver |
| Edited by | Sheldon Wilson |
| Distributed by | Imagination Worldwide |
Release date |
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Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Plot summary
Sheriff Jack Shepherd is tasked with investigating a mysterious blood-covered boy who shows up at his station one day. The boy appears to be supernatural in nature, and manifests unusual powers such as the ability to read minds or show other people his memories by touching them.
Meanwhile, an unseen stalker is killing and butchering people in the woods. The audience is led to believe that the weird bloody boy is some sort of supernatural killer, similar to Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers.
It is revealed near the end of the movie that the dead across the world are rising up and seeking revenge on the people who killed them. These dead manifest as blood-covered humans that seek out and kill their original killers. If a killer has more than one victim, all the victims merge into a single composite being. The blood-covered boy is one such being, made up of 6 people from the community who were killed by the stalker some time before. He is going around reading people's minds to learn the identity of his killer.
The killer stalker turns out to be a local older woman, who has been murdering people in the community for some time. Her family was killed when the local dam broke, and in revenge she has been killing everyone involved with the dam, as well as their families. The bloody boy eventually tracks her down and kills her, just as she is about to kill Jack.
As the bloody boy walks away through the woods, he is suddenly attacked and killed by another bloody creature, this one much larger and more demonic-looking. The identity of the second blood creature is never explicitly revealed, but from the creature's appearance it is implied to be the old woman from earlier.