The Serpent's Tongue
One Hour Serialized, Drama
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Evelyn, a timid yet curious young woman under the control of her pastor father, is killed by a venomous snake during an extreme religious ritual. But when she resurrects with new serpent-like abilities, she teams up with a deadbeat molecular biologist to harness her powers and seek revenge on her father.
Concept
The inspiration for this project came from my own traumas from sexual assault and domestic violence. I remember one night I watched a documentary about venomous snakes. The narrator kept emphasizing, snakes don’t want to bite you, they only bite out of fear, they just want to be left alone.
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I suddenly felt a deep connection to these vastly misunderstood and often demonized creatures. I fantasized about what it would be like if I had venom filled fangs of my own to deter the predatory men I’ve encountered in my lifetime. And so, “The Serpent’s Tongue” was born.
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Evelyn, a timid yet curious young woman stuck under the thumb of her pastor father, is trying desperately to understand the world around her. Most importantly, to understand why exactly God took her mother from her. Her father Bill, says sickness is the biproduct of sin, believing that every time Evelyn strays from God’s light, God will punish them.
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With a budding political campaign for a congressional seat in a rural Georgia district, Bill needs all the divine intervention he can get. However Evelyn, his dark haired, olive skinned, half Hispanic love child, stands out like a sore thumb in his WASP-y conservative congregation. Tensions rise in their relationship; Bill wants Evelyn to stay in line and play her role.
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But Evelyn is sneaking off to get library books in search of another answer, a world of science and medicine, a world where her mother could have been saved, a world that her homeschooled education can barely comprehend.
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However, Evelyn’s reality is thrown upside down when she finds her new librarian friend bound and beaten inside a storage shed behind the church. She soon discovers her father is responsible.
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Unsure of the deeper connection between this woman and her father’s campaign, Evelyn tries to free the librarian, but Bill catches her and provides a brutal punishment.
Motivated by a recent bad poll and Evelyn’s betrayal, Bill decides a grand gesture of devotion is now warranted. Taking it back to the Pentecostal zealots of decades prior, Mark 16:18, tonight, they shall take up serpents...
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An extreme religious ritual where venomous snakes are passed around, trusting that if your faith is devout enough, you will be protected by God. Evelyn prays hard for safety, but is soon bit by a death adder, a snake from a very far away part of the world, one that Bill has obtained through even more nefarious activity.
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Evelyn succumbs to the venom and is carried out to the woods to be buried in secret, but she soon resurrects as a more powerful version of herself. Glowing amber eyes, heat vision, sharp venom filled fangs.
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She takes off into the dark swampy woods, being pursued by the men of the church who believe she has turned into some sort of hellish creature.
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When Evelyn accidentally bites and kills a man who is trying to capture her, she feels certain she has become the biproduct of sin her father warned her about.
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She cries out for her mother, but instead, the very snake that bit her, returns to her. Evelyn intuitively follows this snake out of the woods, to the home of Warren. A man tortured by his own troubles, owner of a venom collection lab, and the rightful owner of the snake that bit Evelyn.
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With her father’s men in pursuit of her, reckoning with her new reality, Evelyn places all her trust in Warren to help her navigate this new reality. The two forge an unlikely father/daughter type bond that forces them both to finally face the traumas of their past.
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This is a story that asks, would you recognize evil if it were labelled as good? What if good were labelled as evil? And what, if any, is the role of men to step up to protect the abandoned daughters of our patriarchal society?
"The Serpent's Tongue" Script U.S. Copyright © by Rebecca Arroyo
and Registered with The Writers Guild of America
