A neighborhood
that refuses
to let its dead leave.
WHAT AILS YOU is a horror film about inherited violence, faith, survival, and the impossible burden placed on Black communities to continually save themselves after generations of abandonment. The monsters in this film are born from love that has curdled into possession.
- Title
- What Ails You
- Format
- Feature Film + Proof of Concept short
- Genre
- Urban Gothic Horror · Psychological Horror · Body Horror · Southern / Midwestern Gothic
- Setting
- A close-knit Black neighborhood on Detroit's east side — present day
- Runtime
- 90–100 minutes
- Rating
- R — violence, language, thematic intensity
- Writer / Director
- DeMarco Jenkins
Logline
After a beloved choir singer dies at a party, a producer, a coder, a dealer, and a singer are pulled into the orbit of the neighborhood’s warmest elder — and the thing she keeps chained beneath her house.
Director's Statement
WHAT AILS YOU is a horror film about what happens when a community refuses to let its dead leave.
It is about inherited violence, faith, survival, and the impossible burden placed on Black communities to continually save themselves after generations of abandonment. The monsters in this film are born from love that has curdled into possession.
I want audiences to feel like they are walking through a familiar neighborhood that slowly reveals itself to be a haunted ecosystem — where every porch remembers someone who never came home, and where protection and captivity have become the same word.
Every performance should feel emotionally truthful, even when the supernatural enters the room. Especially then.
— DeMarco Jenkins, Writer / Director
Themes
Protection and Ownership live in the space between them. Every character crosses that line at least once.
Tone
- Candyman (1992)
- Get Out
- The Night of the Hunter
- His House
- Saint Maud
- Prisoners
- The Wailing
Grief-forward. Slow dread. Community as chorus. Faith as pressure. Violence that costs something every time it appears.
Visual Language
Acid Green
Contamination · the field · visions
Deep Crimson
Cloth · blood · devotion
Bone
Spines · hymnal paper · chalk
Matte Black
Night · basements · negative space
Acid green light · red cloth · dark wood · basements · chain · concrete · fluorescent light · old hymnals · 1970s photography · Polaroids · spinal imagery · church architecture. The frame withholds.