Feature film · In development

Sanguine

The Firm meets Get Out

Sanguine poster. A blood drop built from rows of dates starting in March 1967, with the title cut out of it, under the line Silicon Valley has always fed on its young. A feature film written by Maurice Grey.

To save the house his aunt raised him in, a young founder signs with Silicon Valley’s most exclusive accelerator, and learns the program has been harvesting its founders on a lunar schedule since 1967. He can’t escape it and he can’t expose it. The one thing the paperwork allows is refusal.

Format
Feature film, horror and thriller, about 110 minutes
Language
English
Set in
Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Queens
Script
Finished, 115 pages
Written by
Maurice Grey
Director
Open
Producer
Danny Miller, ouidembois
Looking for
A director, a producing partner and financing
Quarter-finalist, Shore Scripts Feature Contest 2026 (opens in a new tab)
Request the deck Book a call (opens in a new tab)

The premise

The monster in this film is an accelerator.

Crestarr Labs is the most coveted accelerator in Silicon Valley. Founders would do almost anything to get in. It offers capital, prestige, a room on the fourth floor, a wellness ring, a pledge, and a consent packet nobody reads past page two.

Crestarr harvests their vitality, measures it through their rings, draws it on a lunar schedule, and transfers it into other bodies. The program has operated this way since 1967. Inside Crestarr, they call it gardening.

The system works because everyone consents, and Crestarr can’t take what isn’t given. Chris’s only weapon is a notarized refusal.

The title

The company calls it gardening. Chris’s family calls it love.

sanguine adjective

1. Optimistic, especially when the situation gives no reason to be.

2. Of blood. Blood-red.

From the Latin sanguis, blood.

The world

Mood images, not from the film.

A hooded figure carrying a case walks away along a wet beach at night, footprints behind him, city lights in the fog and a pale moon above.
A garage workbench at dusk, shelves of old radios with their dials glowing, a wristwatch on the bench and a bonsai on the windowsill.
A concrete atrium with green carpet under round skylights, rows of identical black suitcases and bags tagged and lined up by the desk.
A long concrete corridor with green carpet, hung with framed group photographs of every past batch, and a bronze acorn on the wall.
A forearm resting on a desk, a taped dressing inside the elbow and a dark branching mark running under the skin toward the wrist. A ring on one finger.
A black marble vault. Lit glass cabinets of small vials line one wall, leather ledgers fill the other, and one ledger lies open under a brass lamp.
An empty black marble room under a glowing ceiling, cushioned benches along both walls and instruments laid out on a table at the far end.
A silver tray of glass ampoules filled with dark red liquid on a bar cart, beside a glass of red wine. One ampoule lies snapped open.
A small bonsai planted in open dirt behind a house at dusk, a water jug and a trowel beside it, the back door open and lit.

Inside Crestarr

Every draw is scheduled, logged and signed for.

Chris Walker, 25

A health-tech founder from Queens, raised by an uncle who fixed things and an aunt who prayed over them. Most of the role is a man deciding, silently, how much of himself to hand over.

Owen Calloway, 30

Al’s protégé, once the founder nobody funded, and what Chris looks like three batches from now.

Al Thornton, late seventies

Crestarr’s co-founder and the most candid man in the building. He never raises his voice, never lies, and wins.

ResidencesMentor roomsAtriumMedical bayGreen roomAuditoriumAntechamberGrade Repository
The floors above ground are a working accelerator. The sub-level is where the harvest happens.

The history behind the film

There are no vampires in this film.

The film draws on a documented history of Europeans consuming African bodies, and moves it into an industry that sells vitality with a consent form.

Mumia

For about six hundred years, European apothecaries sold powder made from bodies taken out of North African tombs as a cure for bleeding, bruising and epilepsy.

1765

The starving crew of the sloop Peggy drew lots and ate Bob, an enslaved man. When the next lot fell on a white sailor, they waited, and were rescued the next day.

1837

Captives from the Portuguese slave ship Arrogante testified under oath that the crew killed a man who rebelled, forced the others to eat him, and ate his heart and liver themselves.

Sugg 2011 · Harrison 1766 · Barcia 2022

From the writer

I have buried a company. Anyone who has done it will tell you it feels like a funeral, which is why this film opens with one.

I have spent nearly two decades inside the world Sanguine is about. I’ve been a founder, an employee, and an investor. I know the language, the incentives, the rituals, and the people who move this industry.

The industry depends on founders. Their ideas, their intelligence, their creativity, their relationships, and their intellectual property become companies, investments, and digital assets that can be owned, distributed, and made to compound in value. Sanguine takes that process and makes it literal.

Crestarr draws its founders on a schedule, with a form. I wanted that process to feel familiar. The paperwork is familiar. The incentives are familiar. The logic is familiar. The supernatural element is the part we can see.

I want the audience to leave with the feeling of having refused something themselves. That feeling is quieter than winning.

And it lasts a lot longer.

Maurice Grey, writer

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