Rotten Tommy

Becky Sharp's mother vanished forty years ago and left no trace. Becky gave up expecting answers long ago. Then she pulls three unmarked videotapes out of a wall in her childhood home.

The tapes hold pilot episodes of Rumplejack, a children's show that was never broadcast. It takes place in a seaside town with a lighthouse, and its cast includes a talking horse who is the town sheriff, Stickemup, and a hand-puppet monarch, King Sausage. The tone is cheerful and odd, and nothing in it hints at what follows.

Watching the tapes wakes something the footage was meant to keep buried. Rotten Tommy has come to play, and once he is awake he does not stop until he finds the viewer. Becky's search for what happened to her mother now runs alongside a threat that is coming for her.

This is horror in the cursed-media tradition, with an analog-horror feel built around old videotape. The pace is fast and the violence is gruesome. The tone is gleefully unhinged, with dark humour running through the nightmare, and Rotten Tommy follows its own strange rules and has a bottomless appetite.