History of Mystery, A Crime Story Pitch

Meet The Hell Houndz, a four-piece rap-rock outfit that has currently been making their way through the underground music scene with the help of their manager and friend Michael Icarus. The band is comprised of Kiyo, the smooth and stylish drummer, Xo (Zoe), the musical prodigy on bass, Terry, the cool and confident lead guitarist and Vandal, the radical and ruthless frontman and, lastly, everyone’s favourite dog and mascot Kalypso.

The Hell Houndz began in elementary school with Vandal and Xo. Xo was a kid genius with great instrumental skill and Vandal was a singer and lyricist like no other. The two of them hung out all the time and became close friends. Xo was later introduced to Kaly, Vandal’s super-intelligent and capable dog. Xo asked Vandal where he had found such a smart animal and he told her that Kaly was rescued from an animal testing lab by his dad.

Xo came up with the idea for a communicator collar that allowed Kaly to speak and turns out she had a lot to say. Later on, Vandal met Kiyo during his first year of high school in shop class. The two of them got along quite well and after finding out he was able to play the drums, Vandal pulled Kiyo into the band. Lastly, Kiyo was introduced to Terry. She was fighting off five bullies on her own and he decided to step in as her back up. After that, they became friends. He invited her to watch them perform at the school talent show. After she saw them, she knew she wanted to join. Xo taught her how to play the electric guitar and Terry turned out to be a prodigy in the making. As high school ended, the group split up for university. Though they stayed connected, they couldn’t spend much time together. In university, Terry meets a guy named Michael Icarus and they become close friends. Upon finding out that Terry was in a band, Michael decided to get involved and the rest was history.

After three years of grinding on the underground music circuit in Ottawa, Michael finally had enough connections, artists, and respect to put together a national tour on his own. This would allow him to finally show the world, The Hell Houndz. Their first stop on the tour was a three-day rock festival in Toronto. This was also where the infamous Benny Barker, the metal and hard rock legend, would be headlining. As they get to the festival, they meet several interesting characters. This includes the head of the Barker Babes fan club named Greta and Barker’s manager, who shows discomfort and worry for him. They also find out that fans (mostly women) have been disappearing in the area since the set up of the festival.

At first, they don’t think any of it. However, at an after-party, Vandal runs into an old friend of his named Norville Rogers who tells him about this conspiracy theory about celebrities in the music industry being involved in some dark organization. He claims that The Hell Houndz are not safe in the music industry. He also gives Vandal a clue. A piece of paper with a symbol and says once he sees it he can never un-see it.

Vandal shows his friends the mark and tells them what he heard. They don’t believe him at first but once they get to the floor of the party, they begin to notice the mark everywhere. On all the major figures, even Benny Barker and Queen Nubia, the biggest pop/R&B icon in the industry. At the party, Barker has a breakdown and after this, as each day progresses, Barker continues to act more strange. He looks sickly, like he’s deteriorating. As they investigate him, they find clues that lead them to the bottom of a hotel where Barker was staying. They also find all bodies of the missing girls wrapped up in cobwebs along with a lair, along with the dead body of Greta.

As they go deeper, they find Benny Barker, who has become an eldritch spider-like creature. The gang now has to quickly think about how to deal with him and the horrors they find. They work together, using their skills and cooperation to take him down. They lead him into traps, avoiding a head-on fight. Once he’s beaten, The Hell Houndz watch as he starts to dissolve into dust right in front of them. However, as he dies, the near-death Barker tells them that this didn’t end with him. This ends the first chapter of this story while setting the stage for another.

Protagonists

Vandal a.k.a. Giovanni Singh:

· A 28-year-old 6”5’ Jamaican Rastafarian man with dark-brown skin, a thin but lean build and consistently bloodshot brown eyes. He has long dreads that fall to the mid of his back but they tend to be tied up and pulled back. He is the anxious and intense lead vocalist of the Hell Houndz

Kaly a.k.a. Kalypso:

· An 18-year-old Australian Cattle-Dog/Jack Russell Mix with brown eyes, high and perked up ears and a computerized collar. (Her aging is much slower because of testing)

Xio (Zo) a.k.a. Xiomara Salazar:

· A 27-year-old 5” 4’ Afro-Latin woman with light-brown skin, a large afro with side swiped bangs that over her left eye and a short and thick body. She is also a super genius and the resident bass player of the band The Hell Houndz.

Kiyo a.k.a. Kiyoshi Jones:

· A 26-year-old 5” 8’ Japanese man with creamy pale skin, hazel eyes and a stocky but well defined and muscular build. He is the badass drummer of The Hell Houndz.

Terry a.k.a. Estera Alam:

· A 26-year-old, 6-foot-tall, mixed Iranian-Caucasian woman with red-ish brown skin blue eyes and a heavier set fit/muscular body. She is the beefy virtuoso lead guitarist of The Hell Houndz.

Antagonists

Benny Barker: A massively tall man with a slim but toned build. His skin was as pale as the snow and raven coloured hair. Slicked into a tight ponytail. He has high cheekbones, a strong jawline and a bone-chilling dimpled smile. He is a metal legend with a dark secret.

Concept and Background

Taking primary influence from whodunits, Eldritch horror and the amateur sleuth genre, this story will take you on a familiar journey with a dark twist that will keep the audience intrigued and wanting more. Beginning with character tropes, Saturday Morning cartoons have a reputation for stereotypical gender roles and sex typing. Sex typing is defined as attributes that are associated with one sex or another like aggression for masculine characters and dependence for feminine characters, however, in History of Mystery, the story will be destruction those elements with the main characters. One, in particular, Estera Alam aka Terry. Terry as a character takes the same slot as Daphne Blake in Scooby-Doo, however, unlike Daphne who is very different from interpretation to interpretation, she is usually depicted as a girl next door like and damsel in distress. Terry, however, is the opposite, she is a strong and competent woman who has a heavier set muscular build that at times gages intimidation and does not back down from a challenge.

The next thing is to address the crime of the story with its eldritch aspect. In 1986, The Fly, which is not a complete Crime film, is a thriller where the protagonist decays into a monster after a failed experiment. He investigates his own body as it falls apart, attempting to find out what is wrong with him, meanwhile the audience watches from the perspective of his love interest. Watching as he falls apart, decays and turns into something else completely. In History of Mystery, the story uses elements of that uncertainty and un-comfortability, where our protagonists are using clues and cues given by the side characters and the antagonist to find out what is going on and more importantly what is happening to them. Throughout the story they see Barker become a completely different and more unsettling person than ever before he completely devolves into a full eldritch spider.

The story then ends, just like every other Scooby-Doo story. The unmasking, but with a twist. The idea is that this crime is happening on two different plains, the first plain is the real world. Where girls are disappearing and are found by The Hell Houndz, some living, some dead, but still found. The second plain is the universe this monster comes from, and where it essentially disappears to at the end, once it has been found and defeated. The ending takes an analytical but supernatural approach to the crime, where instead of unmasking a monster who is a man, they are unmasking a man who is a monster. When the story ends, Barker, the antagonist says he’s not the only one, before completely dissolving into nothing. Which leaves the crime solved but the mystery opens for future iterations.

As anime and adult animation begin to bring us to the adult animation golden age, like Castlevania, BoJack Horseman, Tuca and Bertie, Rick and Morty, etc. The format chosen for this concept is an adult animated movie, with a release on Netflix or HBO. The reason for it, is because with animation you can tell extremely creative stories in ways live action prohibits unless you had an extremely large budget, meanwhile using an adult demographic to tell meaningful and darker toned stories. Utilizing the structural elements of a Scooby-Doo type story would automatically give the concept a potentially interesting demographic. Allowing the story to have a darker edge while covering real crimes and not just scaring people, opens the floor to more creative ideas. Dismantling and reasserting tropes to have more 3-dimensional characters and finally, by combining both horror and crime fiction in a dark, twisted and humorous way, History of Mystery has the potential to be the next greatest crime story.