Beyond the Screen

Summary

Serafina Hart has devoted her life to preserving the past.

Inside her sprawling mansion she keeps a priceless collection of Egyptian antiquities: gilded coffins, ancient artifacts, the preserved remains of long-dead royalty. To outsiders, the collection is a symbol of sophistication and affluence. To Serafina, it is something far more intimate.

On a cold December night, she invites a younger girlfriend to the house for a visit while Serafina’s husband is away for the weekend. What begins as a cozy evening of wine and conversation slowly shifts into something more and more unsettling. As the layers of civility are peeled back, what surfaces is a gruesome deathtrap waiting to be sprung.

Adapted and modernized by Matt Dorff from Francis Stevens’s 1918 magazine story “Behind the Curtain,” “Beyond the Screen” transforms an early classic of dark fantasy into a psychologically charged contemporary thriller about obsession, betrayal, and the violence that lurks behind polite exteriors.