FILM: THE BUNKER

The Bunker is a psychological thriller/horror film which revolves around the kidnap of a congressman’s daughter. Julia, better known as Jewel to her friends and family, is a teenage runaway who is unwilling to live within the rules and boundaries set by her parents. She has run away once before, and her father’s connections have kept that quiet. This time, however, an election cycle is about to begin and the scandal of a runaway daughter has congressman Robert Jennings desperate. Desperate enough to have half the NYPD out quietly looking for his daughter, and desperate enough to pay privately to have her found and brought back home. The problem for those looking for her, though, is that she is no longer on the streets, and is instead imprisoned in an underground bunker, having been kidnapped by a sadistic serial murderer. Jewel knows exactly how much longer she has left to live, but will it be long enough for anybody to find her?

Backstory

In early 2001, Joe  had a few ideas for shorts, including a sketchy one about a congressman’s wild child daughter being kidnapped off the streets while her father pulled out all the stops to find her before she turned his reelection campaign into a scandal. So began the formation of The Bunker–destined not to be Monks’ first screenplay put into production, but his second.

During 2001 and early 2002, while Monks fought a losing battle with diabetic retinopathy (it would eventually blind the comic book author and would-be filmmaker), Monks returned on and off to the story, adding details; fleshing out the characters; developing the plot line, while trying to keep his day job between invasive eye surgeries and lengthy recovery periods. By April of 2002, when Monks both lost his job and his failing eyesight, the film project had been entirely shifted to the back burner. Monks shifted gears to focus his energies on a long-delayed horror anthology of short stories, Stuff Out’a My Head, which he had been discussing with legendary comic book illustrator Bernie Wrightson, a frequent Stephen King collaborator. In December of 2002, Stuff Out’a My Head was released.