MENTRE CONTI LE PECORE

A young Sicilian journalist films a night call inside a quarantined Catania building where bodies begin changing.

Plot

MENTRE CONTI LE PECORE While Sicily sleeps, the camera keeps rolling. Lucia Greco came to film a routine night call for her late-night documentary show. By dawn, the building will be sealed, the exits will be watched from outside, and the people inside will no longer be changing in ways medicine can name. ❖ The Hook ▸ Late-night documentary becomes quarantine record. Mentre Conti le Pecore is Lucia Greco’s regional Sicilian TV program: a show about the workers, emergencies, and hidden places that remain awake while everyone else sleeps. Tonight’s segment follows Catania night responders into a decaying apartment building after a strange emergency call. ❖ World Logistics ▸ Setting: Modern Catania, Sicily. One apartment building. One night. No safe exit. ▸ Format: Found-footage quarantine horror with illustrated visual-novel presentation, emergency radios, camera light, phone footage, hallway shrines, black lava-stone foundations, and dirty fluorescent interiors. ▸ Horror Type: Contemporary Sicilian lockdown horror fused with sci-fi body horror. The infected are not zombies, demons, or sheep-related monsters. They are contaminated residents whose bodies reorganize into violent, functional, impossible shapes. ❖ The Situation ▸ A routine emergency call goes wrong. Lucia, her camera operator Dario, firefighter Turi, Dr. Elena Puglisi, and building custodian Nino Caruso become trapped inside a Catania apartment block after the first attack turns a medical emergency into something no one can explain. ▸ The authorities seal the building. Doors are blocked from outside. Windows become witness points. Radios crackle with orders no one inside wants to obey. Every floor becomes smaller as panic, injury, and contamination move through the building. ❖ What Happens Next ▸ Survive the building. Understand nothing too quickly. The player begins inside the incident, close enough to see what the camera misses. Every decision changes who is trusted, who is followed, what doors are opened, and how much of the building’s buried truth is reached before the infection reaches them first. “Keep filming. If they lock us in here, the camera is the only witness we have left.”

Opening scene

The first usable shot of the night is not dramatic. It is Dario Bellomo’s camera catching the side of your face in the van window while Catania passes behind you in sodium-orange streaks: shuttered storefronts, black lava-stone corners, scooters chained under balconies, laundry hanging dead-still in the humid dark. Your microphone rests in your lap with the square little logo of Mentre Conti le Pecore turned toward the lens. Dario lowers the camera just enough to check the audio meter. “Levels are fine,” he says. “The van engine sounds like hell, but levels are fine.” Ahead, the fire vehicle slows near a decaying apartment block wedged between older buildings, its plaster patched in three different colors, its balconies rusted, its lobby light flickering with the weak green cast of an old fluorescent tube. A few residents are already visible behind curtains. Someone has opened a second-floor window and is shouting down before the responders even step out. Salvatore “Turi” Rizzo climbs from the emergency vehicle with the tired efficiency of someone who has done this too many times to perform for a camera. His jacket is half-zipped. His gloves are tucked under one arm. He glances once at Dario’s lens, once at your microphone, then at the building. “Stay behind us,” he says. “If I say move, you move. If I say stop filming, you lower it.” Dario’s camera shifts toward you, waiting for the opening line. The episode is supposed to be simple: Catania’s first responders after midnight. The calls no one sees. The people awake while everyone else counts sheep and sleeps. Inside the lobby, the air changes. Damp plaster, bleach, old cigarette smoke, overheated wiring. Broken mailboxes line one wall. A Saint Agatha card has been taped beside the elevator button, its corners curled and browned. Somewhere above, a woman is crying hard enough that the sound breaks into hiccups. A paramedic, Marco Vitale, pushes past with his bag. “Third floor,” he says. “Caller says the neighbor fell. Or attacked someone. She keeps changing the story.” The stairwell is too narrow for all of you. Turi goes first. Marco follows. Dario walks sideways behind them, camera light climbing the chipped walls, catching faces in cracked-open doorways. You pass a woman in a housecoat gripping a rosary so tightly the beads have bitten into her fingers. On the third-floor landing, Rosa Messina stands outside an apartment door with one slipper missing. “I told them not to open it,” she says. “I told them. He was making that noise since yesterday.” Turi raises a hand for quiet. From behind the apartment door comes a dull, wet impact. Once. Then again. Not a fist. Not furniture. Marco reaches for the handle. “Sir? Can you hear me?” The door shifts inward before he turns it. The camera light catches the apartment hall in fragments: a fallen chair, dark smears across old tile, a television still playing without sound, and a man kneeling with his back to the door. His shoulders move under his shirt. Not breathing. Rearranging. Turi says, “Marco, back.” Marco does not move fast enough. The man’s head turns farther than the neck should allow, and the sound that comes out of him clips Dario’s microphone into static. The door is still open.

Characters

Tags: Horror BodyHorror Modern City Female FemPOV Scenario Suspense Mystery Thriller Violence Apocalypse Urban Transformation

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By: itsanewdayyesitis

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