Theta

Read the screenplay (PDF) — Fourth draft, March 12, 2018; screenplay for the unfinished film.

When Jack finds out he's dying, there's only one thing he wants to knock off of his bucket list before he goes: killing his cheating ex. He enlists the help of his best friend, Karen, and the two set out on a murderous rampage. After a few coincidental mass murders, they become known as the “Theta” killers.

Theta opens on an old horror movie playing on TV, which slides into Jack Callaghan's nightmare about his ex Will and Will's new girlfriend Bridget. Jack wakes up on the couch of his best friend Karen Lawson, where he has been crashing for three months. Will, a straight man who was dating Jack, cheated on him with Bridget, a woman Jack knows, and the drama got Jack fired from his job. Jack notices a theta hanging on Karen's wall. Karen says it is left over from her sorority letters. Jack points out that it is also the ancient Greek symbol of death.

Jack finally tells Karen his other news. Doctors found a big brain tumor, and he has one month to live. Karen reads his bucket list and calls it lame, since it is things like sticking his head out of a sunroof and swimming with dolphins. She suggests something crazier, like robbing a bank, and says she will do anything to make his life feel like it had purpose. So Jack shows her his real list. Number one is to sleep with Justin Bieber. Number two is to kill Will and Bridget. Karen agrees to help. They start planning masks, weapons and even lighting, and decide they should practice on someone first.

Meanwhile, at the Delta Lambda Theta fraternity, pledge week is war. President Adam Holt, Troy Mercier and party captain Beaver put the pledges through hazing tests, including one built around a photo of a pledge's grandmother.

That night Karen has her boss Chuck Dempsey over for dinner, hoping for a raise and a job for Jack. Jack suggests killing Chuck for practice, and Karen says no. Chuck is rude and homophobic, pitches Jack a testicle hair removal product called Fresh Balls with a Z, calls Karen's chicken dry and fires her. Karen knocks him out. Jack had already slipped him tranquilizers in place of acid reflux medicine. When Chuck wakes up tied down, they torture him with an electric mixer, stab him and gut him as their practice kill. Jack calls his cousin Mud, a hillbilly whose family lives off the grid and who has always joked about getting rid of bodies. Mud and his inbred, creature-like assistant Bubbatooie haul Chuck away rolled in a carpet. A group of lost frat pledges out looking for beer sees them loading the body but decides not to get involved.

The sorority pledges of Omega Beta Theta are suffering through their own hazing. They plan to turn the tables on their sisters, and Olivia pepper sprays Spencer, one of the frat pledges who shows up wearing the robes the girls left behind. The frat pledges sleep outside on garbage bags and get an army workout the next morning. Jack has another nightmare, this one a three-way with Will and Bridget. Jack and Karen spend thousands of dollars on murder supplies, get through a costume montage and put the theta symbol on their black outfits to match their masks. Bubbatooie develops a crush on Jack.

For a second practice kill they pick the first girl they see, a tiny girl walking home, and come back to her house that night. Karen lets Jack stab her first. The girl is Maria, and the house turns out to be a sorority house. With everyone screaming, they kill the whole house. During the massacre Jack spares a sorority sister named Grace and brings her in as a third killer. Karen is furious that they left her behind while they talked to Grace. She tells Jack the killing has become too real. She will still help kill Will and Bridget, but she is not sure about anyone else. The next morning the news reports that five sorority pledges were found handcuffed to chairs and killed with a chainsaw, with blood from as many as nine more missing victims. A drawing of the theta symbol was left at the scene, and police name the killers the Theta Killers.

At the frat house the pledges face a final test: kill a bound pledge named Bryce within an hour. Tripp is the only one who pulls the trigger. The gun is loaded with blanks, so Tripp is kicked out and Spencer, Jarrod and Cody become brothers. Mud and Bubbatooie sell body parts by the road and make plans to borrow a bread truck to pick up the bodies they left behind. That night the frat throws the party of the year. Karen agrees to one last mass murder, and Jack, Karen and Grace walk in wearing their masks and turn it into a massacre. When Troy is killed, his macho best friend Adam cries out that he loved him. Adam fights back and kills Grace, and Jack slits his throat. Karen gets the wounded Jack out.

Back home, Karen says she does not know if she can handle another killing. Mud calls to say he was arrested at the scene, but police found Grace dead in her Theta costume and pinned every murder on her, so he is being let go. They decide to kill Will and Bridget while they still have someone else to pin it on. Wearing the costumes, they call Bridget to scare her and break in. Bridget kicks and fights until Jack unmasks. They trade insults about the past, and Jack kills her. Will walks in. Bridget was his fiancee, and he calls her his wifey, the nickname he used to call Jack. He says he regrets ever being with Jack. Karen has been knocked out and Will is twice Jack's size, but Jack kills him anyway. Two police officers catch them, and the officers are killed too. Then they use the police radio to report that the shooters were Will Townsend and Bridget Kepner, connected to the Theta Killers by the same mask.

The last scene takes place on a beach after Jack and Karen have fled the country on Chuck's credit cards. Justin Bieber is dead. Karen admits she asked him to sleep with Jack, and when he politely said no, she beat him to death with his own headset microphone. A letter from Jack's doctor arrives. He never had a tumor. Someone's lunch was left on the x-ray machine. One of them mentions a spell they did not need to do after all and apologizes to Mr. Whiskers. Then one more note arrives, telling them someone knows who they are and what they did. So You're Beautiful in Death plays over the end.

Because the film was never finished, the released rough cut fills in the scenes that were never shot with the script. Parts of the sorority storyline play as script instead of footage.

Release & Reception

• Status: Released. The film was never finished. Production shut down June 29, 2018, and the final rough cut of everything filmed was released.

StabMovies.com posted cast interviews on September 26, 2017. The teaser trailer came out March 2, 2018 and called Theta a horror comedy. A new poster featuring some of the cast came out March 3, 2018, and a teaser set to So You're Beautiful in Death came out May 22, 2018.

After the shutdown, StabMovies.com promised to release everything filmed, as it had with both versions of Stab 7. On August 29, 2018 it said computer issues were holding up the rough cut and Swipe Left. On October 10, 2018 it posted 18 rough cut scenes in a YouTube playlist. The final rough cut of the whole film went up April 10, 2019.

In Behind the Mask, Arnold said some people were upset that Theta was a completely different story instead of a Stab movie, even though it looks and feels like one, with many of the same actors. Dudley pointed out it has the same kind of mass killers and some of the same weapons. Cast members were upset that the film was never finished, and Dudley said a big rewrite and new version could happen someday.

Cast

Crew

Production

Joshua Patrick Dudley wrote Theta after a breakup. He was dating a man who considered himself straight, who cheated on him with a woman and chose her. Dudley said he wrote a movie about killing them as therapy. The working title was Wifey, the nickname that ex gave him. On February 17, 2017 StabMovies.com posted that Wifey was now Theta. Jack and Karen are named after the characters from Will and Grace, the nicknames Dudley and Rachel Alexandria Arnold use for each other.

The first version of the script was mostly about Jack and Karen and a few random victims. Dudley expanded it into four storylines: Jack and Karen, the fraternity, the sorority, and Mud and Bubbatooie. He called it the first StabMovies.com original full-length film. It was also the first film where Arnold was credited as co-director. Dudley said the script was one of his favorite things he had written because it was completely original.

The Theta logo video went up August 6, 2017. Cast promo shoots started August 10, 2017, the site posted a call for extras on August 23, and StabMovies.com announced on September 1, 2017 that filming had started. On October 1, 2017 the site said a release around Christmas 2017 was possible. The same day, its post announcing that Stab 7 was shut down again told fans to check out Theta. Dudley and Arnold shot as many of their own scenes together as they could first, starting with the opening, which took at least one full night. Then came smaller scenes and the fraternity scenes.

The fraternity scenes were shot over a weekend at Tina's house. Tina also helped find party extras. Dudley said the cast came from Connecticut, New York, Boston, Maryland and beyond, and Arnold said many stayed at Dudley's house or in hotels. Arnold shopped and cooked for the whole cast. She also directed and filmed scenes on her own, including the frat test scene, while Dudley worked on the next setup. The party massacre was meant to have more extras, but it got too hot, loud and crowded to be safe, so the same extras run past the camera more than once. StabMovies.com had a rule that nobody could show up to set drunk, but some party extras arrived drinking. One fell hard in a hallway, and Dudley kept the shot.

On December 31, 2017 StabMovies.com said Theta was on hiatus until after winter because of lost actors and locations. On May 29, 2018 it said filming would resume in June. For the sorority scenes the production rented a big house in Western Massachusetts. Arnold said it took about six months just to agree on a date. A day or two before, actresses quit. Ashley Younger promised to bring replacements and then could not be reached. The actress playing the sorority president quit, and her replacement never came. Imad Jbara got stuck in New York. Of about 14 people due that weekend, Nicole Linton said four showed up. The four made the short Swipe Left there instead.

StabMovies.com shut Theta down permanently on June 29, 2018. The post said almost 30 actors had quit and over $5,000 was lost because actors did not show up. In Behind the Mask, Arnold put the number of lost actors at over 25 and said Ashley Younger was ultimately the reason the film shut down. Dudley said it was the third film in a row to be shut down, and it put all of StabMovies.com on pause. Most of Jack and Karen's scenes and every fraternity house scene were finished. Mud and Bubbatooie's scenes were about half done, and nothing with the sorority sisters was shot except one scene of three of them visiting the frat house. After it shut down, Dudley said future contracts would make actors responsible for filming days they cause to be cancelled, except in emergencies.

After watching the first cut, Dudley and Arnold felt the opening took too long. Dudley rewrote it so that Karen comes home to find Jack sacrificing a cat in a ritual from an old book, hoping the theta symbol can save his life. The rewrite is in the final script, but it was never filmed.

Theta was billed as the first full-length, original StabMovies.com horror comedy. Joshua Patrick Dudley wrote it, directed it with Rachel Alexandria Arnold, and the two were the executive producers. The Behind the Mask making-of for Theta has interviews with Dudley, Arnold, Mark Haggett, Dave Allen, Nicole Linton and Corey Dudley.

Filming locations

• Tina's house: The Delta Lambda Theta fraternity house, including the party massacre
• Manchester, New Hampshire: Moving Chuck's fake body wrapped in a carpet down the stairs of an apartment building
• Roadside: Mud and Bubbatooie selling teeth and body parts in jars
• Rented house in Western Massachusetts: Planned sorority house scenes that were never shot. Swipe Left was filmed there instead.

Effects and makeup

The Wiki credits Daniel Bucciano with special effects makeup.

Dudley said the costumes and effects were better than in any earlier StabMovies.com film, even without new camera gear. There was early talk of getting a real chainsaw with no chain, but they used a fake one. Arnold was glad, since she played the scene recklessly.

The fake body used for Chuck, called Pork Chop, was dropped so many times while being carried down the stairs that it lost limbs. A neighbor across the street saw it and yelled that it better be fake.

Corey Dudley said the roadside scene, where Mud and Bubbatooie sell teeth and body parts in jars, drew real people who stopped to see what was going on. Lighting it meant running power from a car.

For Mud, Corey Dudley was covered in black paint to look dirty and used food coloring to make his teeth look rotten.

During the party massacre Dudley swung a real knife at Mark Haggett for the shine of it and nicked his neck. Dudley and Arnold say the mark was tiny and barely there. Haggett was angry and nearly quit, but finished the scene. The wide shot of Adam's throat being slit in the film is that same take, with a digital scream added.

Props and costumes

The Theta Killers wear black outfits with Theta sweatshirts and masks, with the theta symbol colored to match their masks. Arnold said it was hard to see through the mask and hot in the hoodie.

A cat puppet was made for a Theta scene that was never filmed. Dudley kept it in his loft for years and finally used it in Stab 2.

The killers

Deaths

Joshua Patrick Dudley was the music supervisor.

Scott Plante, described by StabMovies.com as a friend and credited in the cast as the Skull Killer, performs So You're Beautiful in Death. It was used in a May 2018 teaser and plays over the end of the rough cut.

• Theta eBook, Lulu, November 10, 2019.

STABFLIX

Watch the film

Bonus features and videos

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Joshua Patrick Dudley on Theta

StabMovies.com

The full uncut interview with the writer and director about this film.

Playlists

• The bonus features playlist

Gallery

Pictures