You Have to Go Inside

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Warning... This article may contain spoilers. Read at your own risk.

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Nick Antosca ... (television story by)

Kris Straub ... (based on the story by)

"You Have to Go Inside" is the pilot episode of *Channel Zero*, as well as the first episode of the first season, which was based on the creepypasta *Candle Cove*. It premiered at 9 PM on Tuesday, October 11, 2016.

## Summary

Between September and October of 1988, five children from the town of Iron Hill, Ohio, disappeared. Four of the five children were found several months later, dead.

28 years later, in a TV interview promoting his new book, child psychologist Mike Painter reveals that his twin brother, Eddie, was the one who was killed and never found, back when they were twelve. Mike leaves his home in New York to return to visit his estranged mother, Marla, who still lives in Iron Hill, so he can find closure for his brother's death.

When he first returns to his old home, Mike surprises his mother. There, he meets a girl named Katie, one of Marla's piano students.

Mike visits the sheriff's department to look through the case files from the 1988, only to discover his childhood friend, Gary Yolen, is the current sheriff. Mike asks for the files under the pretense of writing another new book, one about the 1988 murders, and Gary agrees to let his old friend see them under the condition that Mike go to Gary's house for dinner that night, since Gary's starting to worry about the mental health of his kids.

At dinner, Mike talks to Gary's daughter, the girl Katie from earlier, who had just been watching a TV show called *Candle Cove*. Mike finds this odd, because the last time the show aired was for only a few months in 1988... right around the time of the five murders. Mike returns to the dinner to discuss the show with Gary; the sheriff's wife, Jessica; deputies Amy Welch and Tim Hazel; and friend Daphne Bell.

They start remembering how disturbing *Candle Cove* was: The main puppet, Pirate Percy, who was terrified of everything. The talking ship, the *Laughingstock*. The mustachioed, hook-handed, monocle-eyed, long-toothed Horace Horrible. The villainous, skeletal pirate Jawbone, who would take children's skin. Jessica even remembers that in dreams, Jawbone was called the Skin Taker. The most terrifying episode to all except Amy, who was too young to remember the show, was the one where all the characters were screaming for seemingly no reason.

The conversation starts to freak Mike out, who storms out of the dinner, somewhat drunk. He wanders around the edge of town before returning to his childhood home. Marla wakes up to hear him arrive home... right as static begins playing on a TV that switched itself on. Mike gets out of bed to see a life-sized version of Jawbone.

The next morning, Marla talks to Mike about him coming home so late. Mike told her that his old sleepwalking habit from childhood must've started up again, and Marla remembered that Eddie's sleepwalking problem was worse. Mike is unable to finish breakfast, so he leaves the house.

Meanwhile, Jessica goes to wake Katie up for breakfast, only to find she's not in her room, or anywhere in the house, for that matter.

Mike gets a new breakfast at the local diner where Daphne works, where he meets his old sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Frances Booth. She reviews verb tenses with him, indicating that something in the past continues to the present.

Jessica finds Mike at the diner and asks him to help her, Gary, and Deputies Tim and Amy in a search party to find the missing girl. That afternoon, the search moves to an area on the edge of the local woods where Mike and Eddie would play.

When confronted by Tim about his departure from dinner the previous night, Mike can't account for the time he spent between he'd left the party around 11:00 and when Marla had said he'd gotten home... at 3 AM. Jessica takes Mike aside, asking him why he's acting so oddly. Mike confesses that he thinks Katie's disappearance is related to the return of *Candle Cove*, and how the show just so happened to air during the 1988 child disappearances, only to stop airing after the original disappearances stopped.

Jessica then asks about events just prior to Mike's return to Iron Hill. It turns out that three days before his arrival in Ohio, Mike had just left a psychiatric hospital, after checking himself in following a nervous breakdown, where he'd carved something into his arm.

Understandably, Jessica grows suspicious about both the supposed connection to *Candle Cove* and about Mike's seemingly deteriorating mental state.

Mike stops by the Yolen home to talk to Gary and Jessica's son, Dane. Mike asks Dane if he knows where his younger sister went, to which Dane responds with, "What's the Crow's Nest?" and that the TV told her to go there. Mike runs back home to search a closet for his father's old gun. Marla tells him that she'd gotten rid of the gun years earlier.

Mike instead arms himself with a knife and runs deeper into the woods. After passing a sign for the Crow's Nest, Mike comes across someone dressed as a skeleton, complete with a skull mask, a cloak, and a meat hook. He hesitates before confronting the skeleton, only to have the skeleton run off.

Mike follows the skeleton through the woods to the Crow's Nest, an area on the far side of the forest, just on the edge of a disused rock quarry (the same one where the missing children had been discovered dead decades earlier). There, he finds Katie hiding in a set of boulders. Mike returns the girl to her family. As the two leave, a creature slips out from the rocks. The child-sized person takes a pair of teeth that Katie had left behind for it... presumably to add them to its tooth-covered body.

After spending the night in a cell in the small jail adjoining the sheriff's department, Gary asks Mike about how Katie was found the evening before. Gary's as suspicious as Jessica was about how Katie had watched the old puppet show *Candle Cove*, and how it had told her to go to the Crow's Nest. Mike lies and says he just went out to a place he'd visit with Eddie to think and stumbled across Katie there. Gary isn't as happy as Mike would think that his daughter is safe, due to her two missing teeth.

As he has no physical evidence to continue holding Mike as a person of interest in Katie's disappearance, Gary reluctantly releases his friend. While checking out at the front desk of the sheriff's department, Mike notices a familiar jacket hanging from the office chair of one of the deputies... only to watch Tim put it on, thus realizing that it was Tim who Mike had seen wandering around the woods outside his childhood home the morning after he'd arrived. Jessica stops Mike as he exits the building. She's still confused as to why he's in town. Mike reveals to her that he's not actually working on a book about what happened in 1988.

That afternoon, Mike puts medicine on his scars, and it's revealed that what he'd been carving into his arm was "MIKE COME HOME." Marla comes in to find that Mike is in the process of packing up to go back home to his family in New York. She offers to let him stay longer, but he refuses.

Mike asks his mother if she remembers the old *Candle Cove* puppet show, and she says she does. He follows this up by asking if the show kept airing after she'd sent him to live with relatives after the murders. Marla is confused by the conversation, and Mike tries to brush the whole thing off. Marla hesitates before asking which twin made up the show. Mike is now the one to become confused, and Marla reveals that while Mike and Eddie were watching *Candle Cove*, she'd used to see the two of them watching a static-filled TV, thus implying that, though Marla thinks her sons made the show up, only children were able to watch the show.

That night, more children throughout Iron Hill watch the return of the *Candle Cove* show. Meanwhile, Mike stays in a motel somewhere on the road home, unable to sleep. His cell phone begins to ring. On the other end, his brother, Eddie, asks, "Mike, where are you going? We're just getting started again."

## Cast

* Paul Schneider as Mike Painter
* Fiona Shaw as Marla Painter
* Luisa D'Oliviera as Amy Welch
* Natalie Brown as Jessica Yolen
* Shaun Benson as Gary Yolen
* Luca Villacis as Eddie Painter and Young Mike Painter
* Abigail Pniowsky as Lily Painter
* Marina Stephenson Kerr as Frances Booth
* Katia Raquel Leon as Katie Yolen
* Liam Marchant as Dane Yolen
* Kristen Harris as Erica Painter
* David Brown as Tim Hazel
* Gwendolyn Collins as Daphne Bell
* Cassandra Consiglio as the Tooth Child
* Mackenzie Wojcik as Gene Hazel
* Annika Elyse Irving as Sadie Williams
* Greyden Bohotchuk as Young Gary Yolen
* Oscar William Brown as Young Tim Hazel
* Dan Duran as the Interviewer
* Fred Stinson and Rob Mills as the Life Size Puppet Jawbone and the Life Size Puppet Horace Horrible
* Olivier De Sagazan as The Skin Taker
* Carl Hodgkinson as Carl Cutter
* Bronagh Waugh as Young Marla Painter

## References

1. ↑ http://www.syfy.com/episodes/season/episode/1/you-have-to-go-inside
2. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5833684/fullcredits?ref\_=tt\_cl\_sm#cast