Hinkley's Manor

Hinkley's Manor's creation in January 2016 was the culmination of multiple interests that Sean had developed over the course of 2015. To truly understand its backstory, we need to go back about a year. As an eighth grader in the spring of 2015, Sean's English class had covered Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This coincided with the original production period of Maguire's Doctor Who series, so creative writing was at a high-point. Poe's work planted the seed in Sean's mind that would be nurtured by other events as the year progressed.

In August 2015, Sean, Maguire, and former member Garrett made a series of videos called Metro, based on the game franchise. Unlike the scripted Doctor Who, these videos were entirely improvised. The videos were incredibly fun to make, although Maguire made the decision not to release them in the long term. That same month, Sean discovered the Five Night's at Freddy's franchise, and watched a lot of media surrounding it, which further developed the love of the genre that was necessary, but we weren't quite there yet.

One afternoon around this time, Sean's father showed him a few episodes of the 1960s incarnation of The Twilight Zone, and additionally, he also found and started to listen to creepypastas, short Internet horror stories, and found that some of them were very well-made. He particularly fell in love with The Stairs and the Doorway.

When school resumed, the works of Edgar Allan Poe returned to the forefront, which further cemented the grasp of horror in Sean's mind. However, during this class, he read a non-horror book that was written in the style of a script, something he'd never encountered before (he never has been a voracious fiction reader). The way this was written made him start to think about writing a story himself.

Then, a particularly important video series was produced. In December 2015, the two episodes of Conspiracies with Nate were produced, and these two videos were quite unique: both were filmed in such a manner to make them have a highly mysterious atmosphere, with very little light and dark filters placed over the final video to further reduce the light levels. These videos were overlayed with the horror track Ice Demon by Kevin MacLeod, and upon viewing the first episode, the love of story was further developed. On Christmas Day, Sean constructed his first proper gaming PC, and finally, all the things were in place to write and film a horror movie in-game.

The switch in Sean's head was finally flipped on February 7, 2016. That day, Sean wrote the base story for what would become Hinkley's Manor. The original story has some of the base plot points of the early story as well as one of the original climactic points. However, this initial draft was not only viewed as being too short, it also contained a significant problem: it had too many clichés in it. These points were redeveloped as the decision was made to expand the story into something significantly longer.

The name Hinkley's Manor didn't emerge until around mid-March, when the initial draft was being reworked and expanded. Much later on in 2016, Nate and Jason both made their own contributions to the first draft, and Nathan, who along with Sean was set to be in the story as one of the two main characters, wrote some of his own lines and ideas in. Sean's father also came up with a portion of the story. In late 2016, the Nosiphus crew also began constructing the set that will be used to film said video.

However, various events, as well as just the general passing of time, placed Hinkley's Manor's development on hiatus, mostly because Sean couldn't decide exactly how he wanted to wrap up and end the story. Sean decided to rewrite the script from scratch a couple of times to improve the dialogue, as his writing style has changed quite a bit since 2016. A novelization also came into existence.

That being said, Hinkley's Manor is not cancelled. Its development will continue, and we hope to see it being filmed and published, even if it takes quite a while before it happens.