Shallow Ground is a 2004 horror film written and directed by Sheldon Wilson and starring Timothy V. Murphy, Stan Kirsch, Lindsey Stoddart, Patty McCormack, and Rocky Marquette. A naked teenage boy (Rocky Marquette) appears at a soon-to-be abandoned sheriff's station, drenched in blood, on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of a local girl that remains unsolved. Sheriff Jack Shepherd (Timothy V. Murphy) searches for the boy's true identity and intentions, while dealing with his guilt over failing to save the girl and solve her disappearance. Plot summary The residents of the small town of Shallow Valley are preparing to leave as the looming mystery of several disappearances the past year has left nothing but a sense of dread. While packing up the sheriff's station, Deputies Laura Russell and Stuart Dempsey are horrified by the sight of a naked teenage boy, covered head-to-toe in blood. The boy wanders through the station to the holding cells, tasting the blood of the local drunk named Harvey. As the boy is restrained, Laura notices that at some point, he covered the faces of several specific people in photographs with his bloodied fingertips. Under pressure and riddled with guilt over the unsolved disappearances, Sheriff Jack Shepherd assumes the bloody boy to be behind it all and sets out into the woods to investigate where he came from. Tracking the boy's bloody footprints, Jack is horrified as the path leads to the same location that he last saw family friend Amy Underhill. A year earlier, Amy was abducted and Jack found her chained to a tree in the woods. Believing that the culprit was still nearby, Jack freed Amy and left her for just a moment... only to find her gone when he returned. Making contact with dripping blood, Jack relives this moment and experiences the deaths of each person that went missing at the hands of a hooded individual, with him and the bloody boy both convulsing and puking as a result. Elsewhere, Vet Darby Owens says goodbye to family friend Helen Reedy. Over a year earlier, Helen’s husband and daughter were killed in an accident during construction of the town dam. Since Helen’s daughter was close to Darby, she asks the girl to stay for at least the rest of the day to soothe her loneliness until family arrive for dinner. Darby declines, as she intends to leave town as well before the