DIRECTOR COMMENTARY

CONCEPT

In the wake of the David F. Sandberg shorts, most notably LIGHTS OUT, there seems to be a kind formula for horror short films on Youtube— Two minutes in a dark room and something loud happens at the end— Not necessarily scary, just loud.

Kind of in response to this, I wanted to write something that is so full of tension and build-up that it doesn't need to rely on a loud noise or jump scare at the end to be successful. I wanted to write something that was within this 2 minute forward but where the SUSPENSE was just as important as the pay-off, if not more important. Where SUSPENSE was the driving force and that we didn't use a jumpscare or noise scare as a petty crutch.

Part of the challenge was to imbue the main character with a sense of psychology, decision-making, and at least an emotional arc, if not a character arc. We think of this short as a kind of conversation— The camera acting almost as a VOLLEY between the subject and the door as information is transferred back and forth.

Each volley, so to speak, ratchets up the tension just a little bit more, forcing our lead to make decisions and efforts to increase her standing, only for them to be cut down by the "OTHER" systematically, one-by-one.

—For example, she eventually wakes up her boyfriend, but he can't see, so she has to fend for herself.

—She looks to the baseball bat, but the door cracks open, making her more vulnerable, kind of forcing her to stay put.

—She claims to have a gun, but the door opens further, exposing her being unarmed, for bluffing.

—And then the only thing she has left is to beg. And scream.

As you can see, as much as possible given the self-imposed restraints, I wanted her to be thinking and problem-solving. I wanted her, basically, to TRY. Not only does this fuel the suspense and build-up, but it also makes her end more tragic in a way, in that she had a kind of drive and wasn't just a sitting duck or lamb for slaughter.

As far as where this came from, I think the seeds of this short can be traced back to primal childhood fear and images. For one thing, as a child, I remember watching the shadows at the bottom of my bedroom door every night before falling asleep. And I remember listening very closely for footsteps at night, and I remember hearing creaks and being certain that there was something or someone in the dark slowly creeping up on me.

I also remember being stricken by the book cover of THE TOMMYKNOCKERS by Stephen King in my elementary school library. To this day I have never seen the series or read the book, but that image has certainly been stuck in my mind over the years.

I also remember reading THE TELL-TALE HEART in school and being unnerved by how the murderer would enter his neighbor's apartment by very slowly and incrementally opening his door, which has obvious influence on this short just the same.

Needless to say, the OG NOSFERATU was a huge influence on this short as well. Not only does our creature embody a kind of skulking vampiric posture and creepiness, but it dawned on my long after shooting that we are definitely riffing on the artificial, monochrome colorations of the film with our amber yellow and green, although we lean further into a neon as opposed to NOSFERATU's teal...

CINEMATOGRAPHY

I am generally pretty camera and lens agnostic and want to start with ALL options on the table and to whittle them down from there to the single best and ONLY choice for the story at hand. But in this case, the ALEXA 35 was an easy choice— We wanted to capture a clean, modern image and to degrade it from there, and it seemed that the ALEXA 35 gave us the best color representation and dynamic range for dialing in the exposure based on the unique needs of the short and making sure the shots best transact with one another. I am a big fan of the 35mm equivalent sensor and am a little bit of a skeptic when it comes to large format cinematography. I think a lot of filmmakers insist upon larger formats because that's what Christopher Nolan does and because they think higher resolution automatically means better movie, which is certainly not the case.

As far as lensing goes, it was an easy and immediate choice to remove anamorphic lenses from the conversation— I like anamorphic lenses, but ONLY when they are used correctly and with intention. I think a lot of filmmakers these days are a little trigger happy with anamorphic lenses because they are "cool" and "cinematic," but I try never to make creative decisions on those criteria alone. It is very important to me to connect every technical choice back to character, theme, and emotion. That is like a thesis of mine as a filmmaker. And especially for genre filmmaking, I think anamorphic lenses can be a very wrong choice as the longer focal lengths required—and therefore that added compression to the image—can erode the sense of space and dimensionality of the scene. Anamorphic lenses can feel more objective and presentational sometimes, while spherical lenses can sometimes better capture the space and world AROUND you, and this is especially important with horror films, where the kind of z-depth and sense of moving THROUGH space are so essential. Moreover, in that the DOOR in the film is conceivably an 8 ft tall character, a squarish aspect ratio was the only acceptable choice, further disqualifying wide-screen anamorphic aspect.

After reviewing over 3,000 reels in searching for a DP for the film, Austin Straub was the standout choice. In studying Austin's prior work and kind of cracking open his methodology, I realized that because of his background in documentary filmmaking, he mostly shoots with zoom lenses as opposed to primes in order to make swift, in-the-monent focal length adjustments, and I think this choice is what sets his work apart and gives it just the slightest edge over his peers. I THINK that the extra glass elements in the zoom lenses takes off just enough of the clinical digital edge of the image and gives his work the best combination of clean and modern—while still filmic—as opposed to the kind of TV/video look we see in a lot of short films, much less feature films. So even though we have absolutely zero ZOOM mechanisms in this short, we shot the entire thing on zoom lenses. This is actually the methodology of the cinematographer Claudio Miranda, we learned, who is the go-to DP for Joseph Kosinki. We considered all options, but we decided to stick with the ARRI DNA ZOOMs, for ergonomics purposes, based on how we needed to move the camera.

As far as focal length goes, we intentionally stayed on the far wide end of the spectrum. I am of the opinion that wide angle cinematography is a bit of a dying art form and that more and more films feel presentational and like you are watching characters on a flat screen, which is not my taste. With this short, we wanted to DECOMPRESS the space as much as possible— We wanted to put you INSIDE the room as opposed to just show you what is happening inside of it. We wanted to give you the best sense of moving through space.

On that note, I was over the moon when Austin sourced and suggested the 8mmR wide lens that we used for a few key shots in the film, as well as for the centerpiece EVIL DEAD-looking shot of the camera rushing up to our lead that we call the "Raimi Shot." An exception to the zoom lens-only rule. This prime lens was actually created for architecture photography and is unique for its rectilinearity IN SPITE OF its width, whereas any other unspecialized lenses in this range would have that obtuse, fisheye, Yorgos Lanthimos look, which would be too distracting in this use case and inconsistent from the rest of the film.

For the vast majority of coverage of our characters we landed on the magic number of 16mm. It was expected that we would land somewhere in the 12-18mm range for these shots, and we tested each millimeter one-by-one. As soon as we landed on 16, everything just clicked into place and came alive in a weird way, and we knew that it was the one and only choice. There's that David Fincher quote that there are two ways to shoot a scene, and the other way is wrong, and I think this mantra applies not just to where you put the camera but to each and every single technical decision you can make as well.

Of course, for the last few shots of our subjects, we strategically diverge from the rules we set in place, ramping up to longer and longer focal lengths in quick succession for dramatic effect. In this quick final sequence of shots of Grace, we DOUBLE the focal lengths each time— 45 to 90 to even 180mm. As her fate is sealed, we tighten the frame on her more and more, kind of boxing her in and trapping her in the frame, stripping away her breathing room and therefore her agency. The framing works in tandem with the ramping up of the compression— Her world gets smaller and smaller around her, like her back is more and more against the wall, like the walls are closing in on her. As I've said, it is very important to me that the focal length and technical choices have an arc and tell a story in themselves.

For these last key shots, we captured everything with a locked-off camera and added the camera shake in post. This was in order to give us the most latitude to be able to art direct the amount of camera shake to our liking and to be able to ramp up the shake in equal increments across the final sequence of the shot. This echoes the Fincher/Messerschmidt approach to camera shake on the film THE KILLER, where you shoot locked off to enable you to ART DIRECT the camera shake in post, as Messershmidt says that it is very hard to judge the camera shake on set and to make it consistent. We agree. The shake we add to these last shots was meant to juxtapose with the eerie smoothness and stillness of the shots of the DOOR and the creature— A way of stripping our lead of all of her stability and control and giving it all to the "OTHER."

And finally, as far as camera movement goes, we wanted to create a feeling of almost a conversation between Grace and the Door (or what's behind the door). I think you get a sense that the camera acts as a kind of volley between the two— The camera is very much tied, subjectively, to Grace and her experience, but in some ways the camera represents INFORMATION, like when the feet appear under the door and the camera RUSHES right up to Grace, as she processes and is like overwhelmed by her dire, immediate stakes. I wanted to very careful that each movement has MOTIVATION— The quick pans and cuts, as you see, are tied to Grace and her movements, sometimes cutting on action to hopefully create a feeling of seamlessness. Meanwhile, the slow dollies to the door were motivated by Grace's focus and attention, kind of zeroing in on the door and her invader...

PERFORMANCE

What is interesting is that while I reviewed over 3,000 DP reels and over 9,000 locations for the short, Grace Kaufman was the one and only choice for the lead role. I was struck by her performance in the thriller RESURRECTION, where she played the daughter of Rebecca Hall's character and more than held her own. What I love most about Grace as a performer can be summed up in one word— Presentness. She has a sense of presence and subtlety that I have almost never seen in a talent her age. I feel like Grace has a kind of focus and clean slate that allows her to find her place in the world of the scene and think the character's thoughts. Easier said than done.

Given the relative intimacy of the shoot, it was important to cast someone that Grace knew and was comfortable with, and Cullen was at the very top of the list. Cullen is a generous performer, and it is definitely a selfless role. I definitely did not give him the easiest dialogue, but I feel like he found such an interesting balance between whiny and annoyed for being woken up that I find kind of hilarious.

I feel like a lot of talent these days feel the need play to the back row, but for this short, especially with our up-close and personal gaze, a little bit goes a long way. So a lot of what we talked about was how many of the technical and camera choices of the film and the soundscape work IN TANDEM WITH and INFORMS the performance, hence a less is more kind of approach. For example, I see a lot of horror films where the subject starts breathing and panting really heavily which ends up feeling kind of performative and unrealistic and like a crutch. I think when we are afraid it is more that we TENSE and kind of SEETHE, like it's an internal thing. So I tried to coach Grace and Cullen to funnel all of the emotion into their eyes as much as possible.

Acting in horror films requires a high degree of technicality, even with a character sitting in a bed, there is a surprising amount of choreography with how in sync Grace's movements needed to be with the camera. It was very much a dance, and I have a lot of gratitude for Grace and Cullen for their endurance and flexibility across so many takes. They worked their tails off for this short.

Just like sneezing or playing drunk, I think it is a bit of an underrated challenge to play tired. You see in films how people will kind of snap awake and jump out of bed, and it was important to me that Grace tap into that kind of dazed, half-awake/half-asleep headspace at least in the first few shots of the short. As such, I did my best to create an atmosphere that was conducive to being able to accurately play tired, and I suppose it was successful because Cullen literally fell asleep in the bed when we were shooting Grace's first few close ups.

I am not sure if she used it on the day or just leading up to the short, but because I really wanted her to believably play groggy and tired, I got Grace this biotech device called Pulsetto, which is a kind of collar that stimulates your vagus nerve by way of electric shock. This activates one's parasympathetic nervous system and induces a sense of calm and relaxation. There are a lot of use cases for this device from combating panic attacks to aiding meditation to even preventing the yips on the golf course. And I guess now film acting.

VISUAL EFFECTS

As far as the VFX component goes, I think modern extraterrestrial designs in media have gotten way too busy and overcomplicated. From THE TOMORROW WAR to A QUIET PLACE to even movies like THE BOOGEYMAN by Rob Savage, I feel like too many creatures in film end up looking like the CLOVERFIELD monster, just with varying degrees of spikiness and drool.

I have always been fond of that classic, lanky, gray silhouette and this was an opportunity to throw it back and kind of scratch that itch a little bit.

In designing the creature, we took notes from Cycladic figures from Ancient Greece as well as the bronze sculpture work of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, especially his piece "Large Standing Woman IV," which I stumbled upon at the LACMA in LA. Jean-Paul Sartre of all people said that Giacometti's work "identifies the attenuated forms and isolated figures as embodying human anxieties and alienation." Which I think is quite fitting.

We used a marketplace CG asset as a base, and the one-of-a-kind Japanese creature artist EFU lent his magic touch to further elongate this creature's neck and fingers and to create and refine a more of a spindly NOSFERATU-like silhouette. Efu also had the genius idea to create undertones of GREEN beneath the creature's gray skin, as if it has a green skeletal structure or muscular system underneath its pasty skin, which felt inspired and unique and even helped the shadows roll off into darkness even better than expected. Little things like this make a huge difference in a CG creature— Else it would have been just a notch flatter and less dynamic, even for its brief appearance.

French CG artist Julien Chiari carried us home and helped to best comp and bake the alien into the darkness and the world of the scene. The short film PORTRAIT OF GOD was a good reference for this. It took several iterations to calibrate the exposure level for the final reveal shot, as we calibrated for the people who will inevitably watch during the daytime on their cellphones, while still honoring the proper viewing experience— At night, in complete darkness. I got some great notes from my beta audience on this, so thank you. In the end, we applied some final grace notes, like cheating the defocus level of the alien's HAND in order to deemphasize it just a smidge so as not to take eyes away from the face and torso and creature at large.

Hopefully you did not think about it, but the silhouette passing by and casting a shadow in the room in the opening shot was achieved with visual effects as well. We had originally planned to shoot this practically, but we realized on the day that the bedroom window was actually too high to capture a good enough silhouette. In lieu of taking the time to build some kind of platform, we decided to solve in post so we could maintain a good clip on set. We were lucky to have Strange Dave on board to provide motion capture and reference photography for the CG alien— Strange Dave is a kind of creature performer extraordinaire, with his towering figure and ghoulish physique. He is basically the Doug Jones or Javier Botet of horror short films, and you've probably seen him in THE ARMOIRE or THE SMILING MAN. One of my favorite parts of the shoot was kind of unleashing him in his black morphsuit and shooting him doing all kinds of creepy walks and movements back and forth, which informed the final CG. Aside from NOSFERATU, of course, a key reference for Strange Dave was the infamous Brazilian birthday scene from SIGNS— We wanted to achieve a gait that was very lanky and uncanny as much as possible, kind of swooping and otherworldly like the scene SIGNS. We could have eradicated it easily, but I grew to love the slight jaggedness of the alien’s movement, as if some Ray Harryhausen thing from deep space.

We leaned into this in post in order to push it further and in small ways to push it beyond what it possible with the human body alone— We talked a lot about how to further elongate the strides and give the alien more of a GLIDE about it as it glazes past the window outside. While the early versions of the shot were sound, acceptable, and realistic, I was interested in the idea that the footsteps and weight transfer of such a spindly and lightweight figure would be much less than those of an ordinary person. A slippery slope with CG is that certain assets or characters can feel weightless and without proportional gravity and contact or impact, but this was a unique situaton in that this uncanny feeling helped our cause and our creature. We also did some work to elongate the stride, so that the creature was using a fuller range of motion, as opposed to taking human-sized steps, which would be closer to baby-steps for its unique and towering physique. I hope this underscores the uncanny and otherwordly feeling in a small way.

Another key reference—both for Strange Dave and for us in post—was the original Patterson-Gimlen Bigfoot footage. I was really drawn to the kind of long swooping arms and the kind of stillness of the torso of this figure as it lumbers along. I think the reason why this is the gold standard for Bigfoot footage is that it does have a weird, inhuman, uncanny quality about it, much more than some of its competitors, so to speak, that are more easily debunked and written off.

All in all, I thought Julien and Efu did a great job, and a special thanks to Zach Miller for helping us kind of forensically smoothen out a handful of camera operations, which were probably totally negligible and that no one would have noticed but me.

SOUND & MUSIC

We had some very clear north stars, but it took some effort to find the VOICE of this short. I think the easy choice would have been to make the alien have kind of a GROWL or a kind of multi-layered composite of a bunch of animals like the T Rex in Jurassic Park, but I really wanted to have a softer touch for the quote-unquote voice of the alien. I wanted to have a sound that could would complement and be justifiable with the alien's lean, lithe, lanky figure. My initial direction was to make it a bit FELINE and UN-threatened. It's almost scarier when the "other" is not presenting aggression, as if it is in control to such an extent that aggression would be superfluous. Eventually, I was able to source a reference for what I was imagining— The closest thing I could find was the song called "13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed."

After a good amount of experimentation, I became interested in the score itself kind of representing the "voice" of the alien, almost like the instruments and tones we used were within the alien's hypothetical vocal range. I cast a wide net for the composer for this work— I found a French composer that I was excited about as well as a rap artist from Bangledesh who happened to score a horror short film I saw and loved. However, as soon as I heard the work of German theremin artist and vocalist Caroline Eyck, I knew she was the perfect fit. For my money, Carolina is probably the world's most famous theremin artist, and I was really excited when she came onboard.

The theremin is such a magical, otherworldly instrument. There is really nothing like it. This is the instrument that was a staple of classic horror and sci fi films from the '50s. (THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL) SPELLBOUND had a theremin score and won an Academy Award. I don't think I made this up, but I think the first time an audience heard a theremin, probably back in the '20s, they legitimately thought they were hearing the voices of the dead.

Through our iterations, I kept coming back to her piece "The Haunted Theremin"— In it, there are a couple of tones that I was just obsessed with, and asked her to recreate for the short film. She was able to capture a sound that I think is not just otherworldly, but ALIVE and ORGANIC, which was really important to me. We worked our way to long, sustained notes, which are admittedly simple for Carolina's abilities, but perfect for this short— I wanted these long sustained notes to complement and even sync up with the steady, creeping suspense and rising stakes.

Almost to a fault, I wanted to motivate and intellectualize each and every note and component, like you see when the theremin's voice comes on when the green light under the door snaps on and how we layer on top of it when the stakes grow and the figure or figures make themselves apparent. And then of course the persistent baseline represents a kind of heart rate. Carolina lent her voice, subtly, early in the short as well, which I thought was a deft touch and a nice surprise for me. And another kind of grace note was how we underpinned the score and the bassline and especially the final crescendo with the actual NASA representation of a Black Hole sound, which is based on sonified data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which I was really excited to incorporate.

I am a little obsessed with infrasound and its application to filmmaking and storytelling. Infrasound waves are sound waves with a frequency below the lower limit of human audibility, and there is a tradition of feature filmmakers injecting infrasound into their soundscapes to create a feeling of uneasiness and even dread in key moments. There is one case study where an office was said to be haunted, as workers were having all kinds of supernatrual experiences and visions. However, come to find out, there was a single screw loose in a fan that was vibrating at the very same frequency that the human eyeball is at rest, which was causing people to have hallucinations. As soon as the screw was tightened, the haunting and sighting stopped on a dime.

19hz, which is just one unit lower than the human hearing range, is said to be the fear frequency, and I admit we have a lot of that in this short. I am pretty sure this is moot because most commercial speaker and headphones probably don't have a projection range too far beyond the normal range of human hearing, but even if one person if affected by it, it is well worth it. If it improves the films even a fraction of a percentage point, it is well worth it.

As side note— While it sounds cool, I am not sure how much of an impact infrasound actually has, because I have done little experiments, blasting it on speakers overnight while my family members are sleeping to see what happens, and no one has reported significant feelings of dread or discomfort. Maybe just a minor headache. My dream would be to do a pair of test screenings of a feature horror film, one with infrasound and one without, and to have a qualitative sample for its efficacy for scares.

And in the end, as the credits roll, I wanted to have a juxtapositional experience of a nursery rhyme-informed score accompaniment. I didn't want to be so overt as to recreate “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” but I did want it to be in the neighborhood. It was amusing to me how a lullaby's very purpose is to soothe, and how what precedes it in this short film is a bedtime experience that is far from soothing... We take an innocent melody and distort it into something ominous.

CONCLUSION

As far as where this comes from, and what it means, I like that it is a little bit elusive and open to interpretation. I think it can be kind of cheap or easy, especially for a short film, to slap on a moral or theme like its a cattle brand and call it a day. I don't like being lectured in that way. For this exercise, I was much more interested in capturing a specific tone and presenting a little story where, in a way, the experience IS the theme. I have my own read, but I like that a few people have come to me with unique takes and connections to their own fears and experiences.

In general, I think that maybe, as a species, we have grown a little too overconfident, and even complacent, and I think that horror stories serve us well in that they are reminders of our innate mortality and vulnerability, which I think is a good thing. I think it can generate a kind of humility, in a weird way.

I think horror films are like bad dreams— When you wake up from a good dream, it's like you don't want it to end, but when you wake up from a bad dream, you almost have this new sense of gratitude and presentness. You kind of have this exhale or reset moment, before you go about your day. And if the short film serves that purpose in a small way, I would be happy.

Carl Jung thought that our dreams were messages or warnings from the subconscious mind. The subconscious trying to make us aware of something. Maybe that's what this is, on top of being a bite-sized little thrill ride. Maybe it is some kind of warning. Not to get too cocky. Not to feel too safe. To double check you locked the DOOR.