To properly research for my short film and get a better understanding of horror in short films before I start with my planning, I must look at other horror short films to gather inspiration on plots and storylines, locations and technical styles, and anything else I may be able to use to influence my decisions throughout the planning stages of my work. I looked into 2 different short films, 1 with a similar sub genre to mine (“NIGHT TERROR”), which plays on the idea of nightmares and being the most venerable at alone night, and the other (“The Smiling Man”) is of a more gory sub-genre but I chose to look at this one because I loved the style of the SFX as well as how creepy and disturbing this short film feels. I want to briefly analyse them individually and discuss what I may use from each and or what inspires me, but first wanted to look at something I have been unsure about while thinking about planning, which is the length of time for my film. While many people have suggested creating something between 5 and 10 minutes, I wanted to look at some examples to see how long they have created their short films and wether or not I felt that the story was portrayed within this amount of time. Both of the films I looked at were between 5 to 7 minutes, and I feel that the stories were more than adequately portrayed in this time frame.
The first short film (below) is a 5 minute long short film based of the idea of night terrors, hence the name, the film takes us through a woman’s struggle to leave the house because of some kind of supernatural or demonic force and being keeping her afraid to leave and walk into the dark. Although the setting and plot of my short film is going to be a lot different to this one, I thought I should touch on the significance of the darkness and nighttime used in this short film to portray the fear many of us feel while alone in the dark. Night time and dark settings are an essential part of the iconography of horror and sets the scene extremely well as well as helping the scenes seems that more sinister just with light changes. The use of darkness really creates an atmosphere of dread and terror and is something I would like to utilise as best I can in my short film.
In terms of the rest of the film, I really like the SFX of the creature thing in this short films, however I do not think something like this would fit well in my short films as I have decided on my ‘monster’ or ‘villain’ to be that of a satanic cult, therefor, in terms of costuming, my characters will be a lot more simple and will most likely just be in black cloaks with masks on (to almost dehumanise them and not to let any facial features or expressions show through).
This second short film is definitely my favourite and, in my opinion, create a much more intense and disturbing atmosphere than the other, and in my short film, the atmosphere that makes this short film so disturbing is definitely something I want capture and portray through my work. The intensely creepy atmosphere is immediately built up through the lack of script, and therefore eerie silence, as well as the casting of a young innocent looking child as the main character. These two combined already create a fear of dread as we know that the child is either going to see something awful, do something awful, or die at the hands of something, well, awful. The tension continues to build through the placement of the balloons, the sight of a non human/creature looking hand placing a balloon and the creepy broken dolls in the bags attached to the balloons, this is all accompanied by loud screeching music common in horror to really create an uncomfortable atmosphere. Skipping to the end, we then see a very disturbing man-thing and are showed some really unsettling shots of it wiping blood on its face.
Now although, again, my plot isn’t going to be very similar of this, it has still been useful for me to look at some short films in this genre to gather ideas of many different aspects of short films in this genre. I now feel I have a better idea of some of the important parts of making a short film, and how this can influence my own, such as length – The Smiling Man was just over 6 minutes long – the way they portray a story without having to give too much detail of why this is happening and who the characters are, as well being able to create something scary and unsettling through such a simple (compared to the complexity of a lot of full length horror films) story line.
Emily Bennett 