By Keri O’Shea
This feature on the site is all about short horror films, but it begs a question. What’s the shortest film that would still work, still tell a story you’d want to see played out? We could get into Hemingway territory here and consider that he managed to do it on paper in six words – but I don’t honestly know what the lower limit for a film would be. However, this latest offering from director Peter Dukes (whose earlier works The Beast and Little Reaper we have already featured on the site) comes in at a mere three minutes. Yep, three minutes. See what you think. Check out Daniel below:
Sure, it’s dead simple and it has to be given its restraints – but it’s a diverting enough three minutes, isn’t it? A lot of feature-length films realise what Dukes clearly realises, that you don’t necessarily need acres of exposition when you’re introducing a would-be threat to the screen – hell, sometimes the fact that there are guys with bats is more frightening when you don’t know why they’re in a family home kicking down doors, and this is clearly linked to the first evidence of their violence we see, the dead body of a child’s mother.
But is it evidence of their violence at all? Short films work well with a twist, and Dukes has shown already that he gets this. He knows that you can be succinct, not give away every detail, and still lead your audience off in a new direction. So far, his short films – at least the horror works which I’ve seen – have provided a neat batch of calling cards, as well as being fun in their own right. Not trying to cram a feature into a short is half the battle; having decent camera work and a subtle yet effective musical score is a great support to Daniel too.
And now I’m interested to see where things go from here…