Horror Short Film Review: Unreel

 

Plot: A woman accepts a job in a theater where she experiences a strange occurrence when she plays an old reel.

Director’s (C.I. Smith) note

In the midst of the pandemic I’d been working on film and TV projects. However none of them felt relevant  to what’s happening in the world right now.

Anxious, disturbed and concerned by the impact of Covid-19 and subsequent lockdowns had on the world. I am particularly worried about the impact on arts, entertainment and creative industries. Not least the impact on filmmaking and cinema distribution, with the power and control of the streamers and their algorithms casting an ever growing shadow on independent cinema.

Like many filmmakers my main motivation for creating films is so they can one day be screened in a cinema… an experience shared with an audience of strangers in a big dark room. It’s tragic to see that unique experience on hold and, possibly for some cinemas, gone forever.

So what could I do about it?  Maybe the only thing I can really- make a film. So I wrote this screenplay -  Unreel. It’s an allegory of the painful impact that the pandemic, changing behaviours and the dwindling allure of film theatres is having upon the film industry. 

It is also love letter to cinematic horror - including and subverting tropes of horror cinema over decades. And hopefully it’s also very fucking scary. So this is it - a short, weird horror film about the end of cinema as we know it. 

Unreel Review with spoilers

Lily is disheartened when the cinemas are closed down. She takes a call from Dan, with whom she works in the cinema.

He tells her she needs to go to work to maintain the projector and while it may be depressing and dark there, she can watch a movie they found which is now digitalized.

Lily keeps seeing a woman watching her but since she disappears, she thinks she is imagining her.

Lily watches a movie she finds on the drive and finds it to be an unsettling horror movie about three people where the man is wearing a bandage over his bleeding eyes.

One of the women with him makes a run for it and ends up being accosted by a man in a cloak who attacks her, gouges her eyes out and consumes her eyeball.

Lily is freaked out but turning off the movie isn’t going to help her. She finds the woman from the movie sobbing. Soon enough, she finds that the cloaked man has come out of the screen and is now behind her.

UNREEL is an interesting tribute to the silent movie era while at the same time it delivers contemporary horror elements.

A definite must-watch for all horror fans.

Scare Scale: 4/5

Watch the short horror movie UNREEL on YouTube :