I love watching scary movies in broad daylight. Feel free to call me a chicken. I don’t care. Scary + sunshine = content Erin. Especially when said film manages to fill you with a sense of foreboding that boarders on dread. Bearing that in mind, here’s the short film Creak.

Click here for Creak.

I found the transitions between music and silence to be a bit abrupt, but that aspect very well may work for someone else. What more than made up for it was the emphasis of the opening door. This one little sound goes to show you how you can tie a sense of dread into one simple noise. We know that nothing good is going to come from this, especially as we’ve only got one character (of which we’re aware) in the house. This is terrifying, especially if you’re home alone and start hearing things. We’ve all been there, and whether we want to admit it or not, most of us have this strange, lurking fear in the backs of our throats when we’re alone, at night, and we hear something. It’s a primal fear, and the lighting on this taps into that fear.

Two other aspects stood out for me on this one: the lead character, and the payoff. Our lead character isn’t a nubile college student, and that is refreshing as all hell. Finally, we’re not stuck with some underfed girl in pajamas that have “PINK” scrawled across the ass walking around her own home looking stumped. This was an older woman, and I fully advocate that the stories of the above-40 crowd can and should be told. Adding to this, we only saw a pair of hands grab her at the end. There was no demonic face, no scream. Just hands. So very nice in an age of showing the audience the creepy face before cutting away.

And with that, happy Saturday.