Horror Short Film SLOW CREEP – A Night Watching a Horror Movie Turns Into a Nightmare

Here’s a fun horror short film to watch called Slow creepThe film centers on a fifteen-year-old Otter, who is thrilled to have finally found the horror movie she has been looking for for weeks.

He takes the film home to watch with his brother and his friend, not realizing that he has doomed them to a nightmarish encounter with the Slow Creep.

This short film is shared in partnership with the FilmQuest Film Festival, where we seek to showcase some of the amazing independent shorts and genre films created by filmmakers.

This film was written and directed by Mr. Jim Hickcox and we’ve also included an interview that you can read to get to know the director better.

Without spoilers, tell us what your film is about, what its characters and themes are. Is it a proof of concept or a standalone story?

Any completed story could be a proof of concept for a larger story, but this is definitely a completed work. It’s the story of two siblings on opposite ends of puberty. They’re home alone and she wants to watch a horror movie, but he wants to snog a boy. Also, a monster is trying to destroy the VHS tape they rented.

What was the inspiration for your film? How did you get the idea?

Nothing is an idea or an inspiration, obviously, but part of it was playing with the idea of ​​monsters. They’re always super powerful, and I wanted to make a movie where the monster is less powerful than all the people.

Tell us about yourself. What is your background? How long have you been a director?

I work primarily as a cinematographer, but every now and then I convince people that I should make a silly project of my own.

What drives you to work in genre cinema and tell these kinds of stories?

Genre audiences are the best audiences. They are willing to engage with a formal playfulness that most audiences would find distasteful. I like to play.

What was the part of the process of making this project that you enjoyed the most?

There was a really nice contrast between the main film footage and the film they’re watching. All my previous films had been shot on 16mm, so we went both ways.

Most of the film was shot on 35mm with huge Panavision cameras. We had everything storyboarded very explicitly and we were shooting all the time on a gear head. It wasn’t rigid, but it was very controlled.

For the film they rented/watched in the film, we shot on super-8 and we shot SUPER loose. We were running around the woods, improvising shots as we went, taking all the dialogue as wild jokes. Both approaches were fun in very different ways.

What are you most proud of about this film?

It’s hard not to be proud of the festival run, as boring as it is. We’ve played a lot of major genre festivals and won a couple of awards. In terms of intrinsic elements, I’m proud to have worked with this cast. They’re all brilliant and I expect they’ll be recognized as such.

What is your favorite anecdote or moment from the making of the film that you would like to share?

The Slow Creep set was so full of love and loving people, there were beautiful moments all around. It’s hard to pick just one. I don’t know who it was, but someone brought a bead kit to put on set: string, colored beads, letter beads.

Everyone spent their free time making little friendship bracelets for each other. Otter (Nya Garner) wears one in the movie (it says “nope”), but we all wore them on set. Nya made me one that said “Slow Creep” and I wore it until it broke a couple years later.

What was the most challenging moment or experience you had while making your film?

I’m sure there were bigger challenges than that, and I’ve probably erased a lot of them from my memory, but one of my disappointments was the slow progression. The then-teenager who played the monster, Amanda Haiker, is an amazing dancer with a truly fascinating visual vocabulary.

We brought her in because her ideas about movement were strange and fascinating. Unfortunately, the suit we put on her really limited her mobility and we weren’t able to fully utilize her ability on set.

If so, how did your film change or diverge from its original concept during pre-production, production, and/or post-production? How did this change the way you approach future projects as a result?

The script includes a scene that takes place between the time the main characters rent the film and the time we meet them again at their home: a friend of Otter’s, who was supposed to meet them, has an early encounter with the monster (as is tradition in horror films).

A lot of people warned me that it would be too much to shoot in the days we had, so I didn’t even end up casting the part. Once I had a cut, I was bummed that I didn’t have that scene.

I still really like the scene on paper. In subsequent takes I made sure I was more prepared to sneak in the shots I wanted, even though we might not have time for them.

Who were some of your collaborators and actors in the film? How did you start working together?

It’s important to me that everyone on set is nice, friendly, and positive, so I chose my crew from a group of people I knew I would enjoy being with. Friends and friends of friends. If you look at the credits, every one of those names belongs to someone who has my heart.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a director, and what would you say to new directors?

For a while, until my first feature film (fast, cheap, messy), each film I made was more successful than the last. I felt like I was on a trajectory, and the next step beyond “cheap home-made feature” would be “financed feature.”

I’ve spent the last few years chasing this, chasing money, and making no money. It’s hard on the soul. I would advise anyone, unless you have strong connections to industry or wealth, to figure out how to do projects sustainably without money.

Find friends who do it for the love of art, or for your love. If you don’t have money, you have to make your business community-centric rather than capitalistic. It’s hard, because we all live (at least in the US) in a pretty rigid capitalism, and art has to live in a market-driven world. But it’s the only way to keep working consistently.

What are your career plans and what do you hope this film will do for your career? What kind of stories do you want to tell moving forward?

Slow Creep did everything it could for my career: it played at more important festivals than anything I’ve ever directed, it put my name in some people’s heads (at least for a while). What kind of stories! Tuff.

I think horror is sliding into a dangerous direction with “elevated” content (ask me in person, I’ll talk about it for an hour). I appreciate gut punches, cinema that works on the ganglia and makes you feel something rather than think about it.

I also believe that the more specific a story is, the easier it is to universalize it. So I will continue to write projects that are about me in a veiled way and that have complex social messages, but that do not express them openly.

What is your next project and when can we expect to see it?

Hard to say! I’ve written several screenplays and am working on two more. I continue to write more and more cheaply, but I have yet to find the intersection between my aspirations and my funding (that’s just my personal bank account).

Where can we find more of your work and where can interested parties contact you? Do you have a website or YouTube/Vimeo channel? Do you have any social media profiles?

www.jimhickcox.com https://vimeo.com/jimhickcox

Bonus Question #1: What is your all-time favorite movie?

This question is impossible, but my calculated answer, based mostly on personal experience, is Lifeforce (1985).

Bonus Question #2: What film most inspired you to become a filmmaker and/or had the greatest influence on your work?

I’ll give you four. Zorn’s Lemma by Hollis Frampton Time and Tide by Peter Hutton Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger Ritual in Transfigured Time by Maya Deren