What Beckons in the Wood

What Beckons in the Wood is a ten and a half minute folk horror short set in the 1930s. A thief named Edgar is running through a winter forest with hounds and flashlights closing in behind him, and when he falls, the money he stole scatters into the dark. What he finds instead is a table set alone in the trees, laid with a goblet, a plate of ruined bread, a bone-handled dagger, and a small bright bell. When he rings it, a crowned creature rises out of the ground and offers him exactly what he deserves.

It's the first film from Stump & Root Films, the narrative side of the studio. Jeremy Kessler and I wrote, directed, and produced it together, we paid for it ourselves, and we shot it with a crew who mostly showed up for the love of it.

The idea at the center of it is kind of a strange one for a horror film. The scariest thing we could think of wasn't being refused, it was being served. So the creature doesn't live in a lair, it sits at a table, and everything on that table is borrowed on purpose and turned upside down, because a counterfeit only works if it looks close enough to the real thing to sit down at.

On this set I was wearing two hats. I was co-directing, and I was also the one carrying a second camera around to shoot all of the behind-the-scenes photography, a Sony A7RIV running alongside the FX3 that Kent shot the film on.

Set photography is its own job, and truthfully it's easy to treat it as an afterthought. But those photos end up doing a lot of work after the shoot wraps. They go in the press kit and out to festival programmers, they carry social while the film is still in post and there's nothing finished to show, and they're the only record the cast and crew get of the nights they gave up to make it.

The hard part on this one was the light. The set was lit with candles and other practicals inside the frame and a constant light doing the heavy lifting, all of it set for Kent's camera and not mine, so I was working in low, moody light and staying out of the way of the shot the whole time.

The film was photographed by Kent Mast on a Sony FX3 with Blazar Mantis 1.33x anamorphic lenses, which gives it a native 2.37:1 frame without any cropping. Caleb Tyson edited and colored it, and I finished the visual effects.

The forest is lit with candles and practicals standing inside the frame, backed by a constant light, against snow that reads cold blue-green under the moonlight, and most of that warm and cold split happened in camera rather than in the grade. The creature is prosthetic and practical makeup by Chloie Kessler, built and applied on location in the cold.

These are frames from the finished film, so you can see where all of that lands.