Something Scary is the third short horror film to come from Andrew J.D Robinson, the others being Placebo, and A Walk Home Alone. This actually stars Aileigh Karson who also featured in Placebo. Horror and video games are two of my favourite things so when I saw Robinson's latest short was going to marry the two things together I had high hopes, but for me it just didn't quite come together.
Karson stars as GamerGurl; an online star of a YouTube style video game channel. She has received a beta of horror game Something Scary and is going to stream her playthrough live for her fans to watch, however once she starts playing things begin to get strange...
First off, I loved how this was presented, the short is shown almost like it is a video you would watch online, most the time GamerGurl is on video in the corner of the screen with the fake game taking up the rest. The game has nostalgic pixelated graphics which feeds over into the end credits that have a similar look to them. Karson is a great choice for lead, she comes across as naturally likeable and talks to the camera well, which is helped by the editing for her segments. The game she is playing looks pretty basic, but that is totally understandable as this is an indie film, I wouldn't expect something looking stunning so it does the job it was created to do. For me though I wasn't sure which of the several little twists were meant to be the scary part, none of them felt like they hit home to me personally. I even re-watched this 4 minute short a few times to see if I had missed something.
While the actual horror aspect didn't work for me in terms of originality this was good, I haven't seen a short horror set out in this way before. Also with Karson you have a lead who fitted the character she was acting as very well, and the style of the short is pretty cool. Something Scary is by no means a bad piece of work, it had some good ideas going for it, but to me it just felt constrained by the short run time that seemed to get in the way of some of those neat ideas getting to flourish.
SCORE:
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