If you’re looking for a horror short to properly unsettle you on the road to Halloween, director Dennis Cahlo (The Trouble With Tessa) has you covered with his brand new film A Special Day.
The 4-minute found footage horror short plays out like one of those cursed tapes from Sinister, wherein a seemingly normal family home video is interrupted by a shocking event.
To capture the proper vibe and aesthetic, Dennis Cahlo filmed A Special Day entirely on VHS-C tape, giving it a gritty vibe that feels like a true invasion of a family’s home video footage.
Cahlo tells Bloody Disgusting, “I listen to a lot of true crime cases and found myself getting more and more disturbed by the things I had to picture in my head about what the victims must have been going through. And that’s when it hit me what’s really scary to me. It’s not seeing the actual horror, but having to piece together in your mind how it all happened.
“And so I went about making a short that would do that.”
Cahlo made A Special Day on a budget of just $100, with influences and inspirations including Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, Se7en, and the short film Dead Grandma.
“The biggest influence has to be Dead Grandma, a short from last year that blew me away,” Cahlo explains. “That scared me more than any horror movie I’ve seen in the last 10 years because of what I had to picture happening after the credits hit. It’s things like that which I find scarier than monsters or jump scares. And I really wanted to do that but in my own way.”
“I think that every short film leads to a bigger project,” Cahlo notes. “David Fincher is my favorite American director and I think we haven’t had a good fictional serial killer movie since Se7en. So I’ve always wanted to make my Se7en but I never had the catalyst for it. I think, now with what I tapped into with A Special Day, I’m ready to tackle it.”
A Special Day is written, directed and edited by Dennis Cahlo. The horror short’s cast includes Sara Troficanto, Nick Westemeyer, Dennis Cahlo, and introducing Miles Westemeyer.
