note: This is one half of a companion fic (what happened / here) to the short films In the Dark (dir. Rachel Kiley) and Angie & Zahra (dir. Yulin Kuang). Read the other half here.
Read more about the Darkness A to Z transmedia experiment here.
Sam stands outside the house, staring up at the broken windows, the tattered door. If anyone asks, he’d say he doesn’t know why he came back here, months after the fact.
But he does know. It was the last place he’d been able to convince himself things would work out. That he could have some semblance of the life he wanted, even in the midst of the chaos the world had been thrown into.
It was the memory that drew him back to this place. He didn’t have much beyond memories these days, anyway.
He was surprised he found it. Emily had always been the one who was good with direction. Just like Iris was good with protecting them. And Emily was good with people. And Iris was good at finding food, and supplies. Well, Iris was good at just about everything. That was one of the things that had drawn him to her. One of the many things. And Sam was… well, he wasn’t. Good at anything, or for anyone. That’s what it came down to, didn’t it?
The fact that the house was still standing almost rivaled his surprise that he’d found it again in the first place. They’d discovered months ago that looters were often one step behind or ahead of them, ransacking whatever buildings they came across. The kind of people who just want to watch the world burn — that’s what Emily had said. She talked poetic like that sometimes. Another thing he can’t do.
He reminds himself that “they” is just “him” now.
“Umm, hi?”
Sam registers the voice with a slower reaction time than a person should have in the midst of an apocalypse, but it’s been awhile since he’s come across another person.
The girl is standing off to the side of the house, a paintbrush in her hand, and he realizes the smell of paint fumes is strong in the air, out of place in a world where everything tends to smell like death and decay.
He blinks.
“I didn’t think it’d still be here.” The words tumble from his own mouth, quiet, scratchy, and part of him knows suddenly inviting this strange peppy girl into the conversation he’d been having inside his own head won’t make any sense, but they were the only words he could think of at the moment. The only ones he was willing to let out, anyway.
His eyes dart back to the front porch, and he can’t help but wonder what words had been let out there, weeks before, to have changed everything so completely.
He wonders if he should have stopped it. If he could have.
If that would have mattered, or if this was all just…some inevitable collision they’d been headed to from the day he first met the girls.
“Are you here for our SAT prep services?” he hears this new girl ask, and he briefly wonders if he actually heard her right.
“What?” Sam shakes his head, trying to make sense, not just of… SAT prep services? Really? But also of these different times his mind keeps jumping between like some confusing and poorly cut movie. “No, I… I shouldn’t have come here.”
His feet carry him back the way he came before he can make the conscious decision to go that way himself, through the yellow grass and towards the trees off in the distance, leaving the confused girl behind him. Wishing he was leaving his thoughts of Iris there with her, too.
When Angie first meets Sam, she thinks wow, what an attractive idiot.
She’s doing renovations on the house – the gutters need cleaning, the fence is in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, and the trip-wire by the gate could use some structural support.
He’s hanging by the door, a slightly dazed look in his eyes, his mouth hanging absent-mindedly half-open as he takes in the paint fumes.
“Umm, hi?” she asks, because Angie always greets strangers first.
“I didn’t think it’d still be here,” he mumbles to himself.
“Are you here for our SAT prep services?” She kind of doubts he is; he looks like the kind of guy whose essay would be so bad that it’d be pointless to give him notes because it would never actually be any good.
“What? No, I… I shouldn’t have come here.” He turns and slinks off into the sunset, which actually looks pretty epic from the porch and Angie thinks it’s times like these when she really misses Instagram, #nofilter.
As some of you may know, every year the YouTube Space puts together an amazing set for Halloween and booking time to shoot on it is quite competitive. My wonderful producer friend, wmilam, and I submitted a pitch for a short film and not only got approved to shoot, but also got selected to be a part of an exclusive writing workshop (that we aren’t allowed to talk about in print yet? but if you watch the campaign video, you can find out more about it and who’s behind it) to really make sure our narrative is where it should be, and also to grant us more access to the set and equipment than we would’ve had otherwise.
What we’re making: Basically it’s a dramatic post-apocalyptic short film about three friends who are spending their last night together after one of them got infected by the virus wiping out their world and will die in the morning.
Oh, and it’s pretty gay.
This is our set:
Why we’re making it: Have you seen a lot of gay horror films? I had been tossing around the idea of writing one even before Whitney approached me to come up with something for this set, and we’re pretty psyched to follow through with it.
On a personal level, it’s been a long time since I’ve written something specifically that I wanted to write. If you know me, you probably know me from working on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and that was a lot of fun! we told cool stories! i’m happy with some of it! But it’s always different working on someone else’s vision vs working on your own.
I’m also directing this film, which is something I haven’t done since college, because I let myself fall prey to the “haha women aren’t directors, why try” mindset, and that was really stupid. Fortunately, it’s never too late to correct idiocy, and I’m excited to get back to doing something I actually quite enjoyed.
Okay, so what about the money: We hate crowdfunding. I think everyone does. I LOVE getting people involved and invested in what we’re doing, but asking for money is a bummer. However, getting a free professionally crafted set and access to free equipment saves us literally thousands and thousands of dollars, so this is probably the cheapest we’ll ever be able to make a short film for, unless we straight up don’t pay cast and crew, which is shitty and we’re never doing that. $5k is the absolute minimum we can do this for. It’s underpaying our talent and crew, not getting quite the things we need to make this what we’d like it to be, and just praying nothing goes wrong. Ideally we need a couple thousand more than that, even, but we’re committed to making this, so we’ll do what we can.
But will it really happen: Yes! Being in this writing workshop means we’re on a specific timeline we have to meet. Our script will be basically locked this week. We’re casting next week. We shoot October 8th and 9th. We have to turn in a final cut the week of October 19th. And we go live on YouTube the week of Halloween. So this will be a super fast turn around for a short film, especially one done through crowdfunding. Two months! Hooray! (Yikes……)
Anyway, thank you for reading! Please check out the campaign if you haven’t already. Please share if you feel so inclined! And if you have any additional questions, please feel more than free to contact me directly and I will do my best to answer!
Haha. The irony is strong with this one. Rachel: posting a crowdfunding appeal. Me: contributing to a horror film.
Yet here we are.
Rachel’s writing was my favorite thing about the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does here (and directing! zwounds!). Go Rachel and Whitney! Go Zack!
