Creepy phone calls have long dominated the horror genre, but nowadays, many of us don't have landlines in our homes. Heck, we rarely even use our smartphones as actual phones. So it would make sense that Space Oddity Films would hinge its latest (scary) short film on a more modern form of communication — Snapchat.
The three-minute film, 3 Seconds, includes one of the creepiest snaps you could ever get: A picture of yourself sleeping.
"Every new app and social media platform drags along its own fear and anxieties," Space Oddity Films co-founder Alex Mann told Refinery29. "I wanted to try to capture the fleeting, often mysterious experience of using Snapchat in a film. The horror genre seemed like the best way to do it. Plus, their icon is a ghost — how could I not?"
The film got started started when Mann asked himself, "What's the scariest thing that could happen on Snapchat?" The immediate answer: waking up to a Snapchat of yourself sleeping. (We certainly can't disagree with that.) From there, Mann wrote the script, cast the piece, put a crew together, and shot it in one day. Editing took a few weeks, primarily to build the suspense at the pace Mann wanted. The team also had to recreate the Snapchat rainbow-puke filter using visual effects.
You can check out the short film in its entirety below.
Notice that it does a great job of capturing the smartphone-lit darkness of a nighttime bedroom. To do this, the filmmakers used a Canon 6D (with the aperture wide open to capture the most light), and then used an LED to create that eerie, shadowy bedroom environment.
Our main question, though, is why on earth doesn't the girl get up and leave her house immediately upon getting that first creepy snap?
"As a viewer, it's easy to judge, but until you've been stalked by an evil Snapchat ghost, you don't know how you'll react," Mann says.