The Nightmare – 2010 Independent Short Horror Film

Feb 7, 2011
Hari Navarro

The Nightmare 2011 Horror Short - © Christiana Productions

Christiana Productions explores here a very real terror that many a viewer may well have experienced, one that is literally every parents nightmare.

Hailing from low budget film-making's unofficial spiritual first base, New York Joseph Christiana is the very definition of indie film production. A hands on multi-tasker; director, producer, writer, actor… he entered the industry very much via his own guerrilla styled volition.

Christiana Productions

Etching out a self-taught resume of budget hungry short and feature length productions his artistic endeavors would soon spawn their own production company. Christiana Productions draws off of a collective talent pool that consists of producer and sibling Anthony Christiana, cinematographer William Bourassa Jr. (The Dying Light), playwright Joseph Taverney (Finding the Nudist), musician Mike Kamoo (Earthling Studios) and Ron Muga of indie rock band Noco.

The Nightmare – Synopsis

Joseph Christiana’s Nightmare is initially deceptive in that it belies its universally affecting premise. This is the art, the challenge of film in its short form. To grip an audience and over the course of a few miserly minutes transport them. To expertly upend the expected and leave the viewer with a slight of hand slice of life that resonates. The Nightmare does just this within it’s six minute black and white study in abject helplessness. This fear is here cleverly examined by the director through visual queues that are instantly recognizable as horror cinema mainstays.

Joseph Christiana Directs

A child (played here by the director’s young son) finds himself dropped into a color and dialog bleached landscape that is at once familiar and terrifyingly alien. A faceless menace stalks the boy as he flees from the inescapable. A hammer clenched firmly within his iron grip and with a pace that never falters this surely malevolent entity closes in on its pray.

A shuffling of location and the introduction of duo of decidedly ambivalent additional characters signals a wonderful constriction of the plot as its double meanings spiral into one. The Nightmare admirably holds tight to its simplicity never allowing its impetus to spiral needlessly into the convoluted. Thus leading us to a finale from which we find our minds reeling backward to the very first frame. We watch it again this time dressed in its freshly revealed context and the piece takes on entirely new meaning. This again is a goal toward which many short films aspire. The trickery, the clever twisting of conventional thought that leaves an audience contentedly fooled. A job well done.