A man facing the uncertainties of a mysterious creature against the backdrop of an abandoned single location are sometimes all you need to create a convincing horror film. And with Jacob Chase’s Larry we think we’ve found an unsettling short that’ll haunt your dreams (and your iPad) long after viewing.

A man alone at night in a booth with a light flickering on an empty parking lot, save for a single deserted car. To kill time the man picks up an iPad from the Lost & Found box and discovers the tale of “The Misunderstood Monster” Larry, a lonely creature that just wants to find a friend. But then the guard begins to see things…

With a minimalstic but effective story director Jacob Chase continually builds up tension to make his protagonist, and consequentially the viewer, face his fears. As Chase related to S/W, he is a “huge fan of horror films that are built around suspense more than jump scares”, an approach he visibly applied to the scary moviemaking elements of Larry.

The director actually used to run a haunted house, “Sherwood Scare”, with close friends for three years and saw the film as an “opportunity to get back into the horror/suspense mindset and try to make people nervous giggle with fright.”

Shot in one night with a crew of about 15 people, the filmmaker chose not to use CGI for the creation of Larry and went with an old, altered costume from the days when he was running the haunted house and worked closely with his creature makeup designer to get the desired result.

Chase took part in this year’s Sundance Episodic Lab, where he worked on his series project Harmony, a “musical murder mystery about a repressed detective who sets out to catch the serial killer who murdered his family”. In the meantime, the show got picked up by ABC for a pilot production commitment, with Peter Paige & Bradley Bredeweg (ABC Family’s The Fosters) cited as executive producers.

Jacob was previously featured on S/W with Amy, a powerful character piece focused on the ‘complexities that lie at the end of a relationship’ and is now writing a couple feature assignments for different companies. His wide range of talents as a writer and director is clearly notable.