Chelsea Lupkin
There’s nothing more unsettling than the feeling of being watched, especially in the middle of the night with only shadows for company. A living nightmare born of anxiety or something more tangible, you never know when that prickly sensation down your spine is alerting you to mortal danger. In Raffael Oliveri’s Midnight Talk, a woman’s fear of an unknown onlooker takes a dark turn toward the demonic in a hair-raising exploration of loss.
“It’s something nagging for our attention . . . What threat are we sensing?”
Oliveri’s film expertly plays on classic horror tropes. Namely, turning a woman’s home, a familiar and safe place, into a hellscape and thus eliminating anywhere to truly hide from the malevolent presence that seeks to haunt her. Coupled with a creepy aunt (Felicity Steel), who alludes to supernatural dark forces, Oliveri preys on his lead’s (Senie Priti) heartstrings to build his wicked mythology. The majority of the film feels like a scary story you’d imagine told around a campfire, except that the audience gets a chance to see what happens when a verbal retelling provokes a very real monster.
“We’ve all experienced at one time or another in our lives the strange sensation of being watched. We walk down a dark corridor, or turn our backs to sleep. It’s something nagging for our attention, when we are all alone and find ourselves suddenly and unreasonably hyper vigilant. What threat are we sensing?” Oliveri explains to Short of the Week as we discuss the origins of Midnight Talk’s storyline.
Felicity Steel as the creepy aunt in Midnight Talk
So how do you create a villain the audience can’t see? – tricky camera angles, music, and spooky lighting. Midnight Talk successfully builds an intense amount of dread, while moving towards a payoff that’s truly unsettling and evil in every way. Two cinematographers, Drew Dunlop and Chas Mackinnon, worked to create the short’s haunting aesthetic, while sound design from Oliveri himself took it over the finish line. Though the budget for this film was quite low, it certainly didn’t feel as such. Holly Ogle’s practical make up effects were just what the film needed to make the world feel terrifyingly real for that frightening climactic ritual.
A film that both explores demonology and a family tragedy, Midnight Talk uses the horror genre to explore grief in a way that leaves a lasting impression. Screened at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Oliveri is working towards adapting his short into a feature and is also in pre-production on a new short film called Tainted Souls.