We are so honored to be included in the shorts lineup for this virtual Queer Horror Pride festival in support of the Transgender Law Center!
Frightgown website for tickets and info
The festival will take place Friday, June 25 - Sunday, June 27. Happy Pride, and remember PRIDE WAS A RIOT.
Homebody Pictures and Pineapple Pictures are excited to announce the award-winning horror short film WATER HORSE is available to watch online on Omeleto!
Starring Charlotte Rea, Darren Bailey, Lilith Hurley, and Joe Covell, WATER HORSE depicts the anxiety of motherhood through a nightmarish lens. It has screened at prestigious genre festivals all over the world, including Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest, Boston Underground Film Festival, Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, and many more.
WATER HORSE is directed by Sarah Wisner and Sean Temple, a married writing and directing team committed to telling character-driven genre stories with personal and socially-conscious themes. Inspired by Scottish folklore and Sarah’s own dream, an abandoned boat interrupts a family’s idyllic lakeside retreat, swiftly spiraling a mother’s perception of reality into a dread-laced nightmare.
“With a run time under 8 minutes, Wisner and Temple are confident with their voice, utilizing every frame to linger, watch and frighten. While its visual style could be pulled from a variety of existing references, the recent audience interest in ‘prestige/elevated horror’ that favors mystery and crisp, monumental horror images such as the ones depicted here make this directing duo and exciting team to watch.” -Chloe Leeson, Screen Queens
Homebody Pictures and Pineapple Pictures are very excited to share this nightmare with a larger audience on Omeleto. Visit homebodypictures.com to learn more and contact Homebody Pictures.
We are so thrilled to tell you that Homebody Pictures will be teaming up with the incomparable folks at Wild Obscura Films to bring you THE THAW!
Nora Unkel and Devin Shepherd are kickass producers and we are so excited to be working with them.
From wildobscurafilms.com,
"Our Mission: We create films driven by the female gaze. We are the vehicle for the new generation of female-identifying filmmakers and will revolutionize the way women’s stories are told. Wild Obscura Films is a New York-based production company specializing in genre content directed by, written by, or starring womxn."
We are so honored to be part of bringing their mission to life. Thank you Nora and Devin!
Homebody Pictures is excited to announce our next film, THE THAW!
THE THAW is a 13-minute horror folktale that depicts the anxiety of surviving harsh weather conditions and the results of man’s insatiable hunger for resources. In 19th century Vermont, Ruth and her aging parents struggle to subsist on a failing farm after the departure of her unfaithful husband. They turn to an old remedy: a potion that allows the elderly and infirm to sleep through the hard winter months in a state of frozen animation, to be awoken refreshed in Spring. But when a storm blows in an early thaw, the sleepers wake too soon - to horrifying results…
THE THAW is currently in pre-production and we are aiming to film in Vermont during February 2020. We have cast our lead actress, Emily Bennett, an Award-Winning Actress known for her work on NBC’s “The Blacklist”, “Chicago Fire”, “Chicago PD” and “Chicago Justice." Her brilliant short film, LVRS, is currently on the festival circuit and won Best Director at the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival.
Earlier this month THE THAW's screenplay moved on to the quarter-finals for the Fall 2019 ScreenCraft Film Fund. Look for THE THAW's Seed and Spark campaign in mid-December!
The incredible Nightmares Film Festival is happening THIS WEEKEND in Columbus, OH! We are so sad we are unable to attend, but so honored to be recognized by this amazing fest. Thank you Nightmares!
Nightmares is happening NOW through Sunday, October 26, and WATER HORSE will be playing with our friends THE VICIOUS in Horror Shorts C, Saturday at 6PM! If you can, please go support this festival, you’ll be sure to have a blast!
Congratulations to our editor Sean Temple!
Congratulations to designer Sean Temple and artist Leslie Krogh-Wisner!
Thank you TERROR IN THE BAY! View their full list of nominations here! WATER HORSE will be playing during their closing block on Sunday, October 20 at Maple Tops Paramount Theatre in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
We were thrilled to join this amazing lineup in Beyond Fest’s first ever shorts program for our Los Angeles premiere!
With star/producer/stunt coordinator/fight choreographer/vfx guru/all around MVP Darren Bailey! (Photo credit to Benjamin Heller!)
This eerie short film delivered a massive amount of tension in just under eight minutes. With such a tight runtime the filmmakers had to be both economic and specific. There’s not a wasted shot in WATER HORSE, and that precision pays off.
I don’t want to say too much about the type of horror Max encounters, as that journey is part of the fun, but I will add this one anecdote. After watching the film, I decided to do a little research into the title of the film, and what I discovered made me love it even more. Sarah Wisner, you found the perfect way to tells us what happened without telling us what happened. My hat’s off to you.
WATER HORSE is a mesmerizing exploration of a nightmare painted in grays, blues, and blood. This is one short you’ll want to check out.
Thanks a billion to Adrienne Clark for my favorite review to date!
Congratulations to our brilliant, Emmy-Award winning DP Abijeet Achar who beat out feature films for this award! Thank you Atlanta Underground!
And if that wasn’t exciting enough, we were also nominated for best poster! Check them out below!
It’s beautifully shot and filled with unique touches to keep the viewer slightly off skew. The story felt discombobulated and out of sync in the best way, creating a nightmare-filled experience of dreamlike logic and sequences.
Thank you Terry Mesnard!!
A Mother Finds Herself Caught In A Fever Dream Of Terror
My favorite style of horror film is that which deals with an eerie, unsettling atmosphere bordering on — or diving headlong into — the surreal, with the filmmakers never fully or easily explaining what is unfolding. Water Horse, a brilliant short film from co-directors Sean Temple and Sarah Wisner, delivers just such an unsettling experience in less than eight minutes.
Water Horse has the elegance of such 1970s horror such as Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Burnt Offerings (1976), and The Changeling (1980), but it uses that era of fright fare as a springboard, rather than attempting mere pastiche. The short is absolutely rooted in the current horror climate, as well, with Hereditary (2018) springing to mind as a comparison.
Thank you to reviewer Joseph Perry for this lovely write up which also happened to introduce us to one of our new favorite films, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH!
Wisner and Temple make great use of montage and sound to reflect Max’s stress and confusion, their camera also often feels like an uninvited intruder during more static scenes, slowly zooming in on the family’s quality time like a predator waiting to strike. It evokes a style similar to horror films from the 1970s – its retro title card alluding to a clear inspiration, relying on a nightmarish quality to its images that make them quite unforgettable, and a plot for the audience to piece together without clear explanation.
With a run time under 8 minutes, Wisner and Temple are confident with their voice, utilising every frame to linger, watch and frighten. While its visual style could be pulled from a variety of existing references, the recent audience interest in ‘prestige/elevated horror’ that favours mystery and crisp, monumental horror images such as the ones depicted here make this directing duo and exciting team to watch.
Thank you to Chloe Leeson, founder of Scream Queens, for this fantastic review!
Temple and Wisner know horror, and I hope that they can use the techniques and actors in this short and eventually do a longer short film or feature and really knock it out of the park!
Thank you to reviewer Grant Duvall!
The Portland Horror Film Fest Returns with Killer Emojis and Exploding Brains
Water Horse (Fri June 7) and Coda Sacra (Thurs June 6) are two beautifully shot shorts about lake monsters that dredge the same fear—that something sinister lurks beneath the surface of our perception, waiting to annihilate our domestic bliss and physical bodies alike. (There is! It’s called death!)
Thanks to reviewer Ciara Dolan for the mention!
The Towne 3 Cinemas, nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley, will play host to a list of veteran and up-and-coming local and international horror filmmakers, eager to share their grisly works of art with a fresh and frothing audience. The festival seeks to spotlight innovative storytelling with an eye on traditional means produced in high-quality fashion.
In the film Water Horse, done by veteran filmmaker couple Sarah Wisner and Sean Temple, the short weaves a chilling, fever dream tale involving the sudden appearance of an abandoned boat which turns the last day of summer into a mother’s nightmare.
Water Horse will play in the Shorts Spotlight followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers!
Editor-in-Chief Insha Fitzpatrick writes,
If you gave me a full movie of Water Horse, I’d run towards it. This short film could easily be longer because it had so much going on inside of it within the seven minutes. This story carries many layers. For example, the family, where the water horse came from, the home invasion, and the hallucinations. It’s such a solid short horror film with solid acting, a beautiful location and a heart-wrenching finish that leaves you gasping.
Thank you Insha! Read full coverage of the Homegrown Horrors shorts block here.
