Hide – a short monster horror film

Sponsored Feature: Bearly There Media, Park Bench Creative

Hide is an upcoming monster horror short written by Brian Barnes and directed by Brenden Hubbard.

Trailer here:

Still reeling from an incredible loss, a father (Shakey Graves) and daughter cling to a bedtime routine keeping them safe in a town where an unfathomable horror visits its inhabitants night after night.

A Q&A with Director Brenden Hubbard

Welcome, Brenden! Thanks for chatting with us about your new horror short, Hide. What sparked the idea for this short film?

For our writer Brian Barnes, the idea itself started with a simple thought: What would it be like to live in a town where monsters entered each home, night after night, like clockwork? Would it be more interesting to show the first night, or the thousandth? What if the town, having failed to solve the problem, learned to live with it? Brian chose the latter, as it led to interesting thoughts about compliance, complacency, and how we sometimes do strange things just to survive.

What would it be like to live in a town where monsters entered each home, night after night, like clockwork?

It sounds like the bedtime routine serves as a coping mechanism for the father and daughter. Can you elaborate on the significance of this routine and how it adds to the tension?

For me, the routine part was what I personally was in fear of at the time of reading Hide. I felt like I was burning my days working for others and their projects and needed to break it. And honestly what is more scarier than being stuck at home replaying the day to day. For Brian, the inspiration of it came back in 2017 as he had a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old. His life was dictated by routines, and at those ages sometimes that’s the only way you feel like you can survive.

For the father and daughter of this story, it’s not just a way to keep them physically safe. It’s also something they had rooted in place when the mother was still with them. Keeping it alive keeps her memory alive, while also literally keeping them alive.

What was the most significant challenge in bringing this horror story to life, and how did you overcome it?

Great question, aside from the auto response that most indie films deal with such as money or time, I’m leaning towards the challenge of having the larger concept already written with our prequel script Riverbend. As much as building a proof-of-concept short film based on a larger idea feels like good planning, I ultimately felt it led to deeper debates and shifts during pre-production to accommodate the origin story. None of this, I felt, was a bad thing, as it left the story with a lot of open ended breadcrumbs that I hope brings an audience to question the larger concept of “what the fuck is actually going on?”

As much as building a proof-of-concept short film based on a larger idea feels like good planning, I ultimately felt it led to deeper debates and shifts during pre-production to accommodate the origin story.

The film’s production team has an impressive track record, including an Academy Award win for Curfew. How did working with such a talented team impact your creative process?

This process kind of started with me being burnt out with producing other directors work and expressing that to my good friends and producers, Mylissa Fitzsimmons and Damon Russell, who collectively nudged or nagged me…into the right direction. From there, I wasn’t in the most creative headspace to write my own original idea but had collaborated with Brian Barnes on my first short The Helping Hand and at this time he had just been notified about Hide being selected as a quarter finalist for Slamdance. After getting excited about the concept I pitched it to my lead Alejandro Rose-Garcia, whom I was working for with him and his band on the road, and he immediately was on board to make a film to break his own routine. Once I had my core creatives and support pushing me to the ledge and begging me to jump I was fortunate to bring in both Bryan Matthews and Shawn Christensen to help support and elevate the film. When the film shifted to an Austin shoot, we were fortunate to grab Bennett Krishock to come in and handle physical production that I thought I could also handle coming from that space but ultimately was admittedly losing track of. Finally, I have to give props to my dear friend Jack Mannion for visually capturing what my brain envisioned.

Any fun BTS stories to share?

Oh man, so many…The most memorable for me was on our last shoot day, which included our only company move. The move also came with a lighting restriction (the sun). All this of course was going to plan and we wrapped out of the house location on time despite me wanting to keep shooting. So we send my fearless co-producer Parth Marathe to get lunch set up at second location so we can make sure we don’t miss the sun set. Unfortunately, just as the restaurant finished preparing our order, they dropped half of our order on the ground, and had to start all over again. Long story short, Parth argued with the restaurant for over an hour while we starved our way through the sun setting – also there is still missing soups I think I’m owed for. Ultimately, wasn’t a big deal, but he deserves a shout out for wearing so many hats on this project.

Learn more about Hide on IMDb and by following @hide.short on Instagram.