A Night of Horror: Volume 1 (Movie Review)

Initially premiering back in 2015 down in Sydney, Australia, two years later, A Night of Horror: Volume 1 makes it way to VOD in North America thanks to 108 Media. Available in the summer of 2017 on Amazon, Google Play, Microsoft, and Vimeo, the anthology styled film was created by Enzo Tedeschi (The Tunnel 2011, Airlock 2015) and film festival co-founder Dean Bertram, in association with A Night Of Horror International Film Festival along with Deadhouse Films.

Comprised of 10 different Horror shorts, it can be surmised that the whole goal of this work is to really attack the viewer’s minds with horrific situations. While some are able to deliver on this front, there are some that are misguided from the purpose of the film and fall short on these expectations. Aside from that, all the shorts do amazing special effects-wise for a film that did not have much budget-wise. It is also worth noting that all of the actors did surprisingly well for an unknown group of cast members.

Directors and Writers Bossi Baker, Nicholas Colla, Daniel Daperis, Carmen Falk, Matthew Goodrich, Evan Randall Green, Justin Harding, Goran Spoljaric, Rebecca Thomson, and the aforementioned Enzo Tedeschi do a really great job of putting the audience in an environment and sense of purpose for all these shorts to live. This in mind, in the first opening scenes, the audience meet a female in an unknown location.

Trying to find out about her surroundings, she comes upon ten distinct setups within this location, in which she comes to find out what really happened to all of those that came before her setting foot here. The film also uses a lot of plot within a plot to keep the anthology interesting and moving forward. Many anthology films always have some sort of setup, but this was a fantastic and interesting way of bringing and pulling viewers into the grisly world that these ten horror shorts had in store for us.

Rather than go into each and every short, let us go right to the highlights, which comes in the form of the short entitled Hum. Written and directed by Baker, here is a story about a girl who believes there are noises of hums coming from inside the walls of her apartment building. Many believe that she is troubled and is on the verge of insanity as she is the only one that can hear these hums. She soon learns that she is not crazy at all.

Without giving too much information, it is not the ending of Hum that is disturbing, but the monster from which the hums are coming from that makes this a truly terrifying experience. Hum does what most big budget Horror films fail to do these days, and that is truly terrify an audience and place them in a setting that really embodies the whole experience. The fact that such a short was able to accomplish such things deserves to be noted and applauded.

Another gem in the collection worth noting comes in the form of The Priest, also a piece that achieved the same quality of delivery of a high-budget Horror film. Written and directed by Spoljaric, The Priest revolves around a woman’s train ride home that leads her into a horrific encounter that will live on in her. This is only scratching the surface of this diabolic little collection, and Horror lovers need to watch to learn more.

Although most of the shorts within A Night of Horror: Volume 1 have a habit of not making viewers care about the content, something that many Horror fans can tip their hats off to, is the lack of restraint that exist in all the shorts to make a truly horrifying, bloody, and violent experience. While there is a lot of this, it is not about how graphic the shorts were, but how they were able to take over your mind and exist there even after the film has ended.

All this said, if volume 2 of A Night of Horror is in the works, hopefully it will make these improvements and build upon what instantly makes this an Indie Horror classic. Until then, CrypticRock gives A Night of Horror: Volume 1 a 4 out of 5 stars. 

Purchase A Night of Horror: Volume 1: Amazon | iTunes