Just about everything has been done in screen horror, and most new productions offer variants on past ideas rather than anything truly original. So filmmakers have to rethink, have to take another tack. Darren Perry's experience as a director of horror shorts extends back decades, and his love of the genre as a fan stems even further - it all shows, and his expertise as both a moviemaker and a keen viewer enables Darren to find that distinctive angle.
The sketchy and over-familiar plot of his new offering Cold Caller comes as little surprise, though Darren's own horror knowledge and eye for a creepy image or situation lends a little freshness. Where this one excels, however, is in the establishment of mood. The film, though only eleven minutes long, dares to take its time, dares to brood and linger and creep around its location, at once recognisable as a suburban garden but also as a place of unease. Like Matthew Holness' acclaimed Possum, Cold Caller appears to be staged in a little pocket of madness, a bubble of shadows and things eerie, which happens to be positioned somewhere just around the corner from 'normality'. The title character doesn't even feature until more than halfway through, and neither does dialogue - instead, we become lost in a netherworld tenuously connected to our own. Perry's camera leads us, roaming and zooming with a tantalising agony, focusing on nature and darkness and ambience and the chop-chop-chop of an incessant pair of shears; nothing 'happens', but the creation of a foreboding and a dread is staged so effectively. So few would-be horrormeisters have the nous to carefully take their time in this manner, even in features - to witness this approach in something as brief and basic as Cold Caller comes as a revelation.
