By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Christopher Pinero’s The Prowler is a horror short which combines the best of both giallo and psychological horror. At a lean nine minutes, the short has you on the edge of your seat for the entire time, and like all great horror it has the rare quality of disturbing you so much that you want to look away, but being so compelled by the narrative that you can’t.
Set in a seemingly mundane suburban home, the narrative follows Victor (Aaron Dominguez) as he’s seemingly losing his grip on reality. As the story unfolds you come to find out that Victor is not what he appears to be at the start of the movie, culminating in a swiftly brutal ending that if I went into specifics of would rob it of its power.
Through minimal dialogue and the natural light of the movie’s suburban setting Pinero builds an uneasy sense of atmosphere from the start. Through the various filters that Pinero employs, the movie is given a nightmarish quality that makes you feel as if you’ve woken up from a bad dream only to find that it’s still happening.
Aaron Dominguez gives a more than capable performance as the protagonist Victor. Dominguez while using largely gestures and body language, still manages to make him a compelling character while remaining silent for the majority of the short’s runtime – which is no small feat at all.
In addition to writing and directing, Pinero also edited the short, showing a keen understanding for when to linger on a scene to provoke fear, and when to go the opposite tack and use quick cutting to keep the action moving along.
If you’re looking for a horror short that gives you a sharp jolt to the system, then The Prowler is for you. It’s rare to find a short, which is this well directed and edited at the same time, with the atmosphere and colour scheme being straight out of a De Palma movie in his 1970s-80s heyday; which is praise that is not given out lightly.
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