Something Wicked Dwells

Writer and director Waide Riddle invites his audience into the bleakest pit of despair in Something Wicked Dwells, a nightmarish short in which four men find themselves chained up in a cave, painfully aware that they’re on the Beast’s dinner menu. Unfortunately, the short fails to deliver beyond its premise, offering very little for audiences craving a horrifying vision of hell.

Something Wicked Dwells promises a great deal from its opening seconds, dripping in atmosphere and ominous foreboding. Helped in part thanks to some good sound design and impressive photography from Jay R Lawton, Riddle depicts hell as an empty cavern with a horrifying and hungry Beast approaching from the darkness. The sounds of the prisoners’ chains scraping against stone echoes around the vast caves, and the fear on the actors’ faces is palpable. Lawton has chosen to shoot the performers in high contrast black-and-white, making the darkness of the caves much darker, and rendering the horror on the prisoners’ faces with great effect. There’s a great sense of drama in the short’s premise, and their unfortunate situation is immediately one an audience can empathise with. Riddle picks up on the unique vulnerability and fear of being eaten, and the nudity of the prisoners reinforces this - it’s a stark reminder that our place on the food chain is never quite as secure as we would like it to be. Audiences may be reminded of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, where nudity was similarly used to render human bodies as meat for consumption. Clearly a great deal of thought and attention went into the presentation of hell in Something Wicked Dwells, which is why it is disappointing that the production feels half-baked in other, more obvious ways.

The most glaring issue audiences may have with Riddle’s short is the curious lack of movement in the filmmaking. Presented as a series of stills, Something Wicked Comes is unable to adequately present the horror of the story. The potential for drama is spectacular; four men waiting for the inevitable to happen, praying to whatever god will listen to them as an unseen Beast approaches from the darkness. The short is completely neutered by the decision to play as a slideshow, and all sense of urgency is lost. Somehow the short drags along, failing to escalate in any meaningful way. Further compounding the short’s lack of energy is the baffling decision to make the narration available as a separate Amazon and Audible download. Despite complimenting the sound design previously, I acknowledge that audiences may find it repetitive without any human performances whatsoever. Particularly weak is the sound of the Beast, which fails to add any menace at all, instead sounding like a stock monster grunt sound effect repeated ad nauseum. The poem that the short is based upon is subtitled throughout. It would have been interesting to see the short adapti or presenting the poem in a new way, but this feels like an inadequate middle ground, not fully committing to one approach or another. Truthfully, it feels as though the poem is the centrepiece here, with the short film playing in the background as an accompaniment. What’s lacking is any sense of human performance, either in physical movement or voice acting. It’s a tremendous shame that the horror is so thoroughly dampened in this way.

Something Wicked Comes could have been a delightfully macabre window into Riddle’s unique vision of hell, but in choosing to prioritise his poetry over his filmmaking, the short disappointingly squanders its potential. Still, it’s evident that the bones of an interesting story could be excavated from Riddle’s short with some refinement.