A man who is exhausted, dehydrated and hopelessly lost in deep woodland sees a strange cloaked figure with their back to him, that he at first assumes to be another person until he grows annoyed and chases the rude 'person' who darts and almost scuttles away in an eerie and unnatural fashion every time he gets close to it, and as he keeps chasing the mysterious figure into the endless trees he never suspects that he's being led by something malevolent to his very doom!!! I really liked this short a lot, I thought the concept was pretty spooky and cool, and the awesomely sneaky monster was totally new to me, I'd never heard of a "Hidebehind" before, but what a creepy creature, something that plays with and confuses you by seemingly disappearing and reappearing at will, and that you can't directly look upon until it wants you to and by then it's already too late for you as it's right next to you before you can react! In this short it's namely the trees that it impossibly creeps around but I could see how that could work well with practically anything, and what I loved about this short is that it has an effective lost in the Woods atmosphere and tone and look to it, you can easily see how the earliest loggers thought of such a spectre while being surrounded for months on end by the endless dark unknown of the woods of which they knew very little about what at the time, and of the many creatures those rugged tale-tellers thought of the Hidebehind is surely one of the scariest! I thought the actor was fine but I loved the way the performer who played the creature shuffled around and moved in a way that was almost like floating, and when you finally saw it I loved it's malicious goblin-like face, very cool effect as well as a great kicker to end the short with. I think it was a practical effect too, always love to see that being done so well. I loved some of the visual trickery like when it would impossibly disappear behind a very thin tree, and when it got the man at the end and he was looking around the tree he was resting against and then around the other side, and the camera panned all the way around it and there was nothing there but then the monster was there just waiting for him to notice it, I'm sure there must have been some kind of transition in the shot but it looked pretty seamless to me. Very good short I love the ones like this, well worth a wee look, and for god's sake beware the dark woods! X
Review of The Hidebehind
