It Draws Closer
2024 · 5m · United States
Directed by Joshua David Matthews
Genres: horror
A dialogue-free horror short about a young woman whose sketched creature comes lethally to life in her bedroom.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A girl's doodle crawls off the page—fine premise, but the execution feels like it's genuflecting to every jump-scare convention in the horror playbook instead of actually subverting anything. Dialogue-free isn't experimental if you're just muting a by-the-numbers creature feature.
The central conceit sits squarely in a lineage of animated-object horror reaching back through stop-motion craft traditions, and Matthews handles the tonal restraint with formal precision; the real question is whether the film adds anything conceptually to what's already been rigorously explored in this space.
The soundscape and editing rhythm are doing the actual work here—the decision to let negative space and ambient dread carry tension instead of scoring every beat gives this resource-lean premise its teeth, and that single choice transforms what could've been student-film gimmickry into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Writer/director Joshua David Matthews ably crafts a creepy ooga-booga atmosphere as well as generates a good deal of tension. While the ending may be more than a little predictable, it nonetheless still delivers an effectively shuddery jolt all the same.