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A man tries to hide from an disembodied wailing figure chasing and terrorizing him through his apartment.

THE WAIL (Teaser) | Experimental Short Film
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Film Stats
Credits
Synopsis
About the Director
Director's Statement

USA, 2019, 2m 8s
Digital Video Casette / 4 : 3

Press Kit

Director

Bobby Fodera

Bobby Fodera

Cinematography

Bobby Fodera

Writer

Editor

Bobby Fodera

Sound

Jenna Schmidt

Sound Effects Courtesy Of

Soundly Audio Library

Starring

Owen Hananel

Special Thanks

Vasilios Papaioannu

A man runs into his apartment as a wailing screech is heard. He slams the front door behind him, quickly locks it, and tries to catch his breath as he stands with his back against the door. Once he catches his breath, he quickly looks around his apartment, grabs the couch, and pushes it against the front door. He backs up from the door, and stands there, motionless, expecting something to crash through the door, but only three slow knocks can be heard. Then they repeat and repeat and then get faster to a constant loud tone that morphs into the same wailing screech. The man is horrified as he holds his hands to his ears, runs to his bedroom, shuts the door, and locks it. He slowly slides down the door until he is sitting on the ground against it. He then slowly puts his ear to the door, and after a few moments, a large crashing sound is heard. There is complete silence and then the wailing screech is heard again. The man jumps up from the door and backs away from it, and then the door begins rattling and the doorknobs rattles with it. The man looks around his room for refuge and then runs to his window, while knocking things in his path out of the way. He climbs atop the windowsill, slides open the window, and looks down. He looks back toward the door for just another moment as he hears the wailing screech and is pulled from the windowsill until he is only holding on to it by his fingertips. He then is pulled from the sill and disappears and there is only silence. The camera pushes back through the room and then through the apartment and everything is tidy and unmoved. The couch is not barricading the front door anymore and the camera continues to push through the apartment and displayed on the living room television is an image of an ultrasound photograph.

ROBERT V. FODERA, JR., or better known as Bobby, was born in Staten Island, New York and is currently working toward a Film B.F.A. and a minor in Animation and Visual Effects at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Since 2016, he has directed numerous short films, music videos, and short animated films. The Wail is notably his first experimental project. As a filmmaker, Fodera is currently developing his creative style through his educational endeavors in Syracuse. Fodera aspires to be a director of feature films that push the limits of creative storytelling.

This film was greatly inspired by Christopher Nolan’s experimental film, Doodlebug (1997), where a man seemingly goes mad within the confined space of his apartment just to smash a tiny version of himself with a shoe and the reveal at the end shoes the man being crushed by a larger version of himself. I wanted to follow a similar structure as my character is running from away from a wailing force and it seems like it is impossible to hide from. The Wail eventually takes him away, with the reveal implying that The Wail was a metaphor for a crying baby. I want to follow the same aesthetic of the confined space of an apartment, want to shoot on an older camera to give an older and grainer look, and want to recolor it to black and white to give a dramatic and paranoid tone similar to that in Nolan’s film with the deep and dark shadows.

Stills
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Poster

This film was made in partial fulfillment of a B.F.A. in Film in the Department of Transmedia, College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. 2019

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