“Darker Colors”, darker colors – that's the name of the short film that director Seth Worley 2020 staged as a preliminary study for his cinema debut and in which he has already tried the concept for “sketch”. You can see a gang of children in the game in the forest – and a magical body of water, a source of life, if you like that not only heals wounds, but also brings things to life. When a sign falls into the water, the situation quickly becomes scary – because that is full of childishly imaginative monster images …
Like numerous other short films from Worley-among them “Plot Device”, which was commissioned as an advertising film for video editing software and was already viral in 2011-“Darker Colors” can be viewed on the Red Giant Software YouTube channel. And if you do that, you can't really avoid thinking that this Microbudget filmmaker is appointed higher. It basically seems a little strange that it took almost one and a half decades from the first small online hype to the premiere of “Sketch”.
The same applies to the fact that apparently none of the big film studios discovered the Talent Worleys. Instead, his debut in the USA now appears in the sales of Angel, a media group that primarily supplies the evangelical target group in the USA and who recently had two rather controversial films on the cerbholz with “Sound of Freedom” and “Bonhoeffer”.
Not only the sets, the whole film feels like a box with colorful creativity has been exploded.
However, this should by no means prevent you from watching this magical, imaginative film, especially since it has nothing to do with religious confessions. Rather, you think of the children's horror cinema of the 1980s, of classics such as Joe Dantes “Gremlins-Kleine Monster”, Schräger video libraries “Monster Busters”, or in particular the morbid nightmare scenario by Bernard Roses “Paperhouse”. Because there was already a question of childhood fantasies, which arise with a drawing pen and then awaken to threatening life.
Only that it is decided in “Sketch”, more colorful and gaudy, because the Monsters, the Amber (Bianca Belle) first released from their head on the paper and then from the coloring book into the world, you can see its origin unmistakably: bright colored pencil, wax and scoring color meetings on the scribble of unbreakable children's hands Eklecticism by glitter or glued on the wobble.
Traces of Tim Burton and Stephen King
At the same time, it is enchanting and threatening creatures that arise from the magical waters – the creepiest beings of the world, through the filter of a naive children's fantasy that is looking for a valve for grief and anger. Because Amber and her older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) have recently lost their mother – and father Taylor (Tony Hale) is extremely loving, but struggles with his own speechlessness in the face of this enormous loss. You may think of the lustful morbidity of some childlike and young protagonists in the early films of a Tim Burton-of Winona Ryders Gothic Teenager in “Beetlejuice” or the death-addicted young “Vincent” in the short film of the same name. So you wouldn't be that far next to it …
… “Sketch” also ventures a bit in Stephen-King territory: at the latest when Jack carries the urn with the ashes of his late mother to the magical lake, there is finally a touch of “Cemetery of the Cuddly toys” in the air. However, Worley does not do it as far as King's abysmal-growing horror study on death, loss and grief. Instead of tipping the horror of childhood to the bloody excess, he leaves it under the surface. As a space for possibilities, as a premonition and awareness that everything, really all dark in humans and in the world can come to an outbreak at any time and nobody is sure.
Thanks to the magical lake, the child's monster drawings awaken to life!
So roughly Worley deals with the dead mother with this mere exploited plot wist – a turn that does not even have to be counted in order to let us come up with the awareness that it could also come much worse, that the horror is real, even if his manifestations are emphasized and joyfully unable to be unreal. “Sketch” works so well precisely because both aspects – the horror and the fun – always remain in relation to each other. On the surface, Seth Worley's directorial debut is an imaginative, colorful horror comedy, tells through children's eyes, in which there is more laughter than really sustainable creep.
But the fears like the abysses of his childish heroes take worse enough that the scenario could also tip into real horror at any time. This never creates the impression of so many mediocre horror comedies that there is basically nothing really at stake in them, and here and there even a clash flashes that the fears of childhood are basically the purer, more untamed. So those that we do not completely escape as adults.
Conclusion: The cinema debut of the short film director Seth Worley is a thoroughly enchanting, imaginative children's horror film in the tradition of eighties, which never exhausts in a profane retro nostalgia. Between Stephen King and Tim Burton, Worley has the slightest means of a completely convincingly staged childhood monster rooms-and presents a small low-budget film that looks better and higher quality than many a much more expensive blockbuster. It is feared that he will remain an insider tip in the absence of an elaborate advertising campaign, the more emphatically he is recommended – because here you can still make a real discovery!