CAST:

Liv > Aisha Aidara

Guy > Laurence Young

Tash > Miraede Bhati-Williams

Ellie > Aadhya Widje

Red > Brandon Koolloos

Uber Driver > Tref Gare

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CREW:

Director of Photography > Gracie Dephoff

Assistant Camera Operator > Gilda Jones

Sound Design, Sound Mixing and Score > Anthony Carr

Editors > Noah Janssen and Darcey Eagle

Producer, Assistant Director and SFX Artist > Jack Bell

Title Card > Chooka Pettenon

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SPECS:

AWARDS > MONSTERFEST (Screened as part of the MONSTROUS MONSTER FEST MELBOURNE SHORTS SHOWCASE - Melbourne, Australia) // HAUNTED HOUSE FEARFEST (Nominated for BEST HORROR SHORT - New York City, USA) // A NIGHT OF HORROR (Screened as part of the AUSSIE SHORTS GALA - Sydney, Australia)

CONTENT WARNINGS > Graphic violence, Stalking, Gore

RUNTIME > 15 minutes

SHOT IN > March 2021

PREMIERE > November 2022 at MonsterFest

CAMERA > Sony FS7

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NOTES:

Noah Janssen (Director/Co-Writer): Growing up, there was a tiny red bridge that goes over Gardiner’s Creek that you had to cross on the daily walk home from the train station. Once you crossed it, you would land underneath a tall lamppost, creating a yellow spotlight at the intersection of three pathways. I’ve always been obsessed with movies, always framing life through shot compositions, and for years on end, the crossroad on the other end of that red bridge was cemented in my mind as the opening shot of a horror movie. It took time and good advice to realise that my fixation with dreaming up shots wasn’t so much a passive hobby as an activating impulse to make it real, something I’d start to resent if I didn’t get going.

As I finally started inching my way towards filmmaking, my obsession with patriarchy and the state of masculinity was infecting all of my work. The idea for GHS came from an interest in seeing a talking point moved from a logical place to an emotional one; what is the actual emodied feeling of ‘danger’? One of the roots of patriarchy is the bias that there is no inequity, that this imbalance is imagined, because if you are socialised as a man, the actual feeling of threat, or disrespect, or dismissal, is not an actual feeling you have felt because you don’t get taught the empathy to deduce that someone else’s experience of life might be different than your own. So what if you took a man, who is trying to logically express that the ‘danger’ is an imagined threat from women actively looking for trouble where there isn’t any, whilst unintentionally proving their point because he has not even considered the very real danger he himself is in? I was very nervous about using the female characters as vessels to express an idea rather than well-rounded characters in their own right, to not use femicide as just a jumping off point but an emotional reckoning for women with a rage they’ve decided to express through action, but in retrospect I know that it’s a film with more to say to men willing to listen than women who obviously aren’t learning anything new here. What it needed most was actors willing to bring themselves to the characters, and so I’m extremely lucky to have Aisha, Miraede, Aadhya and Laurence bring such authenticity to characters who we only see for a short window of their life. It’s a bit scary to build the opening minutes of a film on the audience’s presumption that they’re watching a reductive piece of trash, so the depth and nuance of Aisha’s work in the first dialogue scene always gives me a wave of relief.

I believe that if you invest in the right things, you will reap the benefits. Maybe not in the way you had intended, but the cumulative effect of following your truth will amount to something good in return. On the third and final day of our shoot, exhausted but optimistic about the footage we’d shot so far, we set up for the opening shot of the film, the one I’d played over and over in my head a thousand times. I called ‘action’, and as we heard Aisha’s heels clicking their way across the bridge, a little fox strutted across the walkway, right through the bottom of frame. Our jaws dropped. If you choose to be cynical about shit like that, we are simply different people, that is a sign if ever there was one.

That shot is what you see in the opening seconds of this movie. Whenever I have to get out of the car on the first day of a shoot, or have to wade through the logistical nightmare of contracts and invoices and location scouts and availabilities, I think about that lil’ fox and know that this is what me and Liz are meant to be doing. A huge huge thank you to everyone who made it happen, to Jack, and Darcey, and our parents, and our donors.

Get Home Safe will always be the film that meant the most in the grand scheme of things. It has its cracks but the seeds are there.