‘Dream Creep’: The Scariest Short on the Festival Circuit Will Make You Fear Your Own Head

Hang onto your ear holes! You can finally add “made someone in the audience puke” to the growing list of accolades recommending “Dream Creep.”

Among the best and buzziest ideas to come out of the festival circuit this year, writer/director Carlos A.F. Lopez’s brilliant horror short — about a couple awakened in the night to “sounds emanating from an unlikely orifice” — debuted at Sundance in January. Since then, it has won Scariest Short at The Overlook Film Festival and snagged the special mention for Worst Nightmare at Palm Springs ShortFest (where, full disclosure, this writer voted on the awarding jury). “Dream Creep” has also screened at South by Southwest and other shorts showcases where its nightmarish reputation as “THAT ear movie” tends to precede it.

“I’ve had this idea for a long time,” Lopez told IndieWire, describing an epiphany he had while sleeping next to his wife, executive producer Cathy Lopez. “It sprang very organically from me waking up from a dream that was just really…loud.”

Dreams so vivid they feel like reality have inspired horror movies since before Freddy Krueger took up residence on Elm Street, but Lopez angles at something truly new and nauseating here. When David (Ian Edlund) wakes up to hear his wife Suzy (Sidney Jayne Hunt) pleading for help from inside her own head, he’s forced to make a choice. Facing an unseen intercranial foe, Suzy spends the first half of the short as a disembodied voice telling David not to wake her up but to do exactly as she says. Otherwise, Suzy will die.

“I remember looking over at my wife and thinking, ‘She has tohave heard that dream. There’s no way she didn’t. Viscerally, I felt so much,’” Lopez recalled. “Then, as I was looking at her, I thought, ‘What if I could hear just a little bit of her dream, just a little sound?’ Because when you look at someone who is asleep and they are dreaming, there’s this whole universe happening to them and you can’t understand it unless they tell you.”

Explored first as a forty-page pilot that Lopez submitted to the 2021 Sundance Episodic Labs (the script made it to the second round, no small feat), the idea for “Dream Creep” manifested as a sci-fi cheating scandal initially. In the proposed TV show, one troubled spouse would overhear the adulterous thoughts of their unconscious partner and face the consequences of that invasion across multiple episodes. Rendered as a short, however, it’s simpler and far scarier. Suzy assures David he can help her — so long as he’ll perform a perpendicular lobotomy by inserting a meat thermometer into his sleeping wife’s ear.

“I think it just has a bit more of a punch in the horror format,” producer Megan Leonard told IndieWire. “The concept to me was just so bizarre, and it felt like something that should already exist in horror in a way. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s not already…something?’”

Longtime friends and living legends of the Seattle Third Wave (that’s the nickname the city’s flourish filmmaking scene has given itself, but you saw the moniker formalized here first), Lopez and Leonard love movies. They spent the pandemic exchanging VHS tapes, and agree that the director’s love of archival cinema matched with his producer’s eye for current festival programming was integral to the sprawling collaboration behind “Dream Creep.”  

“I’ve been collecting my favorites for years,” Leonard said. “But this really felt like a culmination, getting the entire group together and using all of our skills and all of our energy with people that understand the stakes of what we’re trying to do.”

“That’s kind of how she sold it to me,” Caso said. “Megan called me randomly one day and told me about the script. She said it was really good but Carlos wanted to work on it. Then, five or so months later, she called me again and said, ‘So, would you by any chance be interested in partnering with me on that project for real?’ I said yes immediately because I love these people.”

Leonard and Caso, who at one time ran in different circles but always kept tabs on each other’s work, first partnered on the 2018 short film “I See Through You.” That project was written and directed by none other than Lael Rogers, who designed the special effects for “Dream Creep” and joined the producers and IndieWire in Palm Springs. (The writer/director screened her spectacular short “The Influencer” there as well; Lopez spoke with IndieWire by phone and was not in attendance.)

A dazzling web of geolocated production credits, Lopez and Leonard assembled a crew of Seattle’s finest filmmakers and slid many of them into new specialties for a two-day shoot at Lopez’s house. Setting up her own “mixing office” in the the family’s basement, Rogers used at least six different kinds of blood (Eyes! Nose! Mouth! Chunky! Splatter! Bulk!) to take the terror of “Dream Creep” past its aural tipping point. Oh, yeah, David goes for it with the meat thermometer. That’s what made some poor audience member, who saw the short at Vidiots in Los Angeles, throw up.

“I’d never ever done practical effects,” Rogers said. “Actually, it was Ian, the lead actor of the movie, who suggested that I start doing them. And my immediate thought was, ‘Well, I should see if Carlos would just let me!’ I’d read the script and it was so good that I wanted to be involved in any capacity. Then, I realized that the effects were such an integral part of the story, I really wanted someone to care for them in a way that was going to make it work.”

Never one to ask actors to do anything she wouldn’t do herself, Leonard agreed to step in as Rogers’ test subject for the outrageous nosebleed gag Suzy needed to pull off post-stabbing. Too much fake blood was put too high in Leonard’s nasal cavity for the first attempt, and it flooded the “Dream Creep” producer’s sinuses. The prop plasma would eventually stain the Lopez’s bedroom walls too, when a pressurized stream of blood jetting out of Suzy’s ear goes full Jackson Pollock on a hanging painting. It’s an epic shot with a legacy that’s lasting.

“Before this goes in any publication,” Rogers warned IndieWire with a beaming smile, “I will have you know I protected that wall so well. The blood just wasn’t running right and Carlos told me, ‘Take that protection off. These are my walls. I’m going to repaint.’”

“And one day he will repaint,” Caso quipped. The blood, Leonard said, was “perfect.”

When “Dream Creep” wrapped, Lopez gave his producers gift cards for Scarecrow Video. That’s a local archival institution essential to the Washington filmmaking community that’s garnered more attention since the threat of its closure made national arts headlines last month. Though Lopez is happy for his idea to stay a near-perfect short, the filmmaker has more than enough material for a full-length “Dream Creep.”

“Every time we meet up, Carlos and I have a new feature,” Leonard said. “We’re like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, are we up to five?’ It just feels so boundless in terms of what we can do with it.”

The twists Lopez is proposing wouldn’t just make a good idea longer. In keeping with the fastidious artistry behind the most petrifying pillow talk ever put to short film (you’ll notice David wakes up at 12:34 a.m. and the short itself is 12 minutes and 34 seconds long), Lopez envisions an equally imaginative future for what he says could be turned into a psycho-parasitic alien race tapping into human thoughts like open source A.I.

“I’m definitely in the feature writing zone of it,” Lopez said, considering dreams from a kaleidoscopic new angle. “So far, it feels like it’s this alien interdimensional thing where our dreams share a connection with another world. Maybe they’re using us and we just haven’t known. It’s weird that I’ve chosen to be a filmmaker and artist in my life because I’m so troubled by the idea that we have imagination. What — or who — are we dreaming for?”

If Lopez’s genius turns into the genre franchise it should be, Leonard (who has reported increased sleep paralysis since making the short) would like to see the “Dream Creep” universe stay in the Pacific nNrthwest with her and the rest of the Third Wave.

“We’re staking a claim to this idea, yes,” Leonard said, “but we’re also staking a bigger claim that some of the best movies are being made in Seattle.” Sounds like a dream.

“Dream Creep” is in select theaters for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Shorts program.