Nightmare Radio: The Night Stalker

In a little booth in an otherwise deserted radio station, DJ Candy (Paula Brasca) takes her listeners through the night. It's quiet, the lights are low and the ghosts of other films flit by. Viewers might think of 2020’s punchy Ten Minutes To Midnight or last year’s multi-award winning short The Lone Wolf. There are similarities to both, though this scenario is neither as incisive nor as entertaining. Its primary function is as a wraparound for a mixed bunch of short films on horror related themes. Listeners call the station to share their scary stories. Candy is disinclined to give them much credence; the danger is that viewers will agree with her.

The film’s scariest scene comes at the very start of the first short: the very real nightmare of a woman spilling coffee on her laptop. It’s one moment in a life full of small aggravations. She finds relief in a growing obsession with urban foxes, photographing them and gradually taking on some of their behaviours, much to her partner’s distress. It’s like a condensed version of Marianna Palka’s superb Bitch, but without the subtlety or character development. Still, it’s a reasonably polished piece of work.

Next up is a story which recalls Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes (which itself started life as a short), in which a man watching closed circuit television witnesses incidents in the corridor of his apartment block before they happen. Again, it relies on trying to shock rather than delivering any narrative depth. It’s better than the third story, however, which sees young people venture into a haunted asylum. From ghoulies and ghosties and twee children’s nursery music, good Lord deliver us!

Whatever their flaws, these are believably the sort of stories which people might try to impress their fellow listeners with in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, in the wraparound story, a repeat caller tries to impress Candy. The name he gives is Jack. “Like Jack the Ripper,” he says, as if he earnestly believes that makes him sound original or scary. Nothing comes out of his mouth that is not a cliché. Again, Candy grasps the situation pretty quickly and tells him that he’s boring. The problem is that the writers do not seem to have grasped that viewers will feel the same way.

It escalates, of course. Despite her summation, Candy gets rattled at times as if she has somehow been shielded from the usual female experience of encountering that kind of nonsense every other day. With nowhere else to go, the film escalates the brutality and misogynistic sentiment before a rather obvious twist ending. Though she does what she can with her character, Brasca never gets the opportunity to show viewers even a fraction of what she’s capable of.

If you’re up late at night and have a craving for horror stories, well, there are worse anthologies out there, but you might be better off just listening to the radio.