The Nicky Nack

In the restaurant lounge of the pub the mobile DJ is playing Glen Campbell. The hostelry is The Nicky Nack, what seems like tartan on the floors, an old pamphlet about infernal doings on the wall. We'll get that name again, the same Seventies orange and orchestral stab of genre. The Cabin In The Woods did it and I've no doubt that if Rabbie Burns had access to the tools he'd have indulged too.

It's misty out, somewhere it would seem in the hinterlands of Southerly Scotland and Northerly England. There's a particular kind of traffic, of transport. In the credits it's revealed as County Durham, but the footsteps sound the same across that belt. Though not quite, as Timo Saila's sound work will demonstrate.

Tom Oxenham directs, co-writes with Hugo Nicholson. They've been able to license (or at the very least appropriately credit) two songs, Turn Around, Look At Me by big Glen and From The Heart by Donny McCulloch. In a properly short film, just six minutes, that sonic commitment has a weight, and indeed they are the foundations that Alun Armstrong's central performance bridges. This is a third short for Oxenham, his 2019 short Man-Spider imagined the fate of (at least one) Peter Parker's spider, the consequences to that fateful arachnid of being imbued with the proportionate etcetera of a man.

Co-writer Hugo Nicholson has here a début in that position, though he has superheroic connections of his own with a behind the scenes credit for location management on The Batman to go with a fair few turns before rather than behind the camera. Armstrong is an industry veteran and in the act of checking just how many roles he's credited with (150 per IMDB) I found myself being reminded of quite how much genre work he's done. That's even before trying to determine how many names he's been directed by, from Ridley Scott to Tim Burton. It's also not his first horror comedy role, though it may be equally hard to track down a copy of Billy The Kid And The Green Baize Vampire...

Screening at Glasgow Short Film Festival's 15th edition, as part of the recurring Scared Shortless strand, The Nicky Nack was in good company. That included other horror tinged with humour, this shares with Visitors a fondness not just for the jump scare but a certain jocularity. It's also got sets filled with details both incidental and expository, enough to potentially lose one's head over.

I mentioned the Bard of Ayrshire not just because of geographic similarity and historical adjacency, but the poetic elements that recalled Tam O'Shanter. Admittedly, seeing any film with rhyme and rum (or at least other spirits) might mind one of the man whose museum is in Mauchline. The Nicky Nack mentions witches too, but it's in a certain warmth that it becomes something unco good in mixing the dread and the drouthy.