SHADOW

There’s something uniquely unsettling about shadows. They slither at the edges of our vision, distort in the dim light, stretch into unholy shapes when we aren’t paying attention. Kamell Allaway’s "Shadow" takes that primal unease and fashions it into a 12-minute nightmare—an exercise in pure, creeping dread.

Shot in stark black and white, the film carries the eerie fingerprints of German Expressionism, evoking the nightmarish geometry of Nosferatu and the psychological torment of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But make no mistake—this isn’t an antiquated horror homage. It’s a modern, visceral experience, one that slithers under the skin with the slow, deliberate malice of a childhood fear you never quite outgrew.

At the heart of the film is Ahtna (Katy Wright-Mead), a mother whose shadow—her literal, elongated double—begins to break free from her body, haunting both her and her daughter, Elise (Valentina Gordon). The shadow is no mere trick of the light. It looms, morphs, and writhes with an unnatural will of its own. One moment, it resembles Ahtna herself; the next, it is something altogether inhuman—a sinewy, twisting entity that seeps into the walls, watching. Waiting.

What "Shadow" does so well is capture the disorienting, fever-dream logic of a nightmare. The short’s minimal dialogue makes the experience feel almost suffocatingly silent, placing the full weight of terror on the visuals. And what visuals they are. One of the most chilling moments sees Ahtna slamming her head into the wooden floor again and again, the dull thud reverberating like an eerie metronome. It’s the kind of imagery that bypasses rational thought and digs straight into the subconscious, making you shift uncomfortably in your seat without quite knowing why.

There’s no hand-holding here, no clear explanations. Is the shadow a manifestation of Ahtna’s subconscious? A representation of maternal guilt, of the all-consuming fear of harming one’s own child? Or is it simply a force of pure malevolence, a specter untethered from logic or meaning? Allaway leaves that for the audience to decide. What’s certain is that Shadow thrives on ambiguity, the way true horror so often does.

If there’s one slight critique, it’s that the short leans more on mood than on traditional storytelling. Characterization is minimal, and the narrative is more of a creeping sensation than a structured tale. But honestly, that feels like part of the point. Shadow isn’t a film that wants to explain itself. It’s a film that wants to unsettle you, to leave a lingering, shivering presence at the back of your mind long after the screen has faded to black.
And it succeeds.

By the time Shadow is over, you might just find yourself staring at the walls, watching your own shadow a little more closely. Just in case.