Short Film Showcase: The Ten Steps
2004 Dir. Brendan Muldowney Duration: 10 mins Katie (Jill Harding) is left to babysit her younger brother in the family’s new house in rural Ireland while her parents dine out with her father’s new employer. There is a power cut and Katie calls her father who tells her to go down into the cellar to flip the fuse switch. He attempts to keep her calm as she descends the stairs – only a few weeks prior she had a panic attack in the cellar after a classmate told her the Devil was once seen down there… Director Brendan Muldowney may employ familiar conventions to tell this sinister tale – a young babysitter, an isolated and spooky house, a power cut, rumours of morbid events from the past and a candlelit descent into a dark cellar - but he keeps things suggestive, creepy and offers us something genuinely memorable and deeply unsettling by the end. Carefully building an atmosphere of mounting dread, he slowly but surely cranks up the tension and distress to almost unbearable levels be...