This 3 minutes long film from SCAD shorts leaves you more stunned than many acclaimed cinematic movies of the last decade!

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Camryn Manheim, Jane Adams, and Dylan Baker in Happiness (1998)

Logan Link

A young girl is playing on some waste ground when she finds a pencil with a face. Whatever she draws with the pencil becomes real. Just an ordinary day.

Christian Simmons

Pencil Face

Does the creepy horror feel well

A young girl is playing on some waste ground when she finds a pencil with a face. Whatever she draws with the pencil becomes real. Just an ordinary day.

The word you&apos;re looking for is &quot;unsettling&quot;. This is the word that the film aims squarely at and it is a state that it more or less achieves. The story is a simple one and, although the specific details remain to be seen, we know that this will end badly for the girl. We know this because the film very much plays to the genre of b-movie horror such as Chucky or the like. The face on the pencil is frozen into a permanent grin and has the sort of look on its face that to a child may not bother them, but to an adult it only looks creepy and wrong. This is played out under a score which only suggests creepiness and horror; OK it repeats too much for too long as a score, but it works for this.

So the film works well as a reference to b-grade horrors because it gets the aesthetics mostly right and it is shot with a detached emptiness which could almost be a fashion shoot because Logan Link looks very much a model with her slightly awkward look and long thin frame (edit: just after posting this I decided to Google and yes, Link is indeed a model). The film doesn&apos;t really do much beyond this odd creeping horror feel. Others have tried to make the film be a comment on pedophiles or related topics, but this is a stretch and one the film itself never makes. Enjoy it for what it does well and it is good enough to carry the short run time even if it does have some flaws with repetition and lack of a slightly stronger ending.

A young girl is playing on some waste ground when she finds a pencil with a face. Whatever she draws with the pencil becomes real. Just an ordinary day.

The word you're looking for is "unsettling". This is the word that the film aims squarely at and it is a state that it more or less achieves. The story is a simple one and, although the specific details remain to be seen, we know that this will end badly for the girl. We know this because the film very much plays to the genre of b-movie horror such as Chucky or the like. The face on the pencil is frozen into a permanent grin and has the sort of look on its face that to a child may not bother them, but to an adult it only looks creepy and wrong. This is played out under a score which only suggests creepiness and horror; OK it repeats too much for too long as a score, but it works for this.

So the film works well as a reference to b-grade horrors because it gets the aesthetics mostly right and it is shot with a detached emptiness which could almost be a fashion shoot because Logan Link looks very much a model with her slightly awkward look and long thin frame (edit: just after posting this I decided to Google and yes, Link is indeed a model). The film doesn't really do much beyond this odd creeping horror feel. Others have tried to make the film be a comment on pedophiles or related topics, but this is a stretch and one the film itself never makes. Enjoy it for what it does well and it is good enough to carry the short run time even if it does have some flaws with repetition and lack of a slightly stronger ending.

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Pencil Face

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