CINEMA
DEMON BOX (2024)
Genre: Horror.
Director: Sam Wainsteim.
[Seen at Dark Red Film Festival 2024]
"After festival rejections, a director revises his intensely personal short film about trauma, suicide, and the Holocaust, and transforms it into a painful, blunt and funny dissection of the film and his life."
OUR MOVIE REVIEW:
Equal parts horror, fantasy, and coming-of-age drama, Demon Box is an odd mixture of childhood fears and meta commentary.
The stream-of-conscious type story follows a child who misses his recently-deceased grandfather. The boy has an active imagination, particularly surrounding a box where his grandfather has trapped a demon, and an ingrained fear of Nazis. Grounded terror indeed for a full generation. What makes Demon Box different is its ongoing narration - by director Sam Wainsteim - that is not merely an audible play-by-play, nor is it a detached Greek Chorus of sorts. Rather, Wainsteim provides a director commentary of sorts. Weaving his thoughts of the actual filming in with that of the transpiring story. As a result, Demon Box is highly unique with its setup, yet also extremely neurotic with Wainsteim’s overly-Jewish self-effacement.
While the young boy (Liam Hill) laments the loss of his grandfather (Michael Jordan - whose cool name Wainsteim specifically highlights), his older teen self (JJ Greenberg) contemplates suicide - all under the spectre of a Nazi presence. The threatening demon is icing on the cake.
Wainsteim mixes in family drama and Jewish plight while building up to the Nazi horror and the boxed demon’s eventual unleashing, yet it is the exact uniqueness of this short - the prevalent commentary - that disrupts the suspense. Under this stylistic-setting, drama and horror alike are, at times, reduced to a pithy one-liner.
Clever and unique, Demon Box presents a relatable-side of horror. Such magic, however, can sometimes be silent.