Short Film: The Night Courier

This is a short around the 20 minutes mark that was directed by Mason McDonald and released in 2021. It is a neatly put together piece but also a piece where I picked up more from the IMDb description than the short actively communicated.

It starts with a woman (Emily Tynan McDaniel) entering an apartment. She puts her bag down and pops the bedroom light on. She puts some plastic down in the bedroom doorway and then turns the light out. She picks up a book, entitled Who Are You Really, and then vanishes off screen.

an open invitation

A man enters the apartment and heads straight to the phone. He seems to be talking to a voice mail. Putting the receiver down he notes that the book isn’t there, walks into the bedroom, realises there is plastic on the floor when she appears and hits him from behind. I thought the welcome mat, “Come on in! All are Welcome!” was a nice touch – playing with invitation. We see this as she drags his plastic wrapped body out.

bleeding

She drives him out into the country, listening to a language tape as she does, and then we see him tied, being bled into a jar. She takes the jar and spills a trail to a crate, the rest going onto the top of the crate but, in the background, we see the chair is empty. She realises that he is gone as the lid of the crate begins to be banged, from the inside. He runs to the nearby house, calling for help…

vampire

The escape will draw the householder (Paul Gregory Clark) in, some nearby cops and the thing (Maximilian Koger) in the crate. However, what the IMDb description outlined, that perhaps wasn’t fully communicated in the short was, “In a society where vampirism is known and somewhat common, a night courier is hired to feed those who have been turned and are unable to live amongst us. The effects of vampirism occur on a spectrum where some are able to pass as 'normal', while the effects make others so volatile that average life is impossible.”

Emily Tynan McDaniel as the Courier

It’s an interesting premise that deserves pulling into a larger piece, the fact that she has planned out who will be the victim is shown in a notebook of assigned victims she carries. She is a stoic antagonist and I do think it would be interesting to take that longer ride with her. But, for now, we have the short film…

The imdb page is here.