By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Demons in the Closet (2023) is a blood-soaked claymation short film, in which the protagonist slays a bunch of human-eating demons that come from a supernatural realm inside his closet.
It was directed by James Smith, a young self-taught animator from Germany. “I’ve always been fascinated with stop-motion animation, because it has a real aesthetic,” stated Smith in the interview for the Fantastic Pavilion and added that “today’s animation with CGI doesn’t feel near to me as stop-motion does. Sometimes you notice some little dust on the figures and I really like this, you see that someone crafted these characters and created the scene with their hands.”
Smith’s other major interest is horror, particularly movies made decades ago. “I’m a big fan of the body horror cinema from the eighties, like David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where they’re using practical, disgusting, disturbing, gory effects. You don’t see these kinds of things often these days, that’s why I love the eighties so much,” Smith revealed.
For the violent moments in Demons in the Closet, Smith also took inspiration from the popular slasher subgenre: “I’m influenced by slasher movies like Friday the 13th (1980) or even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Subconsciously, I’m influenced by Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining (1980). My own protagonist hacks and slashes himself through the demons and kills everything along the way,” said the director.
Another clay character in Demons in the Closet is the protagonist’s loyal dog, who is important to the emotional side of the short. Smith recalled that “I had this idea of the protagonist being with his dog, and as he gets pulled through the closet’s door into another dimension, he finds himself quite lonely and has to find a way to encounter all of these demons. In the end, he hears the barking of his dog and realizes there’s someone still waiting for him. There’s always someone who you can rely on and in this case is the dog.”
Demons in the Closet lasts just over a minute, but its production was certainly a significant challenge for Smith. “This one took me two months to complete, with two weeks of full animation. I had to work in between so it was quite difficult to arrange it all. I self funded this thing. Sometimes I even work on it like 17 or 15 hours straight on a day, because with claymation the characters can break, you can ruin a scene quite easily, so sometimes you have to do it in one take. Then four weeks of editing and sound design. Stop-motion always takes so much time and is so nerve-racking. But I had to do this one. I always wanted to integrate body horror and stop-motion, and create something totally weird and crazy,” Smith concluded.
Demons in the Closet has been shown at such festivals as Fantastic Fest, Mórbido and Slamdance.