Spooky Encounters of the Sad Kind: 11 Minutes of Handmade Ghostly Magic

The film I am introducing you to today came to me as a submission from its creator. ‘Spooky Encounters of the Sad Kind’ by Jonathan Wilhelmsson runs approximately 11 minutes, and every one of them is handmade. By the time it ends, you are left wanting more, which is the rarest thing a short film can do.

Let me begin with the title, because Jonathan wants you to underestimate it. It borrows its shape from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and swaps wonder for melancholy, and on first read it sounds like a joke. 

That is deliberate. Jonathan was born on Halloween, the night the old Celts called Samhain, when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to grow thin. He built the film to begin lighthearted and goofy before turning toward something real and emotional. The title is the first part of the trick.

The story follows Liz Evans, a struggling filmmaker who moves into a new flat in London and begins to notice strange occurrences. Anyone raised on modern horror knows where this road usually leads: the knocking escalates, the house turns hostile, and the woman either dies or crawls out of the ordeal after a great deal of hell. Thankfully, this is not another imitation of The Conjuring or The Exorcist.

What Jonathan draws on is older than that. Before the haunted house became a machine for jump scares, the ghost story was a fireside form. The Victorians told them by the hearth at Christmas, and Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost proved more than a century ago that a ghost could be ridiculous and heartbreaking in the same breath. 

This film belongs to that lineage. It is a wholesome story in which the main characters, who are also the only characters in the film, are flawed in their own ways. As you learn more about their demons, you empathize with them on a deeper level. To make an audience this attached to two figures in such a short span of time is a real achievement.

And then there is Toast the Ghost. I absolutely loved this film, and I loved Toast most of all. He is a beautifully designed character, and I came to love him as much as I loved the sheeted figure in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story. What makes him remarkable is how little he has to work with. 

Toast is a blend of practical puppetry and visual effects, and the puppet could do almost nothing beyond basic rotation. He has no mouth, no eyebrows, not even pupils. In the note that came with his submission, Jonathan wrote:

“I think there’s something about the simplicity and lack of features that actually makes him expressive, maybe because the viewer is forced to imagine it.”

He is right, and the principle is ancient. The masks of Japanese Noh theatre are carved to be nearly neutral, and a skilled performer makes one smile by tilting it upward or grieve by tilting it down. A puppet that can only rotate works by the same law. Every turn of Toast’s head becomes an emotion because the viewer supplies it. That is not a limitation worked around. That is the oldest magic in the theatre.

The making of the film deserves its own telling. It is set in a chilly, rainy London autumn, but it was shot over a couple of summer days in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the time of year when the Swedish night barely arrives. 

While the rest of the city headed for the beach, Jonathan and his team sealed themselves indoors and covered the windows to manufacture darkness. The crew was usually two to four people, and on some days it was only Jonathan and his lead actress Karen on set.

Then came the harder part. Jonathan finished the entire post-production himself, VFX included, on his laptop, assembling the film over many nights and weekends. He has admitted he would have loved the resources to hire a VFX team. He did not have them, so he spent the one resource he did have, which was time. 

It is hard not to notice the mirror here: a film about a struggling filmmaker, made by a filmmaker who carried nearly the whole weight himself. When you see how well the shots are composed and how beautifully the film is graded, that patience is visible on screen, and you will find this passion of his inspiring.

‘Spooky Encounters of the Sad Kind’ released on October 20, eleven days before Halloween and Jonathan’s birthday, and is now streaming on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/jonathanwilhelmsson. Watch it with the lights low.

Just a disclaimer, I think it’s a perfect film for you to watch with kids, but there are curse words used in frustration, though beeped out, you can still take the call.

Now, here’s my rating, and I am reducing the half point for it not being long enough.