Empty Windows

Empty Windows exposes the truth about mortality and blurs the line between evil and mental illness. It questions our perception of reality and how we are incapable of fully understanding someone else's. The inspiration for the story came from several real life occurrences. The little boy is based off someone I went to high school with who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at an early age. After high school, he was hospitalized following several psychotic episodes. One of them involved him removing all of the air conditioners from his parent's house because he thought they were filling the rooms with poison gas. Later on, he was arrested for attacking his mother with a baseball bat because he thought she was trying to kill him. Schizophrenia is commonly confused with Multiple Personality Disorder in movies which is extremely inaccurate. A textbook symptom of schizophrenia is auditory hallucinations and the film explores the idea that these "voices" have a consciousness and personalities of their own. If someone is experiencing a false reality, does this truly make them evil? I have always been fascinated by forensic psychiatry, the complexity of the human mind and what can go wrong with it. We wanted to show how debilitating mental illness can be and how the mind can wreak havoc on itself and others.