Private Project

The Awakening

Produced by StudioCanal-funded BIRDIE PICTURES, The Awakening is a dread-fuelled horror short which fuses elements of British folk horror with hints of Japanese tech-horror, blended to create a nerve-wracking tale about a man who discovers he’s been sleepwalking and is curious to learn where he goes in the middle of the night. Co-written by director Al Campbell (Code404, Two Weeks to Live) and Nat Saunders & James Serafinowicz (Sick Note, Truth Seekers) and starring Daniel Mays (Vera Drake, Atonement, Rogue One, Line of Duty), The Awakening builds on its themes of loneliness and isolation, taking its protagonist on a voyage into inexplicable existential terror, as well as teasing the longer-format story that it’s a teaser for.

Brief Synopsis:
Mike (Daniel Mays) lives alone in a quiet village. He wakes one morning with muddy feet. Intrigued to know what he’s getting up to in the middle of the night, he sets his phone to record the room next time he goes to bed. Reviewing the footage in the morning, he’s shocked to see that in the early hours he sits bolt upright in bed and sleepwalks out of the room! Mike buys a GoPro and straps it to his head the next night. And when he follows the footage of his sleepwalking self on a journey from wakefulness to a horrifying nightmare…

  • Daniel Mays
    Key Cast
    Pearl Harbor, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, Rehab, Shifty, Red Riding, Made in Dagenham, Ashes to Ashes, Outcasts, Mrs Biggs, Byzantium, Line of Duty, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Des and White Lines
  • Nat Saunders
    Writer
    Sick Note, Truth Seekers
  • James Serafinowicz
    Writer
    Sick Note, Truth Seekers
  • Al Campbell
    Director
    The Change for Channel 4. Two Weeks To Live for Sky/HBO Max, series 1,2&3 of Sky’s hit series Code404, Charlie Brooker’s Death To 2020 documentary for Netflix and Inside No.9 for BBC.
  • Charlotte Surtees
    Producer
    Two Weeks to Live (2020), Code 404 (2020) and True Heroes (2008)
  • Phil Temple
    Executive Producer
    The Last Kingdom, Code 404, Two Weeks To Live, Lucky Man, Bumps
  • Mattias Nyberg
    Director of Photography
    Detectorists, War of the Worlds, Two Weeks To Live, Britannia, Pure
  • Samantha Harley
    Production Designer
    Attack the Block, Sex Education, Four Lions
  • Mike Holliday
    Editor
    Ghosts, The Baby, Everyone Else Burns
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Horror, Supernatural
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 58 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 29, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    12,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Alexa LF, with Arri DNA lenses
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Al Campbell

Al is a British director who collaborated with Charlie Brooker in his early career on the various Wipe shows: Screenwipe, Newswipe, and Gameswipe. Most recently, he directed The Change for C4. Previously, he directed Two Weeks To Live for Sky/HBO Max, series 1,2&3 of Sky’s hit series Code404, Charlie Brooker’s Death To 2020 documentary for Netflix and Inside No.9 for BBC.

Writer's Biography:
Nat Saunders and James Serafinowicz started out writing on the BBC sketch show Big Train and went on to contribute to Smack the Pony, Brass Eye, The Peter Serafinowicz Show and The Armando Iannucci Shows. They created and wrote black comedy Sick Note for Netflix, starring Rupert Grint, Nick Frost, Don Johnson and Lindsay Lohan, then teamed up with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to showrun horror-comedy Truth Seekers for Amazon Prime Video.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Eight years ago, Nat Saunders and Chris Hayward sent me a short synopsis of a horror short called The Awakening about a man who wakes up with mud on his feet each morning and sets out trying to establish where he is going in his sleep each night. The premise had me hooked and it has been residing in my head ever since, surfacing between jobs to prod me with fresh thoughts and ideas. James Serafinowicz joined the project, adding more layers to the mystery. I had to make this short.

It’s important to point out that after much thought, development and writing, The Awakening is a tease for a much larger story encompassing the whole village that the film is set in. But at its heart, this short is about loneliness, and the fear of being forgotten or replaced without anyone realising, a situation we all had a brush with during the pandemic in 2020. Establishing the right character to endure the story was key to its impact. Mike is an outsider, ostracised from the small community and his work colleagues, and with the rise in people working from home and Zoom meetings this only reinforces his predicament. Who could fear more the thought of being replaced but someone who has no meaningful relationships with anyone or impact in anyone else’s life, least of all their own? What if someone or something else made more of your life than you ever did, or used it for more nefarious purposes?

The Awakening is a horror, but I was keen to keep it more psychological rather than tangible, at least at this stage. The mystery of where Mike is going each night is what attracts people to the story, and so it was important to me for the audience to go on that journey with Mike and let it slowly unfold in step with the character. I strived to make it as filmic and stylish as I could in the time we had, and with very little dialogue throughout due to there being one main character, it was a great opportunity for storytelling with clear and concise visuals hand in hand with Danny Mays’ wonderful, nuanced performance.

Although Mike is the main character of the piece, the forest he ends up in needed to have some degree of character and malevolence which I worked hard to craft both visually and audibly. The imposing, almost church-like trees rising up above Mike as he stands at the boundary into the forest have a deep sense of unease about them, and as the music rises and Mike pushes on over the boundary the diegetic sound almost completely disappears as Mike trudges through the dense trees, not even the wildlife seems present anymore. What he finds there is purposefully obtuse, conjuring a fear of this strange unknown, yet also somehow recognisable and old. At the end of the film there are still questions to be answered and the audience is invited to speculate on Mike’s fate. I hope to one day either confirm or surprise those speculations.