A showcase and storefront for an award-winning horror film studio
A site that feels like the films: dark, deliberate, and a little unsettling, with a quiet storefront behind it.
A small, award-winning horror production company needed more than a portfolio page. They need to show the work and the awards, say what they believe in, sell their short films behind a gate, and see who is watching and downloading, without a web team.
We're designing the experience first as a working mockup: a showcase that treats each film as an event, an awards page that doesn't read like a trophy case, a short manifesto, a gated screening-room for purchasing shorts, and an owner's view of traffic and downloads. References the studio brought us ranged from A24 and Blumhouse to The Cure and Goblin, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone.
A working visual mockup, under review with the studio. Film purchases, access control, and the owner's dashboard come next; nothing is for sale yet.
Read the whole story
The studio makes short horror films, and makes them well; the awards are real and the sensibility is specific. What they had online was a portfolio grid, which is the wrong container for work whose whole point is atmosphere. They also had a practical problem a grid can't solve: they want to sell access to the shorts, know who's watching and downloading, and keep the lights on without a web team.
We started with tone, because everything else follows from it. The references the studio brought ranged from A24 and Blumhouse to The Cure and Goblin, which told us the site should be dark, slow, and a little unsettling, with type that holds still and imagery that doesn't. Each film gets treated as an event rather than a tile: a poster, a synopsis that reads like a program note, the festival history, the people. The awards page is the part most studios get wrong, so we designed it to read as part of the story instead of a trophy case. A short manifesto says what the studio believes about the genre, in its own words.
Behind the showcase is a quiet storefront. The screening room is gated: a short can be bought and watched in place, and the owner can see traffic, purchases, and downloads from a simple view that doesn't need explaining. We built all of this first as a working visual mockup so the studio can walk through the experience, react to it, and change its mind before any payment or access code is written.
The mockup is under review with the studio now. Purchases, access control, and the owner's dashboard are the next build; nothing is for sale yet, and the live site stays as it is until the new one is ready end to end.