FILMS

THE NIGHTMARE

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Tormented by one surreal, terrifying predicament after another, a boy is confronted with his inner fear. As the air becomes harder and harder to breath, as his tormentors become stranger and press in closer, the boy begins to realize the true nature of his situation.

Kind Words

(Christiana’s) short film The Nightmare is a taut, clever and potent short which both disturbed and entertained me and has won a lot of acclaim in the indie festival circuit including the Montreal Underground Film Festival as well as becoming a YouTube favourite.

Christiana shows us all that the time of the “big idea” people is arriving by producing a top shelf piece of film with great visuals, great sound design and most of all an engrossing and smart story while doing a complete end-run around the creative establishment. Did I mention he does all this without any real dialogue? Oh yeah, he does that too. Dave Pace, Fangoria

“Christiana takes a couple generic horror standards and an easy “target” to generate suspense, i.e. a child in peril, but keeps the largely wordless story moving along at a nice clip to get the audience quickly hooked. Shooting in B&W gives the film an eerie, otherworldly feel so that when the scenes shift abruptly, it’s easy to go along for the ride.The perspective also changes quite frequently, easily shifting from taking the victim’s perspective to put the audience into his young, terrified shoes to showing us his reactions to the horrible visions he must face. For a virtually wordless film, Christiana does a great job getting audience to identify with the main character and allows us to reflect on our own fears that we all faced in childhood.

There’s also lots of other nice things working strongly in the film’s favor, from the the spooky, almost background-noise-like soundtrack to the really creative ending. The film’s only about six minutes long, but Christiana packs a good amount of terror into it and manages that short time wisely by making every shot really count.” — Mike Everleth, Underground Film Journal

Joseph Christiana‘s The Nightmare is a very intriguing, well executed short horror-fantasy film that uses its brief running time well to weave a series of odd, surreal, nightmare sequences together as a young boy is pursued by … something … Stick with it to the end – there’s effective dream-logic sequences that disturb nicely, some good horror-fantasy imagery and excellent use of sound right from the start, leading up to a satisfying climax, a very effective piece of short film craft. —Forbidden Planet International

“Joseph Christiana’s Nightmare is initially deceptive in that it belies its universally affecting premise. This is the art, the challenge of film in its short form. To grip an audience and over the course of a few miserly minutes transport them. To expertly upend the expected and leave the viewer with a slight of hand slice of life that resonates. The Nightmare does just this within its six minute black and white study in abject helplessness. This fear is here cleverly examined by the director through visual queues that are instantly recognizable as horror cinema mainstays.

A shuffling of location and the introduction of a duo of decidedly ambivalent additional characters signals a wonderful constriction of the plot as its double meanings spiral into one. The Nightmare admirably holds tight to its simplicity never allowing its impetus to spiral needlessly into the convoluted. Thus leading us to a finale from which we find our minds reeling backward to the very first frame. We watch it again this time dressed in its freshly revealed context and the piece takes on entirely new meaning. This again is a goal toward which many short films aspire. The trickery, the clever twisting of conventional thought that leaves an audience contentedly fooled. A job well done.” – Hari Navarro of The Hellstreet Journal.


TIME TRAVELERS

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When “chance” reunites two childhood friends and the past is dragged into the light, one tries to convince the other to take a pill that will enable them to travel through time. The result is a warping of perception for the characters… and a deconstruction of narrative for the audience. A lushly photographed work of micro-cinema that pays homage to a time-honored genre… while pushing its limits.

Screenings

Bend Film Festival
NewFilmakers Series
Radcon Sci-Fi Convention
WorldCon
TriCities International Fantastic Film Festival

Kind Words

It’s always good to see independent film makers trying out something new, even if it is with an old idea. There can’t be many ways to find a new twist on time travel, but it seems that Joe Christiana has found one. I guarantee you will not guess the twist in the tale. – Sci-Fi Online

“[Time Travelers] rewards the audience for paying attention… [It] shows that it’s possible to make an intelligent speculative fiction film without multi-million dollar budgets and advanced special effects… What I liked most about Time Travelers was the scope. This was an intimate story about a limited number of people. The consequences they face are dire, but they are dire to their inner circle, not to the world at large. There is no super villain to conquer and no butterfly to step on to change history. Telling the story on this smaller scale is what makes a film that mostly takes place in one living room work. Most of us have had conversations that have had a profound impact on our lives. We can empathize with these characters on that level. – Future Fire


MEAT CYCLE

Called one of the strangest fairy tales ever told, Meat Cycle concerns a man’s attempt to amuse his wife with meat puppets, a performance that brings horrible consequences.

Screenings:
Coney Island Film Festival
Boston Underground Film Festival
Montreal Underground Film Festival
Melbourne Underground Film Festival
Exploding Cinema 2015

KIND WORDS

“An incredibly original vision of horror.”
-Mike Everleth, Under Ground Film Journal

“Christiana’s style of filming and editing is well done in appropriating his color schemes of neon green and negative filters, sequencing, and lens masking to produce that horror-esque hallucination. The audio in the film also suits the atmosphere superbly – a cut and mixture of radio frequencies, static, distortion and laughter. As a film screened in the Underground Film Festival, it is definitely a must-see for its originality and overall production quality, and definitely a must-see for horror/gore enthusiasts.”
— Aedyn Roze, Quip Magazine

“A must-see for its originality and overall production quality, and definitely a must-see for horror/gore enthusiasts…. mis-en -cene cherry picked from seventies exploitation and eighties urbanoia; if someone dandered through the room, shooting a glance at the screen as you watched, they’d think there was something wrong with your Texas Chainsaw Massacre DVD… the film presents great technical prowess and attention to detail often lost in the splatter genre, of which it is an anything but typical example.”
-Gabe Headington, Strangers In A Cinema


MOTEL AMERICANA: VOL. II

“Odd and Lovely Tales From a Seedy Motel In Jersey”

Screenings

Garden State Film Festival (Winner Best NJ Film)

Indie Gathering (Winner Best Indie)

New Filmmakers NYC

Coney Island Film Festival (The Double)Featured Series on iThentic

Taking Account

“The American Dream has been beaten and kicked long enough. He quits his job, fires his attorney, and leaves a wife who won’t notice he’s gone until she has no one to dance with when the ball drops on New Year’s.  With a case of Ancient Age and a trunkload of cigarettes, he checks into a motel to write a memoir about the rise and fall of an elegant, though deeply flawed idea—his dirty life and times.  All of them.  He begins, I am going to turn this prince back into a frog and croak frog songs into the gravel pit of midnight.  Ah, New Jersey, you son-of-a-bitchen crotch puncher, I’m here.  Meet me by the flag pole after school.  Hence this bloodstream of anonymous drifters and wishers.  Strivers.  Near Missers.  On paper, they sound like every other character who ends up in a motel story.  There’s the man paying his debts the hard way and the man avoiding debts.  There’s the woman on the run and the woman who treats her body like a garage sale.  There’s the immigrant who hears the land making promises and the upstanding citizen at war with his unpretty instincts.  And of course there are plans that double as  schemes and bad ideas.  And killing.  Lots of killing.  But remember one thing about these ordinary driftings . . . a frog who used to be a prince is singing about them . . . and he knows no one is listening . . . and he’s brushing his teeth with whiskey . . . which leads to a certain boldness, for which you will have to forgive him.  After all, he used to be a prince.  We were going to call this The Frog’s Opera, but we promised our backers not to get too fancy.  Motel Detritus felt a little cruel.  We settled on Motel Americana after we lost a better title in a card game.  Secretly we loved it.”– Ahab Cloud, accountant for the production

A Rooms of the Motel