It’s 2020 and the world is in lockdown. But it still doesn’t stop spinning. I would like to say that I came up with the idea to make a film amidst a pandemic, but I was approached by my friend and filmmaker Bruce Micallef Eynaud to take part in a local film initiative. The idea was simple. Everyone is locked away so instead of watching Frasier for the sixth time, let’s make a series of films all made under lockdown conditions. As a professional film student I have learnt many things: how to procrastinate without damaging my grades, never buy the overpriced water in the cafeteria, and always agree to portfolio-able work.

 

Both Bruce and I have a passion for b-horror movies. Each film in the ever-dwindling genre is like a gift from your grandmother; excitement builds as anything can be under the wrapping paper, but it always ends up being socks. But I love socks. Plain and predictable, many b-horrors are defined by their inability to horrify as their outlandishly simple concepts tie their own noose through unintentional comedic convolution.

 

It’s unfortunate that b-horror has changed in meaning. Simply a non-art house film with low budgets, the cult following has reversed the definition of ‘bad’ and ‘good’. The Soapbox began as a b-horror in both style and production, but it didn’t feel right. Following a fictional pandemic, I couldn’t imagine a retro 80’s vibe working well with something so topical. The concept was simply hitting too close to home and, as everyone in the world began to feel claustrophobic in their own bedrooms, it started to feel like it was impossible to put imagination to screen.

 

As someone who generally doesn’t enjoy horror, I am enamoured by brilliant cinema. In 2019, Bong Joon-ho released Parasite, a thriller/drama that is more horrifying than any jump-scare focused supernatural horror that feels like a carbon copy of the other hundred spookenings. I wanted an audience to care about the characters, to create a human experience that steadily ups the anxiety through systematic emotional leaps.

 

I don’t write horror. If I don’t watch the genre, how can I create within it? Stylistically, I have always found myself in drama with the odd whiff of comedy. I like creating normal people suffering from normal problems. Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, Chazelle’s Whiplash, McKay’s The Big Short; all these films are about normal people with normal problems (or, at least, they are normal in their world).

 

The Soapbox is a story about normal people with (somewhat) normal problems. Eli (Anthony Mizzi) and Amy (Kyra Poland) are in the final days of a pandemic lockdown and are struggling to cope with the situation. It has been ages since they last saw each other and are simply trying to get by until they can once again reunite.

 

Starting off slow to allow some sense of relation between audience and character (an aspect lost in many short films), The Soapbox is like an exponential graph. The beginning is calm and moves forward stubbornly as the audience sees the depth between Eli and Amy, the film acting as a snapshot for an enforced long-distance relationship. Yet there is an ever-looming threat. Something isn’t right and, as the opening of the film is the end, there is a tension that can’t be easily covered up by a handful of conversations.

 

The weight of isolation is a theme that both Bruce and I wanted to explore, but the path was thick with booby traps. Unlike An American Werewolf in London, I wasn’t writing about a fictionalised world but a fictionalised reality. Nearly everyone in the world was feeling the same way I was, so how can I capture that frustration, that anger at being locked up in my own castle? I wanted to be funny but I wanted to be serious. I wanted to be extreme but I wanted to be real. I wanted to write a b-horror film but I wanted to write a dramatic thriller that engages an audience on its own merit rather than through its mistakes.

 

The Soapbox is a film filled with emotions. It’s hard to point at artistic authorship as, thanks to Covid, none of us ever met face to face - Anthony having to film himself while Bruce directed over Skype. It is an amalgamation of all of us. It is a portrait of a time which the world can relate to. It is filled with mistakes that the insecure writer in me wants to fix. It is an award-winning and internationally travelled short film. It is a thriller made in a pandemic. It is a piece of me in a genre I have no interest in re-exploring. It is what I wanted it to be but also not. For certain, it is a film.