Main Cast: Alexia Zahedi
Directors: Vincent Darkman, Kévin Mendiboure
One of the most primal, relatable fears is the fear that something is under the bed. It’s one of everyone’s earliest fears, alone in your room at night, stuck on this island in the dark, knowing that if something IS under there, there’s no direction you can go to get down that “it” can’t get you. And unless you have a bedside table with a lamp on it, you’re stuck in the dark until morning. So every noise you hear is amplified through that fear speaker and becomes another facet of the MONSTER hiding directly under you.
You can’t even shift your weight because the monster will see and know where on the mattress you are, making it all the easier for it to reach up with its impossibly long arms and get you.
And that fear is at the heart of UNDER THE BED, a short, French language horror film written by Vincent Darkman and directed by Darkman and Kévin Mendiboure. This film is VERY short, just over 4 minutes, and stars Alexia Zahedi as a woman being terrorized by something under the bed. The synopsis on the piece says “A young woman is still haunted by a night monster she used to see in her bedroom when she was a little girl…” but I only barely got that this was something she had been constantly haunted by since childhood, the only hint being a very brief voice-over at the beginning of the movie where a little girl asks her mother to cover her feet at night lest the monster eat them. But even without that bit of prologue, UNDER THE BED would have been an effective short film. I mean it’s a woman alone in bed in a dark room and there’s something under the bed. What part of that isn’t terrifying?
And when she wakes up to find the blanket on the floor … nope, gonna be a cold night in bed because that blanket is staying right where it is until the sun comes up and all the nighttime monsters are banished.
UNDER THE BED is not without flaws, however. In only 4 minutes, we have no characterization, no backstory, and the ending was a bit meh considering the tension that had been built up to that point. I was just wishing for more of an effort on the ending after seeing how well done the rest of the movie had been.
Zahedi does a good job of conveying the terror we would all feel in a similar situation without overplaying it, despite having zero dialogue and all of her acting being limited to physical reflections of terror.
I could probably say more but at this point, I think it’s going to take you longer to read this review than it will to just watch UNDER THE BED for yourself, so I’ll wrap by saying thanks to Mendibourne for reaching out about reviewing the movie and I hope to see more from him and Darkman in the future.
You can find UNDER THE BED on YouTube.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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