The short film The Scourge is an absurdist dark-comedy about a girl named Otto falling into the satanist religious crusade of a mysterious mad-man. The Scourge takes its unorthodox premise and delivers a bizarre story that warns of the evils of religion and those who use it as a means to their ends.
The Scourge was inspired by other media as unconventional as it is. All of the films, shows, and videogames that lead to Scourge used comedy as a form of critique of a common metanarrative, the 2014 videogame, The Binding Of Isaac, inspired the short at both an aesthetic and thematic level. It uses its silly premise of a child in a dungeon-crawler inspired by video games like The Legend Of Zelda to critique the metanarrative of a typical christian household .The game depicts religion as neither a good nor bad thing, just as an incredibly powerful and influential idea that can turn people against their own family, that theme was carried into The Scourge in a similar fashion.
At a visual and musical level, The Scourge was inspired by Isaac’s aesthetic, that being the look and sound of the “metal subculture,” one which none of the crew was very familiar with, but metal has shaped the way modern audiences think about the “satanist aesthetic." Sharp and red lettering for the title and credits, loud metal music, and rough and crude visuals make up a large chunk of The Scourge, parts of the short having so much grain and color distortion that they appear like something straight out of a 90’’s skate-video. The visuals invoke this imagery in a semi-satirical way due to how ridiculous and silly the content of the short are, the parody elements serving not to mock but to juxtapose.
The comedy aspects of the short bled heavily into its marketing, audiences got a taste of what was in store. We made an Instagram page for the short and sprinkled it with personality carried over from the short. The page was littered with behind-the-scenes footage and bloopers - a lot of the crew goofing off on set - and short funny clips taken from the short meant to entice audiences. One small way that the tone for the page was set was in its profile picture, while most teams working on the portfolio-projected opted to make the profile be the piece’s title, we chose instead to use a piece of imagery from the short itself,, the wonky pentagram Otto draws. This symbol serves as a pretty accurate visual metaphor for the film, it's a religious piece that strives to be wacky, and the first impression a lot of the audience gets from the short being that symbol shows it isn’t striving to be a conventional film but one more focused on being funny.
One very silly way we connected to the audience was by having an in-universe blog - which is mentioned passingly in the short - be accessible to the audience. The film’s target audience is small, the short uses comedy vindictive to the religious groups it parodies and these blogs take that to an extreme that can be higher than the actual film. The blogs are short yet funny excerpts that are not meant to be taken seriously and that expand on some of the background details of the film, rewarding audiences that went out of their way to find the blog through a post in the Instagram page. This specific post also expanded on the branding, it’s a silly post in which the in-universe character who wrote the blogs “found the sign-in to the account” and is now promoting his beliefs. The post has the absurdist comedic edge, the character claiming he’d spent hours guessing random passwords until he eventually found the right one, but also having a look that was ingrained with the short by then, the lettering of the caption being “demonic” with scratched out words, and the image used being of an in-universe business-card with the link to the blog in black-and-white. Problematically, this “business-card” was eventually cut from the film, which partially breaks its purpose and seems a bit out of place.
The black-and-white imagery was used throughout most of our instagram posts, specifically those depicting the cast and crew. The rest of the social media utilized deep blacks and crimson reds which were very visually striking when used with the black and white photos.. All of the posts had graphics that were sharp and spikey, like a red frame around what would otherwise be a regular video. All of these ideas were carried into our postcard; from the red graphics, to the black-and-white photos of the cast. We even implemented some comedy to it, having a silly little drawing of a devil tail near a “devilish” character in the short and little piece of text saying “scan me!” next to the QR code.
The themes of The Scourge were divisive, to say the least, amongst the team. All three of us came from different walks of life that led to all of us having different readings of our own text. My intention with Scourge was to depict religion as an idea carried by spite and opportunism over love or belief. The main character is someone bored with catholic and christian ideas and switches to a new belief seemingly just because she is promised power over it, the character that introduces her to the belief has a hatred of religion and a want to control those around him, the only catholic in the story, a young priest, uses religion to shame those that deny it and try to leave it, and the main character’s sister is a victim of religion who suffers due to supporting a different religion she believed stood against the one which hurt her, only to meet a worse fate from the new one.
The Scourge uses comedy and established anti-religious imagery as a way to show that religion built as an institution will always be used to harm the vulnerable and reward the greedy, and falling for the promises of these institutions only strips away from individuality.
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