Walks in the woods, poetry, a loving mother and a rotting corpse. Welcome to Home Education 

Home Education is the impressive short film from filmmaker Andrea Niada. The film stars Kate Reed (Our Broken Heart) and Jemma Churchill (Upstairs Downstairs) and Richard Ginn

Cleverly cut from a feature length script the film has running time just short of 25-minutes

The film tells the unusual story of a young girl taught at home by her mother. The lessons she learns, documented in notebooks that fill the bookshelves, each book in numerical and alphabetical order.  The mother is preparing the daughter for the return of her father, and at first, it is uncertain what is going on.

We soon learn that the father has been with us the whole time. He is dead, and he is beginning to rot, laying in the upstairs bedroom tucked in with nothing but a duvet. This family lives in their world, with their own set of rules and we get a strong feeling that outside civilisation is something they’re not used to.

We get to see some special family bonding time when we watch the young girl read her father some poetry that she has written. The two hover over the man’s corpse completely delusional believing that he will come back from the dead; not in a zombie sort of way, but in a way that he would just wake up and go downstairs and ask “where is my tea?”.

When the young girl ventures to the wooded English countryside near her cottage, she starts to realise that everything that is dead will eventually rot.

I am looking forward to seeing this getting adapted into a feature length, and I have no doubt it will. We have a very talented team and a tale I think would impress some serious horror buffs. The film was dark without being that graphic and gave us an insight into what I believe could be a new unique horror movie family.

On another note…..

There was a scene I watched this year from a film that really disturbed me. The film was Japanese serial killer movie, Creepy and it lived up to its title.  A scene of a young girl is trying to dispose of a grown adult’s corpse by vacuum packing the corpse to prevent air from getting in. Well, Home Education did a great job at reminding me just how disturbing and haunting a scene like that can be.

I think I need some more EDUCATION!