Good grief is Drew Daywalt one of the best indie horror filmmakers working today. It’s not many filmmakers that can deliver constantly frightening and surprising short films that pack wallops of surprise endings and twists that’ll leave you breathtaken. Daywalt is a master of drawing out the scare, and often times he even gets away with a jump scare. It’s not many filmmakers I allow to throw a jump scare my way, but Daywalt takes the often cheapened device and turns it in to a fun little way to book end his horror films. And damn it, he gets me every time.
Along with “The Closet,” and “The Old Chair,” his 2010 short film “The Doppelganger” is a brilliant short with a top shelf twist ending that I just couldn’t get over. A young girl is on the way home from work and receives a frantic call from her husband on her cellphone. He urges her not to go home, and that the man she’s going home to is not him and is in fact an evil doppelganger. A doppelganger, being an evil twin from another reality, is waiting for her as she arrives from work, and she doesn’t really know what to believe.
Reagan Dale Neis is fantastic as this young woman who is not quite sure what to believe and has a difficult time processing this delivery of information that she seems almost too ready to believe. Why she’s prepared to buy in to this story becomes tough to comprehend, along with when exactly the screws turned for her. Daywalt’s pacing, matched the tricky editing and gut punch surprise twist make “Doppelganger” one of the many really excellent short horror films from the Daywalt Fear Factory.