Watch 'The Influencer' on Vimeo and see 'Dream Creep' at the Gig Harbor Film Festival September 26–29. by Chase Hutchinson From Twin Peaks to The Ring, horror filmmakers have long been drawn to the Pacific Northwest’s moody, fickle, gray backdrop. It’s a region that can do foggy, rainy, and dreary dread, just as it can be unexpectedly bright and sunny, making it a malleable setting that can twist your expectations and keep you delightfully unsettled through an entire film.  Nobody captures this better than the talented filmmakers who call Seattle home. For writer and director Lael Rogers and editor and producer Megan Leonard, making films in the Pacific Northwest is essential to capturing a distinct feeling you can’t find elsewhere. “It feels like it exists in this imaginary world,” says Rogers.  Rogers and Leonard both worked on the incisive short The Influencer and the delightful Dream Creep, two new local horror shorts that are making a splash this year.  In The Influencer, videos of a content creator’s “perfect day” lead us to a variety of familiar, comfortable spaces—an apartment, a car, a bustling local club. But then the film descends into a gleeful nightmare on a beach, where we learn the dark secret behind one influencer’s success. A Pacific Northwest coastline is the perfect setting for a scene of a bloody sacrifice, where screams echo across the water’s surface.  Leonard says that pivotal moment could only have been done justice in Washington. “That’s Seahurst Park in Burien,” Leonard says. “I had actually shot something there years ago, so it was on my radar. We roamed all around Western Washington, looking for the right spot. Parks in Seattle, some alpine lakes out east, but everything brought us back to Burien.” After making connections with other filmmakers while working on Influencer, Rogers also wound up doing effects for writer and director Carlos A.F. Lopez’s unsettling local short Dream Creep. It was called the “scariest short on the festival circuit” by IndieWire as it made the festival rounds earlier this year. The film centers on a couple who are having a restful night’s sleep until one of them begins hearing an eerie voice coming from inside their partner’s ear. Chaos and gore ensue as the two develop a strategy to remove the unwanted visitor. Both films required a lot of experimentation behind the scenes. Multiple scouting road trips were required to get the locations for The Influencer just right, whereas perfecting Dream Creep’s effects meant Rogers had to shove blood up Leonard’s nose in a pre-shoot test. “We’re always like, ‘We’re down, we’ll figure it out,” Leonard says with a laugh. They think this year of breakout local horror short productions can only lead to many more good things, including making a leap toward taking on features of their own. The one thing they’re not looking to do? Leave Seattle behind. “I always felt like I was just being stubborn not moving [away from Seattle] because I just liked living here,” says Rogers. “I have never been so vindicated. I think making art in a unique place and making art in a different diversity of places makes for more interesting art. The stuff that’s made [in the Pacific Northwest] doesn’t feel like the stuff that’s made in other places.” “I feel like there’s a convergence of a lot of different people happening right now,” adds Leonard. “I think the community in Seattle has been very separated from each other—people making things independently of each other. With The Influencer, we brought a lot of new people in, and it was a much bigger production for us. We all just come from a place of wanting to make movies together. Movies that we would like and want to watch.” The Influencer is available to watch on Vimeo. See Dream Creep at the Gig Harbor Film Festival September 26–29. Tickets are available at gigharborfilm.org.