Directors SEAN KENEALY And ERIC SILVERA Talk About Their Latest Horror Short, “Two Knocks on a Door!”

Hell of a poster by Creepy Duck Design.

Horror shorts are plentiful, though somewhat overlooked outside of anthology segments.  Sure, we love “Creepshow” and the “V/H/S” series, but how did those filmmakers get started?  Sean Kenealy and Eric Silvera are a filmmaking duo, who started making the festival rounds with their action comedy “In Action” back in 2020 before being picked up by Gravitas Ventures.  A few years later, after moving with the spouses, having kids, and enduring a pandemic, the duo released “Two Knocks on a Door,” a short horror film about fatherhood.

Without giving too much away, the short follows a young dad in his suburban house at night.  Just when you think you know where it’s going, it shifts gears, into another subgenre like a bifurcated nightmare.  Much like their feature, the film has been picking up steam at festivals like HorrorHound and Nightmares, with several more festivals coming up.  Eric and Sean spoke with me about their creative journey, fatherhood, and experiencing the convention side of festivals. Oh, and Sean and I were in the same class at SUNY Purchase.  Yet another college connection, because hey, I know some interesting people.

Lowell Greenblatt: How did you two meet?

Sean Kenealy: We both got our Masters at City College of NY.  We were in the Creative Writing program and met in an amazing Fiction Writing class.  I was a little intimidated at first since it was an MFA program, but it didn’t turn out to be as pretentious as I thought it would be going into it.   I ended up meeting a lot of other great writers in that program, despite being nervous since I didn’t have a literary background. I don’t know exactly how we hooked up, but we both have a love of genre and 80s action films.  We bonded over the sort of “highbrow” stuff in the MFA class we were in, but also the “lowbrow” stuff we grew up loving [Laughs].

Eric Silvera:  That’s exactly right. When they were talking about Chaucer, we were talking about John Carpenter [Laughs].  We also took the train back together from class.  Sean was acting, I was doing comedy, and we were both writing, so we were on similar paths.  We also got engaged a month apart.  One day we went to see “Sleep No More” and we were talking about things we were writing, so we decided to write a TV pilot together.  It didn’t go well, but we co-wrote an action script “Twenty After Sunset,” which was “Die Hard” on a cruise ship.  But I guess that’s “Speed 2” [Laughs].

SK: I haven’t read it in a while, but it’s a fun throwback.  We had a good time writing it.

ES: We did a rewrite a few years ago, and we submitted it to a screenwriting competition, where it wound up in the top 2% of like 2,000 entries.  Looking back we’re like “yeah, we can’t have some of these lines in a script in 2024” [Laughs]. 

SK: Also, nobody was going to produce it independently.  If we wanted it made, or to make it ourselves, we had to lower the budget.

LG: Where did the idea for a horror project come from? 

ES: We had a list of projects after we finished “In Action,” including action, horror, and comedy.  Sean actually pitched me an idea for a horror film that takes place at a film festival, since we were in the festival circuit at that point.  As “In Action” was coming out, we started working with a manager who dug our script for a horror comedy called “Reject.” It’s horror first, comedy second, but still within our sensibilities.  We like deconstructing genres.  It eventually fell apart after a while, like things do.  I’d been kicking around this idea that eventually became a short since we were making “In Action” in 2017.  It was based on a short story I wrote, which became “Two Knocks on a Door.”  I shared it with Sean and our other partner Bill Nawrocki, who edited “In Action.” He shot, edited and helped produce “Two Knocks on a Door.”  He said we should turn it into a script.  I took a stab at a draft, then sent it to Sean, and we sent it back and forth.  I love the horror genre. I’ve been itching to do something in it.

SK:  I loved Eric’s story and I was really obsessed with this idea of the first half being conventional, and the second half being about this guy who’s paralyzed with fear.   I’m always curious about what stops people from doing something.  Why do they break down?” I wasn’t really exploring horror before, but since meeting Eric and collaborating with Billy, I’ve entered a circle of creative people who love the genre and I’ve really leaned into it.  

ES: Sean was also getting into the horror world before “Reject.”  Remember “Wolfbite?”

SK: Oh yeah, my lesbian werewolf movie [Laughs]. I forgot about that. It’s funny when you realize how long you’ve been writing and you remember what you’ve tucked away in a drawer.

Mike (Max Woertendyke) trying to be prepared.

LG: I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but I wasn’t prepared for where the film went after watching someone walk around his house at night.  You make so much out of a guy laying in bed with a voiceover.  Was it always structured that way?

ES: We have a shorter cut, but the version you saw was what was intended.  We knew we wanted a somewhat-even split, but we drew out the house sequence a little more as we were shooting, as well as in the edit to see how far we could stretch the tension.  How far could we push it in a short, without becoming redundant or boring?  With the bed sequence, we cut out a lot of voiceover.  We had two ways we thought about the back half in the edit. There’s one version Billy put together that had no voiceover, which was cool, but we really wanted to push the nightmare and draw it out.

SK: I think we wanted to stretch out the first half more, because the music and the sound really filled things in. At first, I thought we were going to make cuts here and there, but I fell in love with how extended the beginning was, from working with our sound designer and composer.

LG: It does feel like two distinct films.  Like the first half is “Halloween” and the second half is “Saw.”

ES: [Laughs].  Right.  In the beginning, the shots are wider and we have less cuts and more panning.  The last half is more visceral.  It’s tighter with more cutting.

LG:  Where did you shoot it?

ES: In my house.

SK: Where Eric’s sitting [Laughs]. It’s funny, the short story Eric wrote took place in an apartment, because he was living in one at the time.  When we thought about pre-production, we thought we should follow it as it was written, but Eric was in the process of moving and I personally think houses are scarier than apartments.  I feel safer in a city because more people are around.  There’s an isolation to the suburbs, so when Eric moved, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to use that idea but change the location and amp up the terror. And Eric’s wife was gracious enough to let us shoot there for free, which didn’t hurt!

ES: She’s the boss, but I was gonna break her down for this one [Laughs]. I was like “hey, we wrote this movie and we’re gonna shoot it here” and she’s like “what?...okay.”  I had never lived in a house until then.   I had just moved to the suburbs.  I grew up in the Bronx, so I had to get used to the silence.  Sean said “just think about what’s scary about your house.” Billy, Sean, and our gaffer came over one day and we walked through the house, thinking of shots and lighting.  I wound up shooting a test version of the 1st half on my phone, with my wife as a proxy for the lead actor. We used it as a reference during and after the shoot.  It also helped us film quickly because we had to shoot over a weekend and we had to get it done.

Eric Silvera (left), Sean Kenealy (middle) and with co-star Ashley Lauren-Elrod at Nightmares Film Festival (Image: Instagram)

LG:  Was it mostly shot at night?

SK: There was a lot of night-for-day.  We had an amazing gaffer and lighting crew that blocked out the windows and made it look like we shot the bedroom scene at night, even though we shot it in the afternoon.  Obviously, the entire film takes place at night, but we didn’t want our crew to work from 8 pm to 6 am.  We tried to have a normal, respectable working schedule.

ES: It was tricky, but we figured it out.  Since we filmed in the fall, you could easily shoot at 5:30 pm and it looked like night.  Nobody believed me.  I was like “guys, it gets fucking dark out here.” Then Daylight Savings happened and it was like 4:45 pm and getting dark.

SK: I was moving in December and we had to shoot before then, so it ended up working to our advantage.  

ES: While I was on vacation with my wife, I was sending pages back to Sean.  The way we work, depending on where we are in the writing process, we send pages back and forth. After we walked through the house together, we created a final version. 

LG: Before you had the house, what was the initial idea to shoot in your apartment? That’s a big change.

ES: The whole first part would have been a different vibe. 

SK:  The house also gave us more breathing room to explore the character without dialogue. There’s much less space to cover in an apartment. In the house, you see him get high and watch an action movie, then go into the basement, because he thinks he’s tough.  We tried to show a new layer to him as he entered a new section of the house so the audience would connect with a little bit.  It was a fun challenge to lean into.

LG: Who designed the great 80s-style poster?

You’ve definitely seen Creepy Duck Design before. His fan poster went viral on X and eventually because part of the official campaign for 2022’s “Scream.”

SK: Colm Geoghegan. Billy recommended him. He’s Creepy Duck Design on Instagram.

LG: I love his work!  How’d you get him?

SK:  He’s a star.  He does a lot of big work and took us on after we reached out to him.  We gave him a few images and ideas to play with and he was great to work with.  We did a few variations.

ES: The first version had a Hitchcock vibe, which was cool, but we wanted to try something else.  We were like “well, he is really talented and we’re lucky he took us on, so…” [Laughs].  But then we told him we wanted something more realistic and he gave us the version like what you see,  but it was in blue and it looked like an alien invasion.  He watched the film and knew what we were going for, so he changed the color to red, and that was it. 

LG: By now you’ve shown the film at several festivals, including HorrorHound.  How has that been going?

SK:  We’ve been fortunate so far.  We played the Kansas City Underground Film Festival, which is local for me, so I could go see it with a live audience. Someone in the audience was like “get up!” at the end and I said to Eric “alright, we did it.”  That was the reaction we wanted, so it was a win for sure. From there, we played Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio.  I’d never been to a horror film festival before, and I didn’t know what to expect.  I don’t mean to sound corny, but it’s community-based, so everyone there was so warm and loving.  I’d go back to Nightmares or HorrorHound in a second. The caliber of films they show there is great.  Horrorhound, in particular, is a trip. Lots of people are there for the convention, so we had people wander into the film festival part, so people saw our film who otherwise wouldn’t have if it was just a film festival. 

ES: That was amazing.  This one guy saw the movie, then saw me on a panel the next day. He came up to us to say how much he loved the movie. and how he was going to tell his friends about it.  You might hear that from other filmmakers at festivals, but for someone to stumble in to see it, then find us later, it's bonafide.  That was nice.  We also played MidWest WeirdFest and the Phoenix Film Festival.  We weren’t able to attend those in person.

SK:  It’s been fun, though.  I’ve never been to a comic convention or an overnight music festival before, but I imagine that’s what it’s like.  Some days you don’t see the sky for 12 hours, which is disorienting, but it’s so rare to get to talk to people who love the same things as you for a whole weekend.  We have a few more we’re waiting to hear back from.

“In Action,” their previous feature.

ES: It’s funny, “In Action” was the closing film of our first festival on March 8, 2020.  We found out it won “Best Film” a week later, when everything shut down, so the rest of our festival run was virtual.  We spent 5 years making it, and it was cool that it got picked up for distribution, but going in person to talk to other filmmakers can’t be discounted.

LG: Do you have any idea what your next project will be?

ES: We’re working on an anthology of what we’re calling “dad horror,” where the protagonists are young fathers, like “Two Knocks on a Door.”  It’s similar to “Southbound” and “Trick r Treat” with loosely interconnected narratives. The wraparound story is about an expecting father, who we follow through his wife’s 3 trimesters, then after the baby is born, he encounters people who tell him stories about the fears and horrors of parenting.  We’ve already filmed two of the segments, and we’re looking for investors.  We refer to it as” volume one” because there are so many different fatherhood stories out there with characters of different ages, races, and religions.  We might even make a period piece.

Interview edited for length and clarity. “Two Knocks on a Door” will be released this fall after its festival run.  You can see it at Peekskill Film Fest this month, Cabin in the Woods Film Festival in August, or Oregon Screams this October.

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