WATCH
Directed By Alexander Thomas and Nikki Carmela
Written By Alexander Thomas and Nikki Carmela
Shot and Edited By Alexander Thomas
1st AD Tiffany Wexler
Sound Recordist Dylan Henning
Boom Op Julian
Sound Design Alexander Thomas
Additional Photography Bil Brown
The Glass Devil was made as part of Silver Lake Scream Show, a Halloween anthology that screened to a sold-out room of 500 people. There’s something about knowing your horror film will be seen live, in the dark, by a crowd — it sharpens every decision you make in the edit.
The premise is deceptively simple: a cursed mirror that reflects not your face but your failures, your rot, the parts of yourself you’ve worked hardest to bury. Set inside an ordinary suburban home — the kind of house that is supposed to mean safety — the film follows a mother whose growing obsession with the mirror curdles into something irreversible. The domestic space is deliberate. Horror that happens in kitchens and hallways, in the rooms where families eat and sleep and pretend to be fine, lands differently than horror in the dark.
My wife and I have made a lot of things together, but The Glass Devil felt like a genuine reckoning with what we’re capable of as collaborators. The subject matter — a mother, a family, the violence that can live inside the most ordinary love — required a level of trust between directors that I don’t think we could have had with anyone else. Screening it on Halloween to 500 people was the only right way to see it for the first time.
The film earns its violence by making you wait for it. The first half is restrained, almost quiet — dread built from small wrongnesses and a performance that keeps you just slightly off-balance. When the turn comes, it comes hard. The mirror isn’t a special effect. It’s a psychological trap with a blade at the end of it.
Behind The Scenes
The Glass Devil was shot over two days on a budget of under five hundred dollars. Every dollar is on screen — which is another way of saying that almost nothing you see was bought, and almost everything was figured out. The domestic setting was both a creative choice and a practical one; shooting in a real home gives you texture and specificity that a dressed set rarely matches, and it costs you nothing but the negotiation. Co-directing with my wife meant that the two of us were making every call together in real time, on a shoot with no margin for indecision. What that kind of constraint produces, if you let it, is clarity. You stop asking what would be nice and start asking what is necessary. Two days, five hundred dollars, a cursed mirror, and a room of five hundred people watching it on Halloween. That’s the whole equation.
A mirror that shows you the worst of yourself. A mother who can’t look away. The Glass Devil is a short horror film co-directed with my wife, and the most personal thing we’ve put on screen together.