Tickle is a live-action psychological and supernatural horror about the isolation, trauma and intense vulnerability of domestic abuse.
Lilly, our exhausted and desperate protagonist, struggles through a sleepless night of being tormented by a menacing and salacious creature.
Skeptical of her own sanity and separated from the outside world, she must fight the ever creeping grasp from the sinister creature if she wants to make it to the morning.
Tickle presents a painfully raw and spine-tingling scary portrait of a troubled woman trying to readjust to life after an abusive relationship. It’s a horror that delves into the exploitation and objectification of women. An otherworldly exploration into being a forced object of desire for an aggressively persistent, hyper-masculine monster.
The film merges this psychological trauma with one of the most horrifying entities of mythological legend, an Incubus. A demon in male form who lies upon sleeping women in order to engage in sexual activity with them.
Tickle is part psychological thriller in the style of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ mixed with a tense supernatural phenomenon in the style of ‘It Follows’ and ‘The Babadook.’
It’s a film buried in paranoia and panic with strong allusions to PTSD from domestic abuse. Just as ‘The Babadook’ is a terrifying take on mourning a loved one, and ‘It Follows’ is a spectacularly scary film about spreading STD’s, Tickle is a supernatural exploration into abusive relationships and the feeling of absolute helplessness and suffering.
The script’s ready. Storyboards are waiting to be shot. The creature’s set. Prosthetics are developed and the location’s secured.
We’re coming to Kickstarter for your help. We’ve already put hundreds of hours and a ton of money into developing this film but we need to hire a hell of a lot of equipment, buy and make lots of props, feed dozens of people – and as much as it’s unheard of in the short film world, we’d quite like to pay our actress for her talent and time.
Written and directed by Chris Chalklen, his previous film ‘Holy F__k’ was played at 39 international festivals and won 9 awards.
