A man sits beside the person he loves. On the surface, everything is fine. Underneath, something terrible is building.
That’s the premise of Foreboding, a nine-minute horror short from first-time director Joff Hurlburt that dramatizes the terrifying inner world of a man who won’t talk about what’s eating him alive.
Shot in broad daylight at a cottage outside Apsley, Ont., the film uses genre tropes to explore male mental health, violence against women and the horrors that fester when trauma goes unaddressed.
Stuffing it down
Hurlburt wrote the script in 2013, drawing from his own experience as a young man who never learned how to express what he was feeling.
“As a young man we are told to stuff it down and just deal with it,” he said. “For myself it always made me feel like something bad was going to happen.”
That sensation—impending doom with no outlet—became the film’s emotional engine. Hurlburt imagined an extreme scenario. What happens when a man buries his pain so deep it turns monstrous?
The question isn’t hypothetical. In Canada, police recorded 128,175 victims of intimate partner violence in 2024, according to Statistics Canada. Nearly eight in 10 victims of intimate partner homicide were women and girls. The Canadian Femicide Observatory reported 187 women and girls were violently killed in the country that same year. In the United States, the picture is equally grim. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence estimates roughly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner. In 2021, more than a third of murdered women in the U.S. were killed by one.
Foreboding doesn’t shy away from that reality. The story follows Wes and his girlfriend Megan as they arrive at a remote cottage. Something is clearly wrong with Wes. Megan tries to help. He keeps stuffing it down until his mind creates something he can’t control.
Horror in broad daylight
Hurlburt made a deliberate choice to film entirely during the day, using natural light rather than the darkness horror audiences expect.
“I really wanted to show horror and horrible things can happen when it’s a sunny beautiful day,” he said. “It was a different approach for me and it worked.”
Both lead actors are close friends of Hurlburt’s. He spent years discussing the characters with them before cameras rolled. The cottage belongs to the actress’s family. That personal connection, he said, gave the performances an emotional depth that a cold set couldn’t replicate.
“They both pushed themselves for the film,” Hurlburt said. “I love and appreciate them for that.”
A horror built on dread
Among his influences, Hurlburt cited Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining for its relentless atmosphere of dread. He also credited Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead as the film that made him want to become a filmmaker in the first place.
From shooting to final cut, the film took just over a year to complete. Hurlburt has since submitted it to several festivals and said the early acceptance has been exciting for a debut project.
He isn’t slowing down. Two more shorts are planned for this summer, both exploring loss and grief through a horror lens.
But the message of Foreboding remains personal.
“The narrative that men have to keep it all in is brutal,” Hurlburt said. “I would plead for men to please talk to someone—anyone.”