Stuck working the midnight shift on the eve of her 30th birthday, London bus driver Natasha (the excellent Susan Wokoma of the late, great Truth Seekers) believes her vehicle is empty — until the bell starts dinging… and a cloaked figure seems to materialise in one of the upper-level rows.
At just 13 minutes, horror short Night Bus builds a ton of atmosphere and instantly makes you root for Natasha, who’s already facing her milestone birthday with considerable dread and disgust even before things at work get weird… and they get extremely weird and terrifying. Watch for yourself, courtesy of Short of the Week:
Night Bus was written by Jade Alexander and is the co-directing debut of siblings Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth, who told Short of the Week they filmed over three nights in London and aimed first and foremost to scare the audience. “Our main aim all through this process was to get people screaming,” they said. One of the ways they achieved that was by using the CCTV footage on Natasha’s bus to excellent effect. “It was so pixellated and fragmented, that you didn’t know what the hell you were looking at sometimes — which I think adds to the horror brilliantly — you never want to have to lean into the screen when watching a scary movie, but hopefully, that’s something people were forced to do!”