The Recordings, horror story…
Short Story : The Recordings.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2020
A couple of years ago I graduated in communications, when I started studying I admit that I saw myself working in the field of journalism or writing, but as life takes many turns I ended up falling in love with the audiovisual field.
I have always loved cinema and I hope one day to devote myself entirely to making films. It is not an easy medium. I work editing videos in an advertising company but I have several personal projects and a couple of colleagues with whom I plan to make our own short films. It is about one of these shoots of a horror short film that we decided to film that I am going to tell you about.
Marina is a friend with whom I share an apartment and whom I have known for many years. She told me that she had an idea for a script about a horror story. She wanted to make a short film to present at a festival that was being held in two months in Mexico City. We didn't have the budget to do it, but she thought that we could get together with her sister who was studying acting and between the three of us we could get the project going.
He sent me the script and I thought it was interesting. It was about a young girl who is haunted by a demon. We decided that the filming could be done in our apartment and we agreed to do it on two different days, one to record everything that happened inside, and the other to do the scenes that had to be outdoors and in the subway.
We had to postpone the start of filming twice, the first time because Mariana's sister had COVID and the second time because of a somewhat strange situation that occurred in our apartment.
That night I was about to fall asleep when Mariana knocked on my bedroom door. She seemed puzzled and told me that something strange was happening to her computer.
He showed me the screen, it was black and I could see letters and numbers, like codes, I thought it could be a virus when out of nowhere it fixed itself and a blank Word file appeared on the screen.
He told me that he had been working on correcting some dialogue in the script when he got up for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, of course he saved the document before leaving and when he came back and saw the screen part of the file had been deleted.
She got upset and tried to recover it, but when she couldn't, she thought it had been some kind of error in the program. She had to go back and rewrite what she had already done, but suddenly the dialogues were erased again.
She didn't understand what was happening, she activated the computer's antivirus but it seemed to be fine, she restarted it and once again began to write, she hadn't been writing for long when meaningless letters began to appear in the file and suddenly the screen went black.
That's when she came to see me. She seemed quite worried. She thought that I was trying to scare her because of the subject matter of what I was writing, but at that moment it seemed like something unimportant.
I understood that Mariana might be under the influence of thought for thinking so much about the story she was writing, but I thought it was all a coincidence and the computer had had some technical failure. I told her not to think about it anymore, to use my computer if she needed to, and that we could wait a few more days to record.
We planned the recording on a Friday night, we needed there to be no daylight so the idea was to work all night until the sun came up.
We started a little later than planned but we were all doing a good job, the actress was very convincing and even seemed to be seeing a demon at times, so when it was around three in the morning, we were in the middle of a take and we heard a sound, as if something had exploded, like when a tire bursts in the distance and suddenly the power went out.
We were left in the dark, at that moment I felt a chill down my neck, but I thought it was because of the sound that had managed to scare me, I turned on the flashlight on my phone and noticed that everyone was trying to do the same, we thought there had been some damage in the entire area where we lived.
When I looked out the living room window I noticed that the street lamps were on, I looked at the apartments and houses I could see from there and realized that some had lights on, despite the time, so seeing that it was probably just us, we decided to go check the light box that was at the entrance of the building, we thought that maybe they had lowered their heels.
When we got to the box that corresponds to our apartment it looked like it had burned down, it was stained black and had a smell like burnt cable, but what caught our attention was that the other switches seemed to be in perfect condition and to top off the night, the power failure had managed to damage the refrigerator, we had no choice but to stop recording.
The next day we called the power company, who confirmed that they had no record of any damage in the area, so we asked them to come and check it out and when they arrived they informed us that the damage had been caused by an overload that blew a fuse and several cables. We found this very strange because we couldn't find a logical reason for this to have happened. We had to wait for them to fix the problem and we agreed on a new date to finish filming our short film.
A few days later I was reviewing and editing the material we had recorded from that night, then I realized that one of the audios had a background noise, I didn't remember there being any noise while we were filming.
So I thought that was kind of weird, plus I noticed that the sound was appearing at different times in different takes, so I opened up the audio editor to try and fix it, as I tried to clean up the sound the noise started to sound more like a whisper .
I don't know how to explain it, but it sounded like a male voice. I tried to make the audio even clearer until I could clearly hear someone saying the word "Help." I froze. I wrote a message to Mariana telling her that we had a problem with the sound, but I wasn't able to explain to her via text what was happening, so I waited for her to get to the apartment to show her what we had recorded.
When she heard it she was as surprised as I was, she told me that she thought that because of the project, paranormal things were happening to us.
At that moment she confessed to me that her sister had written to her a little worried the day after the recording, because that night at home she had had a dream in which she was running through a kind of tunnel, she was running because she was running away from something, suddenly she said that she couldn't feel her legs or her hands, then everything went dark around her and she heard screams and moans coming from everywhere until some hands held her by the ankles and arms, the worst thing was that when she woke up from that nightmare she noticed that she had bruises on her right arm, marked as if someone had grabbed her very hard.
Mariana showed me the photo that her sister had sent her of the marks. At that moment I didn't know what to think. Despite everything that had happened up until then, the three of us agreed that we wanted to finish the job. We had already heard stories of horror productions where they experienced paranormal situations, so we decided to meet that weekend to finish filming.
Even though we tried to take everything calmly, the day we recorded we felt a particular energy, we thought that at any moment the electricity would fail again and although that did not happen again, we did notice that they were moving things around, at one point I put my phone aside while we were taking a shot and as soon as we finished it was no longer there, we searched everywhere until we found it next to the coffee maker in the kitchen.
At another point while we were working in the living room, we heard footsteps coming from the bedroom, as if someone was walking from side to side. By the time we finished recording we knew we were not alone. I tried to edit in the shortest time possible the following week, because although I was convinced that we had done a good job, I wanted to finish as soon as possible.
We had to dub the sound because at many moments we could hear whispers and disturbing noises. It was impossible to do it in the apartment so we went to Mariana's parents' house where her sister lived to be able to record the audios there.
That day she told her mother about the situations that had been happening to us, and she also confessed to me that many times while she was alone in her room she could feel that there was someone watching her.
On one occasion she had heard footsteps outside her door and that during the last few nights when she was about to fall asleep she heard someone knocking on her bedroom door, she told me that the first few times she had called my name thinking it was me, but she had gotten no answer.
The truth was that I had never heard her call me, after telling her all this, her mother advised us that we should do some kind of cleaning in the house, she herself offered to go help us, she was a very spiritual and religious woman, so for a few days we said prayers and lit some incense with some herbs that she herself brought to us, we lit white and purple candles, so it was that over time we did not hear strange things again, but despite everything that happened to us I must confess that I acquired a kind of excitement for participating in projects with paranormal and horror themes.
I have always loved cinema and I hope one day to devote myself entirely to making films. It is not an easy medium. I work editing videos in an advertising company but I have several personal projects and a couple of colleagues with whom I plan to make our own short films. It is about one of these shoots of a horror short film that we decided to film that I am going to tell you about.
Marina is a friend with whom I share an apartment and whom I have known for many years. She told me that she had an idea for a script about a horror story. She wanted to make a short film to present at a festival that was being held in two months in Mexico City. We didn't have the budget to do it, but she thought that we could get together with her sister who was studying acting and between the three of us we could get the project going.
He sent me the script and I thought it was interesting. It was about a young girl who is haunted by a demon. We decided that the filming could be done in our apartment and we agreed to do it on two different days, one to record everything that happened inside, and the other to do the scenes that had to be outdoors and in the subway.
We had to postpone the start of filming twice, the first time because Mariana's sister had COVID and the second time because of a somewhat strange situation that occurred in our apartment.
That night I was about to fall asleep when Mariana knocked on my bedroom door. She seemed puzzled and told me that something strange was happening to her computer.
He showed me the screen, it was black and I could see letters and numbers, like codes, I thought it could be a virus when out of nowhere it fixed itself and a blank Word file appeared on the screen.
He told me that he had been working on correcting some dialogue in the script when he got up for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, of course he saved the document before leaving and when he came back and saw the screen part of the file had been deleted.
She got upset and tried to recover it, but when she couldn't, she thought it had been some kind of error in the program. She had to go back and rewrite what she had already done, but suddenly the dialogues were erased again.
She didn't understand what was happening, she activated the computer's antivirus but it seemed to be fine, she restarted it and once again began to write, she hadn't been writing for long when meaningless letters began to appear in the file and suddenly the screen went black.
That's when she came to see me. She seemed quite worried. She thought that I was trying to scare her because of the subject matter of what I was writing, but at that moment it seemed like something unimportant.
I understood that Mariana might be under the influence of thought for thinking so much about the story she was writing, but I thought it was all a coincidence and the computer had had some technical failure. I told her not to think about it anymore, to use my computer if she needed to, and that we could wait a few more days to record.
We planned the recording on a Friday night, we needed there to be no daylight so the idea was to work all night until the sun came up.
We started a little later than planned but we were all doing a good job, the actress was very convincing and even seemed to be seeing a demon at times, so when it was around three in the morning, we were in the middle of a take and we heard a sound, as if something had exploded, like when a tire bursts in the distance and suddenly the power went out.
We were left in the dark, at that moment I felt a chill down my neck, but I thought it was because of the sound that had managed to scare me, I turned on the flashlight on my phone and noticed that everyone was trying to do the same, we thought there had been some damage in the entire area where we lived.
When I looked out the living room window I noticed that the street lamps were on, I looked at the apartments and houses I could see from there and realized that some had lights on, despite the time, so seeing that it was probably just us, we decided to go check the light box that was at the entrance of the building, we thought that maybe they had lowered their heels.
When we got to the box that corresponds to our apartment it looked like it had burned down, it was stained black and had a smell like burnt cable, but what caught our attention was that the other switches seemed to be in perfect condition and to top off the night, the power failure had managed to damage the refrigerator, we had no choice but to stop recording.
The next day we called the power company, who confirmed that they had no record of any damage in the area, so we asked them to come and check it out and when they arrived they informed us that the damage had been caused by an overload that blew a fuse and several cables. We found this very strange because we couldn't find a logical reason for this to have happened. We had to wait for them to fix the problem and we agreed on a new date to finish filming our short film.
A few days later I was reviewing and editing the material we had recorded from that night, then I realized that one of the audios had a background noise, I didn't remember there being any noise while we were filming.
So I thought that was kind of weird, plus I noticed that the sound was appearing at different times in different takes, so I opened up the audio editor to try and fix it, as I tried to clean up the sound the noise started to sound more like a whisper .
I don't know how to explain it, but it sounded like a male voice. I tried to make the audio even clearer until I could clearly hear someone saying the word "Help." I froze. I wrote a message to Mariana telling her that we had a problem with the sound, but I wasn't able to explain to her via text what was happening, so I waited for her to get to the apartment to show her what we had recorded.
When she heard it she was as surprised as I was, she told me that she thought that because of the project, paranormal things were happening to us.
At that moment she confessed to me that her sister had written to her a little worried the day after the recording, because that night at home she had had a dream in which she was running through a kind of tunnel, she was running because she was running away from something, suddenly she said that she couldn't feel her legs or her hands, then everything went dark around her and she heard screams and moans coming from everywhere until some hands held her by the ankles and arms, the worst thing was that when she woke up from that nightmare she noticed that she had bruises on her right arm, marked as if someone had grabbed her very hard.
Mariana showed me the photo that her sister had sent her of the marks. At that moment I didn't know what to think. Despite everything that had happened up until then, the three of us agreed that we wanted to finish the job. We had already heard stories of horror productions where they experienced paranormal situations, so we decided to meet that weekend to finish filming.
Even though we tried to take everything calmly, the day we recorded we felt a particular energy, we thought that at any moment the electricity would fail again and although that did not happen again, we did notice that they were moving things around, at one point I put my phone aside while we were taking a shot and as soon as we finished it was no longer there, we searched everywhere until we found it next to the coffee maker in the kitchen.
At another point while we were working in the living room, we heard footsteps coming from the bedroom, as if someone was walking from side to side. By the time we finished recording we knew we were not alone. I tried to edit in the shortest time possible the following week, because although I was convinced that we had done a good job, I wanted to finish as soon as possible.
We had to dub the sound because at many moments we could hear whispers and disturbing noises. It was impossible to do it in the apartment so we went to Mariana's parents' house where her sister lived to be able to record the audios there.
That day she told her mother about the situations that had been happening to us, and she also confessed to me that many times while she was alone in her room she could feel that there was someone watching her.
On one occasion she had heard footsteps outside her door and that during the last few nights when she was about to fall asleep she heard someone knocking on her bedroom door, she told me that the first few times she had called my name thinking it was me, but she had gotten no answer.
The truth was that I had never heard her call me, after telling her all this, her mother advised us that we should do some kind of cleaning in the house, she herself offered to go help us, she was a very spiritual and religious woman, so for a few days we said prayers and lit some incense with some herbs that she herself brought to us, we lit white and purple candles, so it was that over time we did not hear strange things again, but despite everything that happened to us I must confess that I acquired a kind of excitement for participating in projects with paranormal and horror themes.
Copyright © 2020 Prabir Rai Chaudhuri
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horror stories