Ella Price’s “False Start” is a taboo trip through our darkest impulses and intrusive thoughts — and somehow, she makes it look sexy.
I watched a lot of fun horror films at the Atlanta Film Festival, from tongue-in-cheek creature feature Fishy to Weapons, with a Josh Brolin Q&A. But a horror movie that truly terrified and disturbed me was Ella Price’s short film False Start. The premise of this modern-day video nasty is simple enough: Viewers watch as Shelley (Julia Daigh), a disaffected, true-crime-obsessed pizzeria worker, stands on the precipice of her first kill, Betty (Magdalen Silver). The sweet wanderer sees Shelley walking home from work as she picks Betty up for a ride down a long, dark, backcountry road to Shelley’s house.
But is this Shelley’s first rodeo? This is one of the few questions I had while watching False Start, which left me wanting more. The film festival’s description, for the midnight movie block of ATLFF titled “Dark Fantasies,” gave away that our protagonist is an “aspiring serial killer.” Still, watching Price’s movie, where we see Shelley listening (and getting off) to a true crime doc detailing gruesome murders, made me wonder where the line is.
Blood on Shelley’s hands | “False Start” short film
I, like many people, fall asleep to true crime shows. Keith Morrison from Dateline is my own personal Sandman. But what separates me, of the macabre bedtime story and , from a person like Shelley who may or may not be plotting her first murder?
Beyond the opening scene, where Shelley is rubbing one off to her library book about death, there’s a psychosexual thread that runs through False Start: The slick sensuality inherent to guts, the carnal messiness of pizza sauce or blood, the anticipation of a first kiss that might turn into something darker. As Shelley, actress Julia Daigh was able to balance the kind of stilted awkwardness you’d imagine from a pale loner who reads about serial killers all day with shameless passion. Everything about the weirdness and grossness of False Start thrilled me — and disgusted others.
Price’s film was at the end of the shorts block, where we had all watched films dealing with difficult subjects: violence against kids (organ-harvesting in What Are Grandchildren Made Of?), homophobia (slur-fueled murders in Under the Purple Water), and sexual assault (revenge killing in Shaken). But it was False Start that made people shift uncomfortably in their seats. I heard one half of the couple next to me whisper, “What the fuck?!” When I talked to Price after the screening, she told me that people moaned in disgust and even walked out during the first ATLFF showing of False Start.
Shelley enjoying a forbidden moment | “False Start”
How does someone come up with the kind of film that simultaneously turns viewers on and makes them gag? Price had been working on a different story about religion and sexual repression; that script became the bones for False Start. Price then started adding new flesh: The dark character harboring a sexual fascination with violence was now a woman. The story would be set in 2001, “as the 24-hour news cycle shifts its focus from fear mongering about crime to fear mongering about terrorism,” Price told Dread Central.
Likewise, Price and her filmmaker friends were toying with the idea of a horror shorts anthology that felt like a playlist. The Rolling Stones’ song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was brought up, where the moments of Shelley masturbating and being interrupted came in. As for the serial killer element, in a very meta process, Price looked to real-life villains: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Edmund Kemper.
“We talked about Bundy as an aspirational figure for Shelley, and we also talked about Betty having sort of a Bundy energy. Betty doesn’t have the goal Shelley does, but she’s this hard-to-read charming drifter who sort of wills a stranger into her car,” Price told me. “There’s a competition going on subtextually.” Ed Gein was also an inspiration. “The more I work on the feature, the more of that archetype I see,” she said.
Shelley taking a souvenir from work | “False Start”
These aforementioned murderers continue to have their day in the sun on screen. Last year, Charlie Hunnam starred in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, created by Scream Queens’ Ian Brennan. Previously, Evan Peters was the titular character of DAHMER, a series co-created by Brennan and American Horror Story’s Ryan Murphy. (Before that, Ross Lynch, from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, had starred in My Friend Dahmer.)
Zac Efron had also charmed as Bundy in 2019’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; in the same year, Netflix put out Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. As she continues to flesh out False Start, creative process, Price noted, “Fictional or fictionalized killers have been very formative, too, because the character is in conversation with cultural depictions more than the real deal.”
Shelley meets Betty | “False Start”
If all this serial killer talk is making you lick your lips, know that Price, along with her co-producer Cait Rowe, is currently submitting False Start to more festivals. So, like Shelley, you’ll have to be patient to taste that first blood, but having seen Price’s film, I can tell you this sick little spectacle is worth the wait. Besides, I often think of so many other horror directors who made a splash with their shorts. Watcher writer-director Chloe Okuno, Primate director Johannes Roberts, and X trilogy director Ti West all contributed to the V/H/S anthologies before releasing their iconic features. I doubt this is the last time you’ll be hearing about Ella Price’s work in the horror genre.
