Autumn Came Early This Year
Credits — Original Composition · Creative Direction · Writing · Production · Editing · Original Score · Sound Design · Mixed Media
Subchannel 9 · Analog Horror · Experimental Narrative · Mixed Media
autumn came early this year began with something ordinary: people were already talking about fall. The season hadn't arrived, but the language had. Stores were changing. Fall videos were appearing. People were anticipating cooler weather, changing leaves, familiar rituals. I started wondering what that would look like inside the world of Subchannel 9. What if everyone anticipating the same season wasn't simply cultural behavior? What if something had already begun transmitting the instruction? The film follows that idea without fully explaining it. Four friends arrive at an idyllic cabin. Something watches them from the tree line. They notice something, and an ordinary autumn evening begins operating according to rules they seem to understand before the audience does. I wanted the horror to emerge through recognition rather than interruption. The cabin stays beautiful. The sunset stays beautiful. The lake stays beautiful. Even as the logic underneath those things becomes increasingly wrong. By the time the broadcast reveals itself, the question is no longer what is happening to them. It's how long they've been participating.
Creative Decisions
Idyll Before Interference
The opening needed to feel genuinely inviting rather than ominous. Autumn forest footage, moving water, warm cabin interiors, Rhodes and ghost guitar establish a world the viewer might willingly enter. The horror doesn't replace that beauty; it gradually reveals another system operating underneath it.
Ritual Without Explanation
When the group simultaneously looks upward and says trees, no one questions the behavior. Later, the command scatter is treated with the same familiarity. I wanted their reactions to imply that the ritual existed before the audience arrived. The film reveals rules through participation rather than exposition.
The Transmission Changes Form
The visual language moves between sourced footage, generated imagery, cinematic sequences, surveillance perspectives, analog television and broadcast interference. Instead of hiding those changes, I treated them as part of Subchannel 9 itself...as though the signal is assembling the story from whatever media it can access.
Rhodes · Ghost Guitar · Analog Synthesis · Violin · Dystopian Lead · Environmental Sound · Broadcast Audio
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