Fear Came After Screener

A film by Rodrigo Perez-Segnini

Fear Came After

It didn’t feel like something arrived.
It felt like something moved forward.

Request a screener Read the logline

First official selection

01 / Logline

After a traumatic event fractures her sense of reality, a young woman trapped in a shifting industrial room must negotiate with an invisible presence that refuses to stay in the past.

It’s a ghost story, where the ghost is the version of yourself that was changed by a single, sudden moment. Eleven shots, one room, no on-screen text. A standoff staged entirely before contact, where the threat is absence and the horror is sequence.

A hard bar of daybreak light cuts across a concrete floor, dust suspended in the beam.
Still 05 One motivated source. Everything else falls away.
02 / Synopsis

The concept

A visceral, minimalist exploration of the geometry of trauma. Using a shifting industrial landscape as a metaphor for the mind, the film examines how a single, violent disruption of time can leave a person perpetually out of sync with their own reality.

The narrative

In the cold, clinical light of an early morning, a young woman moves through a concrete room. She is hyper-vigilant, checking her body for marks of a past that hasn’t quite stayed behind. As she navigates the space, the room begins to betray her: sounds occur out of sequence, furniture appears without warning, and the spatial logic of the world begins to fracture. Overlaid across her movements is the voice of her older self. A woman who has survived the terror and now reflects on it with haunting, detached clarity. The older woman explains that the event wasn’t a point in time, but a permanent shift in the world’s rhythm.

The conflict

She attempts to negotiate with an unseen presence that is always early. She isn’t fighting a monster, but a scar in her own existence. When she finally realizes she cannot outrun the timing of her own life, she is forced to confront the chilling possibility that the world didn’t move away from her, she moved away from the world.

The tone

Atmospheric, rhythmic, and deeply unsettling. Shallow focus and practical sound build a claustrophobia that never releases. A ghost story where the ghost is the version of yourself that existed before everything changed.

  1. IRitualShe maps the room, commits to the right window, listens for what hasn’t arrived.
  2. IIThe breakThe sound returns too early. She whispers “You’re early.” An older voice reframes the rules.
  3. IIIThe intrusionA metal table appears behind her. She negotiates with silence: “Okay.”
  4. IVRefusal & collapse“Not today.” Then a slow leak of tension, and she sinks to the floor, eyes open.
It’s a ghost story, where the ghost is the version of yourself that was changed by a single, sudden moment.

Rodrigo Perez-Segnini, director

03 / Stills

Nine frames from the assembly. Click any frame to enlarge.

The room drenched in deep red, the figure small in a shaft of light from two windows.

“It came early once.”

04 / Craft

Built sound-first: score and voiceover recorded before the cut, picture placed against the score’s timecode.

Image

Grade
Bleach-bypass bandpass. Near-monochrome cold graphite, steel-grey midtones, crushed blacks, clipped silvery highlights
Accent
A single icy cyan-blue, reserved for window spill and metal reflections
Stock
ORWO MC500 35mm
Camera
Arriflex 435 · 35mm
Lenses
Cooke S4 primes at f/2.0 for shallow depth, with frequent falloff to blur
Filtration
Black Pro-Mist for soft halation and highlight bloom
Grain
Heavy, 800 ISO
Light
One dominant motivated source: daybreak through the right window, carving hard graphic bands
Movement
Low, restrained, locked-off. Slow push-ins, one deliberate tilt, no handheld sway

Sound

Score
Piano and cello, composed and recorded before the edit; the film is cut to its rhythm
Structure
Sparse intro → narration enters → cello joins → crescendo → peak → long unresolved tail
Voiceover
Older Her, recorded with the score; picture beats placed against it
Motifs
Low electrical hum as the room’s floor tone · breath and near-whisper · raw bow noise when the music drops · silence as engineered absence

Format

Runtime
2:27, 11 clips
Frame
16:9 container, film-framed 1.66:1 · 1080p
Language
English, no on-screen text, no subtitles
Status
Finished. Submitted to international festivals
Selections
Official Selection, Best AI Super Short Film, World AI Cinema Festival, Cannes, 25 September 2026
  • Timing as terror
  • Ritual as prison
  • Endurance without closure
  • Memory and recurrence
  • Control performed, not possessed
  • Absence as the threat
05 / The voice

The narrator is the same woman, older, reading from a rulebook that keeps failing in real time.

  • “It stopped happening where it should.”
  • “Fear comes after.”
  • “You adjust. That’s the part no one tells you.”
  • “It came early once.”
06 / Credits
Film by
Rodrigo Perez-Segnini
AI voice & general look of AI cast
Lindsay Michelle Reed
AI workflow & prompts by
Ghost Lamp Studio
Post production
Final Stage Post HouseColorist, music composition, and editor
07 / Director’s note

Based on a real event in my life: a break-in at my childhood home. Three men held my family and me at gunpoint for several hours, a pillow over my head and a gun pressed to it. They verbally assaulted my family, slapped my brother around, and took our sense of security and safety.

It is the reason I left Venezuela. And it is a celebration of the man I became.

Rodrigo Perez-Segnini

Official selection, Cannes

Watch the film

FEAR CAME AFTER is finished and on the international festival circuit, with its first official selection at the World AI Cinema Festival in Cannes. Screeners are available on request for festivals, programmers, and press.

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