A girl confronts her fears when visitors from another land materialize in the shadows of the night.

When you’re a child, it feels like almost anything can happen when you are alone in the dark. Monsters hide in every shadow. Creepy crawlers lurk in the crevasse between the underside of the bed and the floor. The boogeyman waits for you inside the dark confines of your bedroom closet. The kinds of nightmarish imaginings that can only be conjured up by a child’s mind are exactly what the short film Nightshade aims to recreate.

Nightshade, the debut short film of writer and director Charles Chudabala, is a fantasy-horror short about a young girl who must confront her bedtime fears as they manifest themselves in the shadowy corners of her room at night. The film is certainly uneven, as is often the case with debut projects from first-time directors, but its childlike sensibilities and tone make the final product feel cute and endearing.

When watching Nightshade, it’s clear that the film was made by someone who is less experienced at making films. The film has some very noticeable technical issues that are common in the entry-level shorts made by film students and novice filmmakers. It looks, feels, and sounds unpolished, but to hold any technical shortcomings against a movie made under such humble circumstances is unfair. For all of its technical issues, the only one that feels warranted to criticize lies in the film’s score, which often feels unmotivated and distracting. Otherwise, the filmmakers here have room to improve, and they hopefully will with future projects.

What can be said about Nightshade’s technical side is that Chudabala incorporates some fun cinematography and lighting. While some of the shots here are expectedly amateurish, the film has fun with colorful lighting designs, extreme close-ups, and surrealistic shot presentations that give it a dream-like quality. There’s creativity behind how the film’s imagery is rendered, and the effort here is admirable.

Nightshade also gets points for capturing childhood fears in rather a childlike way. The film is designed to feel like a childhood nightmare, but rather than depicting this in a visceral and outright terrifying way, it opts to approach for more childish sensibilities in its presentation. From the use of stuffed animals and imaginary friends as protectors from monsters to the fear of cackling, scenery chewing, Amira Gulch-style witches, everything here is tinged with the innocence and naivete of a child’s mind. Is it scary? No. But it’s cute, and that lends the film a somewhat imaginative and endearing quality.

As for areas the filmmakers can improve, the storytelling here is, for lack of a better word, wonky. Sitting at a meager 4-and-a-half-minute runtime, the film introduces components that aren’t given the time necessary to justify their inclusion. While the childlike tone is endearing, the childlike writing—in which ideas have no payoff and ideas and characters are thrown in without reason—is less so. The whole thing feels disorganized, which makes it feel more amateurish.

Overall, Nightshade is a flawed first film that gets points for being cute. Does this completely redeem its technical flaws and novice directing? That’s up for the audience to decide. It is far from polished or glossy in its presentation, and it suffers from having a number of ideas that don’t quite line up or payoff, but the people behind it are clearly having fun with their work and will surely improve as they gain more practice and experience.