About the Film
Dead on TV began as a question: what does grief look like when it has nowhere to go?
The television becomes a kind of threshold — a permeable membrane between what we know and what we've lost. The static isn't noise. It's something listening back.
Shot over nine days in rural Michigan in February, the film deliberately embraces the texture of VHS and early digital: the artifact, the dropout, the moment where signal becomes something else entirely. The horror isn't announced. It accumulates.
Notes on Process
Working with natural light and practical sources only, every frame was designed to feel found — as though the camera arrived after something had already happened. The color palette leans into deep blues and sickly ambers, colors that feel like a room where the power has been on too long.
The sound design was built around absence. What isn't there. The frequencies that television produces when no one is watching.
On Influence
Influences live in the periphery of this film rather than at its center: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, the way Lynch lets things breathe past the point of comfort, the visual grammar of found footage without the formal conceit of found footage. Something that feels discovered rather than made.
Awards
- Best Narrative — Sonscreen Film Festival 2026