Kaukauna native made his first horror short film. It's already winning awards.

Kaukauna native Eric Larson's first short film is winning awards.

Larson, who has lived in New York City for about a decade, recently completed his 15-minute short film "Check the Locks: A Fidgety Folktale." It won Best Picture at the August New York Film Awards and Best Lead Performance for shorts at the Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio. It showed Thursday at the New York Shorts International Film Festival in Manhattan, the largest film festival on the east coast.

Larson came up with the idea for the film from his own experiences with anxiety and a habit he picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic: Taking pictures of his stove before leaving the house to reassure himself he didn't accidentally leave it on.

"Check the Locks" tells a story of a woman with a similar habit — but with locking doors. After a recent nervous breakdown, the woman goes to a friend's cabin in the woods to try to relax. She compulsively locks and relocks the cabin door, taking a picture of the locked door with her phone to look at later to alleviate her anxiety. But in the night, the woman checks her phone and sees that her photographic proof has changed.

"I like to describe it as half a good old-fashioned haunted house movie, and half kind of a psychological reflection," Larson said.

More:Watch the trailer for "Check the Locks"

Larson and a small crew shot the film in September 2021 in upstate New York. He edited the film over the next few months and had the rough cut done around December. Then, Larson worked with a visual effects artist, found a composer to write the score and did the rest of the post-production work. The film was finally finished in July.

Then Larson hit film festivals. The New York Film Awards, where "Check the Locks" won Best Picture in August, hosts a monthly competition. The Best Picture winners for each month then go against each other for a Best of Fest award, highlighting one top film of the year. The Nightmares Film Festival features horror shorts and feature films from around the world, and the New York Shorts International Film Festival features more than 340 short films screened over seven days.

Beyond those festivals, Larson said "Check the Locks" will play in the summer at the Upstate New York Horror Film Festival, as well as some online-only festivals. He said he has also submitted the film to some festivals that he doesn't expect to hear back from for a few months.

"I didn't really have that many expectations," he said. "I was pretty green about the whole festival process. So I've just sort of been submitting to festivals that seemed interesting and festivals that have been recommended to me by other directors.

"It's been really validating, and really cool to ... not only win awards, which has been really exciting obviously, but it's also been fun just to talk to people."

Larson said he's been able to network with other filmmakers and connect with people who've seen his film. He said he's heard multiple people say they also take pictures of their stove to look at later to reassure their anxieties.

While Larson is relatively new to the filmmaking world, he said his love of movies developed during his childhood in Wisconsin.

"I think, like a lot of kids, I was just obsessed with movies," he said. "My cousins had a farmhouse outside of Kaukauna, and I'd spend a lot of time with them, for like sleepovers on the weekends, just watching VHS tapes. The movies 'Jurassic Park' and 'Batman Forever' for some reason were very formative for us."

Larson graduated from Kaukauna High School in 2006. After that, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he studied journalism. After college, he moved to New York for an internship with media company Mashable, where he worked as a feature writer.

In this job, Larson would sometimes work with a small video team that created video packages for his stories. Their work interested him, and Larson began taking time at night and during the weekends to teach himself the basics of filmmaking. Eventually, he transitioned into working on video-focused work for digital media companies, including Buzzfeed. About four years ago, he moved into the world of advertising, where he worked as an art director.

"That's what made me feel like I can actually do something myself because, for the past four years, as an art director, I've done a lot of writing and art directing for bigger commercials, and got to spend a lot of time on set with these kind of bigger directors ... and really kind of absorbed everything they were doing," he said.

Now, Larson makes his living freelancing. But after the initial success of "Check the Locks," he said he has more short films in the works.

"I think I really sort of caught the bug," he said. "Shooting the film ... was probably one of the most challenging things I've ever done, but one of the most rewarding. I learned a bunch — like, there are definitely a bunch of mistakes I made. A bunch. And a bunch of things that I wish I would have done differently, but now know to do differently. I still have so much to learn, but it was really, really fun."

Contact Kelli Arseneau at (920) 213-3721 or karseneau@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ArseneauKelli.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Eric Larson's horror short film, "Check the Locks," winning awards