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With aspirations of as much personal intimacy as stylized eerie atmosphere, director Jason Rostovsky’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Light is currently over halfway toward its goal on Kickstarter. A coming-of-age horror short about a bullied young girl and her new creature companion, Rostovsky’s goal isn’t simply a $35,000 budget, but “to make a film that speaks out against the horrors of real life.” The filmmaker let Shock in on exclusive production art and talked the tale.

“For the most part, we look back on our middle school days as times of ease – no bills, no jobs, nothing scary. But we block out the terrifying reality of what it was like to be an awkward lonely kid,” Rostovsky says.

“Other kids can be cruel, mean, and violent, and even people close to us can hurt us. Bullying and physical and sexual abuse are real issues that often serve as character moments or sub-plots in films, but these subjects deserve to be in the spotlight. Sure, haunted houses and machete-wielding serial killers are scary, but those don’t effect 1 in 5 girls, or 1 in 3 students.”

Don’t Be Afraid of the Light then will concern Abigail, a strange young girl who is the victim of a group of bullies at school for being weird, offbeat, and obsessed with horror comics, only to come home to a family that finds her even weirder and treats her as such. One dark night, Abigail meets a mysterious supernatural friend that lives in her night-light, and follows her around through electricity. The ghostly entity teaches her to fight back against her bullies and The Dark Man, an evil creature from her past that has come back to haunt and hurt her.

“An empowering supernatural force visits our protagonist Abigail, using lights and electricity as a vessel… You could almost equate the Light to a not-so-imaginary imaginary friend that brings out her subconscious strength and courage. Ghost or not, it sure as hell teaches her how to fight back,” the director adds.

Though Don’t Be Afraid boasts grounded empathy, the film will usher in a creature of otherworldly design. It’s a neat piece of work that inspires hope the production pulls it off. “From script to sketch, our creature design gone through several changes guided by our brilliant Special FX artist Caitlyn Brisbin. We’ve also had the amazing artist Anthony Francisco from Marvel’s visual development team do some renderings, in addition to the conceptualizations Caitlyn has done (which are all very appropriately painted and drawn in makeup). She works very organically and has instilled in all of us the desire to make decisions for the creature based on thematic and natural logic. For instance, our monster is a creature of darkness – it lives in the shadows of the night. So why in the hell would it have eyes? We aim to make a monster that’s not scary for the sake of scary, but is truly terrifying because it’s meant to be so by its origins and motivations.”

Don’t Be Afraid of the Light has 8 days to go on its campaign. Below, find new storyboards from Erik Reichenbach, as well as pages from a comic book within the film that Rostovsky wrote, and was illustrated by Martin Trafford