Clinical Calm

A satirical horror short film inspired by the Valium culture of the 1950’s, a time when women were prescribed sedatives and tranquilizers at alarming rates to treat “housewife syndrome.”

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Inspiration

This short film was highly inspired by pharmaceutical ads in the 1950's that targeted housewives as core customers for various benzodiazepines and sedatives. I've always been fascinated by big pharma, especially Purdue Pharmaceutical. Before the time of oxycontin, Arthur Sackler actually made Valium the most widely prescribed drug in America while downplaying the side effects of addiction. It was heavily targeted to housewives.

What it does

This film is a satirical take on the 1950's 'housewife syndrome'. In a post-war era, business and society wanted to medicate a problem that was mostly systemic in nature, where women had little opportunity in the workforce and took on domestic roles. The missing part here was choice and opportunity.

These drugs were called “mother’s little helper” and helped women dull out and continue to serve their families with less grief. In reality, the cause for depression was often a lack of opportunity for women despite having access to an education. While I consider this a dark side of history, my hope is for this film to remind us to never take freedom and choice for granted.

How we built it

The story and script was written by me and I wanted to make this a very concise and contained narrative with very timely pacing.

I created all my imagery first frame by frame and upscaled all finalized images up front (via Magnific). Only once I had about 90% of my imagery ready did I begin generating video clips for each image. For certain shots I used frame-to-frame techniques but typically I was just directing the camera movement on a still image via prompt. All sound effects and music came from Epidemic Sound with voice work from Google Veo3. I did all video editing within Capcut.

Video: @Kling_ai , @Google Veo3 Sound: @epidemicsound
Image: Midjourney, Nano Banana, Seadream 4.0, Magnific Editing: @CapCutofficial

Challenges we ran into

The meat room concept was originally not planned for and that ended up being a part of my creative process. The intention was a 'void' within the body and mind that first started as a black void. I was not feeling inspired by the imagery and craved something more raw and the meat room idea came up from an inspirational thought of the Lady Gaga 'meat dress'.

Things we are proud of

This short film placed 3rd in the Curious Refuge AI Horror Short Film Competition in 2025

What's next for Clinical Calm

I would love to turn this into a feature film one day! A traditional hybrid-AI production ideally.

Built With

  • capcut
  • epidemicsound
  • google
  • kling
  • magnific
  • midjourney
  • nanobanana
  • seadream4.0
  • veo3
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