The Pizza Man

A father enters a living room and informs his kids that he’s ordered pizza. His sons cheer and run out of the room. His daughter pulls her Dad aside and says that the pizza man is evil.

She presents a small evidence journal with drawings and lists of all the things she’s gathered on him.

“Sometimes I see him outside my window late at night watching me…” says the girl.

The dad tries not to laugh and tells her everything’s fine. A half hour later, the father sees the pizza man coming up the stairs. He is a young man slightly obscured by shadow, tall enough to be above average height and slightly skinny.

The dad walks to the door and explains that the little girl is afraid of him. The dad calls the girl over. She scurries over and hides behind her dad. The pizza man chuckles and lets out a sigh. 

“Oh, little girl…” 

He ducks down extremely low at an impossible angle into the light of the doorway, finally revealing his face, dangerous eyes, and pale skin.

“Why would you ever be afraid of the pizza man..?”

He smiles, his mouth making grotesque sounds, like popping blood vessels and dry spit. The smile goes up too far, to the corners of his face to reveal long, jagged, yellow teeth filled with pizza and human remains.

This story is one I both find extremely comedic and also quite scary, which I love. I got the inspiration from two things. For the first one, I was unable to sleep late at night, lying in my room with the lights turned off and I thought to myself, “What is the dumbest thing I can think of?” Out of nowhere I just thought, an evil pizza man with teeth made of pizza and immediately started laughing to the point that it hurt. The second one was not nearly as funny.

This image has been another weird point of contention for me. When I saw it, I was instantly drawn to it, but it also scared the hell out of me. This is fantastic work by Villafane Studios, and was a real stepping stone that just made the whole thing feel much more sinister. When the two ideas combine, and this scarecrow morphed into a pizza man, I instantly knew how the last moment of the story would play out.

I saw it like a movie in my head, the shot is from the little girls perspective, and where the figure was maybe 6’2″ from the fathers perspective, you see he is much taller, thinner, and overall more ominous to the girl. You would see him duck from the waist, and his head would lower down into the frame, emphasizing his height, filling up a decent amount of the frame. “Why would you ever be afraid of the pizza man..?”

I could see the head tilt a tiny bit, see the impossible smile, and I just couldn’t get the sound of the smile out of my head. The stress of it on his face to do that smile is monumental, it’s destroying him physically. Maybe he is possessed, maybe he is being controlled inside by some creature like Men in Black, maybe he is just SUPER creepy; maybe its all in the little girl’s head. I like this story because it’s just as much as you need to get the point across. A couple paragraphs and that’s it.

If this was a short film, it would indeed be short. 2-3 minuets at most. It’s a tight little story. It’s creepy, it’s funny, it’s stupid, it’s unsettling, and it’s not too long, which is usually pretty hard for me. I would love to make this into a film one day, and who knows, maybe it will become one. Thanks for reading

Villafane Studios Website: https://www.villafanestudios.com/

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