Ted Linden and Chromatic Films presents You Are Here

Like in a movie

Linden, who is entering his senior year at the George School in Newtown, is the director of You Are Here, an award-winning five-minute short available on YouTube. The film won “Best in Fest” at the school’s annual film festival and is headed to some upcoming festivals, including the Southeast Pennsylvania Teen Filmmaker Showcase in August, as well as a festival in Kosovo.

Linden told us in an interview that he doesn’t have any memory of Neshaminy Mall in its more bustling prime, although the AMC theater is where he goes to see most movies.

“Just through the years, going to the movies and seeing it just become more and more this desolate and dead, the more I see it, just kind of turned into this like perfect idea for a film set, because I kind of saw firsthand how abandoned it got over the years,” he said of the mall.

And that comes through in the film itself. After beginning with a vintage back-to-school commercial for the Neshaminy Mall, the bulk of the short features a young man (Linden’s co-writer Inayat Afzal) walking around the shuttered portions of Neshaminy Mall and, eventually, the non-public portions of it.

The film was shot in a single day, over the course of a few hours. Linden said he tried to get permission to film in the mall but couldn’t reach anyone to grant approval, although he did inform the security guard working that day.

Drawing parallels

To most watching, the film is going to look familiar. The massive movie hit Backrooms is also set among the creepy margins of a failing retail establishment, while making use of liminal spaces. Backrooms also had its origins as a YouTube short, and was also the work of a young filmmaker, a 21-year-old Kane Parsons.

Much has been written about how that film’s major success has prefigured the rise of a new generation of young filmmakers who came up through YouTube and other social platforms—a cohort of which Linden is certainly a part.

Linden is a fan of Backrooms and said he had been following Parsons on YouTube for a while. When Backrooms was released, naturally, he saw the movie at Neshaminy Mall.

“I've kind of seen that film come to where it is, which has been really cool,” he said.

Linden, when asked if he wanted to try adapting You Are Here into a feature, he said “I'm working on another short film right now, but I'm definitely not opposed to it at all.” He added, “I would love to go back and explore the story a little bit more, especially some more areas of the mall and the space that I didn't get to capture in the original film.” The film is an official selection of the LiftOff Sessions at the Pinewood Studios in England. Additionally, the streaming service HorrorHoundTV has accepted the film, with streaming available beginning on August 5.

Among his favorite movies, Linden lists M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, which he notes was shot very close to where he lives, as well as Rob Reiner’s Misery. He’s also enjoyed more recent horror films like Talk to Me and Obsession.

“I’ve always loved movies, my whole life,” Linden said. “It wasn’t until I was maybe 12, 13 that I started becoming creative, and starting to think of ideas and putting them on the screen.”

He credits film classes he took at The George School, under teacher Prescott Seraydarian—although You Are Here was not made as a class project—and making films with his friends. He is interested in possibly going to college to study film.

“I just found love in doing that,” he said. “And just the process. I learned to love the process, just all the way from writing to editing. And it really just started as this fun hobby that I was doing with a group of friends.”

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