By Yourself world première at Fantastic Fest 2026, paired with Nikias Chryssos’ Bloody Tennis
“So none of it’s real, nothing’s real with you anymore,” Elliot (Tessa Jean) tells her girlfriend Syl (Zelda Adams), “You just don’t want to be alone.” This apparent overture to a breakup is in fact a flashback, as Syl now really is alone, in a tent, reading back over the last texts that she received from Elliott before setting off into the woods. “Honestly, it might be really good for you,” Elliot had written, “to be by yourself.” By Yourself is also the title of this short film, even if the meaning of those two words shifts and unpacks itself.
Syl has gone on a solo camping trip to reconnect to herself – but she will wake to discover that during the night another tent has been pitched by her own, its mirror image in shape, design and colour. Disconcerted, Syl will quietly move on, and set up camp elsewhere, only for the other tent to be there again in the morning, with Syl’s dark doppelgänger glimsped at its entrance.
Films like Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek (2013), Adam MacDonald’s Backcountry (2014), Patrick Rea’s Enclosure (aka Arbor Demon, 2016) and Chris Ruppert and Tyler Transue’s Creature of the Pines (2026) – as well as any number of campsite slashers – have all taught us that a tent, as well as being a temporary home away from home, is a mere membrane, providing fragile shelter and illusory protection from whatever predator may be lurking outside. In By Yourself, however, writer/director Elaine Frost leaves Syl exposed to what is inside.
In a sense this sylvan psychodrama is rehashing, in a different setting and in the absence of Elliot, that remembered conversation between her and Syl, and will even, eventually, play back some of its lines. For now Syl, left to and by herself, must in her panicky isolation confront her own dark side and the empty nihilism that comes with solitude. By Yourself plays like a conventional backwoods horror, with creepy cat-and-mouse and shadowy figures in the dark – except that the threat which Syl faces is a solispsitic, existential nightmare, as she discovers that, alienated and alone far from her home with Elliot, indeed nothing is real.
strap: In Elaine Frost’s queer horror short, a solo camper trying to reconnect to herself is confronted by the empty nothingness within
© Anton Bitel
