Gillian Butcher
Woman
Overview
While practicing her clarinet alone in a theater, a young woman is disturbed by an increasingly menacing presence.
Cast
Reviews
4 min readThe Unseen Audience
I’ve always been drawn to horror that doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore, the kind that lingers in the quiet spaces between what you see and what you feel. The Orchestra, Curtis Matzke’s 2019 short film, lives in that unsettling gap. Six minutes—just long enough to unnerve you, not long enough to let you look away. latestnetflix.com's take is that it’s a film that understands something fundamental about fear: the most terrifying presences are the ones you can’t quite pin down.
The premise is simple, almost deceptively so. A young woman, alone in a theater, practices her clarinet. The camera lingers on her fingers moving over the keys, the way her breath fills the empty space around her.
There’s a rhythm to it, a kind of solitude that feels almost sacred. Then, something shifts. The air thickens.
The music doesn’t stop, but it no longer feels like hers. That’s the horror of The Orchestra—the intrusion of something unseen, something that wasn’t invited but has made itself at home all the same.
Matzke, who previously directed the horror film Splinter (2018), has a knack for turning confined spaces into pressure cookers. Here, the theater isn’t just a setting; it’s a character, one that’s both familiar and alien. Theaters are places of performance, of artifice, but they’re also spaces where the line between audience and performer blurs.
Who’s watching whom? That question hums beneath every frame of The Orchestra. The film doesn’t answer it, and that’s the point.
The horror isn’t in what we see—it’s in what we don’t see, in the way the camera refuses to give us a clear shot of the disturbance. Is it a ghost? A figment?
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe clarinet was the only living thing in the hall.
Gillian Butcher walks into an empty theater, checks the time, and starts to practice. No dialogue worth quoting. Six minutes. Real time. Then a chair moves, her hair lifts, and music starts coming from seats nobody occupies. PopHorror caught Curtis Matzke's short at Chicago's Cinepocalypse on June 16, 2019, latestnetflix.com argues, and called the last scare a little predictable. The reviewer still wanted the feature. That is the gossip Netflix inherited. Not a feud. A rehearsal that turns into a haunting. 
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HollywoodChicago's Patrick McDonald ran a Podtalk with Matzke the same festival weekend. The setup is simple. A woman enters a performance hall, takes out a clarinet, and cannot find the source of the wrongness in the air. TMDB files it as US horror, June 17, 2019, written and directed by Matzke, with Butcher billed as Woman and Daniel McEvilly as Conductor. IndieFlix's listing adds the undead-orchestra beat and the escape-before-it-is-too-late clock. , ,
He saw her first on a Michigan sidewalk.
Matzke told Screen Magazine he wrote the script in 2019 after watching "a girl who was dressed kind of unusually, carrying an instrument case across the street" at the University of Michigan. "She looked like she was in a horror movie," he said. "Once I had the idea, wrote it out very quickly." Tony Scott-Green scored it. NoiseFloor Ltd mixed. Michael Weldon shot. Zachary Korpi colored. Justin Reifert and Christopher Biewer produced with Matzke under Unfurnished Films. PopHorror notes McEvilly's Chicago Fire credit. HollywoodChicago's page calls the company Unfinished Films. Matzke's own site uses Unfurnished. The furniture joke is the director's. , , ,
IndieFlix lists the short as the opening scene of a feature still in development. Matzke's page is blunter. The Orchestra is currently being developed as a feature. The feature script, a young woman haunted at an elite music conservatory, won Best Screenplay at Woods Hole and Anchorage, reached the second round at Austin Film Festival, and went through the Chicago International Film Festival Feature Development Lab with Jennifer Reeder consulting. Slamdance called the script "an effectively suspenseful and frightening supernatural horror-thriller." , ,
The six-minute proof of concept screened at more than two dozen festivals. Matzke's site logs wins at Cindependent for Best Off-Kilter Short, Austin Revolution for Best US Genre Film, the Indie Horror Film Festival for Director's Choice, and Sherman Oaks for Best Horror Film, plus nominations at Nightmares and ME Film Festival. Bloody Disgusting called it "well shot and appropriately eerie" and told readers to watch for a feature-length creeper. Dis/Member heard Mike Flanagan in it. Screen Magazine later logged an online premiere at filmshortage.com and extra dates at Elevated Films and the Midwest Film Festival. ,
Netflix is one of the later homes. The rumor that the short is leftover trailer footage is wrong. It is a finished scare that Matzke already treated as act one. He told Screen the feature is about "the main character finding her voice and speaking up for herself" at a conservatory. "You're sympathizing with everything she's dealing with even though there's no evidence that it exists," he said. The monster, in his telling, works like The Babadook and The Grudge. Trauma with a downbeat. If the feature ever arrives, the Netflix six minutes are the first chair. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.