Every day during October, the Department of Tangents presents a different short film for the Daily Horror Film Fest. It can be flat-out scary, funny horror, or just plain creepy. And every Monday during the DHFF, we’ll be featuring the films of Andrew J.D. Robinson of WORKOBEY Films.

Today starts a four-film arc that Robinson has set in a fictional area he calls D’Arcadia. The stories are connected but not sequential – he compares it to Stephen King’s Castle Rock, a place where the characters exist together. “It became more pronounced since 2017,” he says, “when that year’s wave of films marked a new chapter where I wanted to dive more into character driven, grounded drama/horror/mystery/thrillers that have a foot in reality versus my previous films were predominately surreal works.”

The first film is Sightings, in which we meet two women whose little sister has disappeared. It doesn’t give viewers a lot of information as to a plot, but then it is designed to be somewhat disorienting. “Sightings cuts from black as if it were an intruding daydream to set the precedent for what is almost a microshort,” says Robinson.

This is the launching pad for the next three films, which will be presented the next three Mondays on the Daily Horror Film Fest. And that won’t be the end of D’Arcadia, according to Robinson. “Although each instalment to the ‘D’Arcadia universe’ sometimes carries ‘spiritual threads’ whereas others are in on the reference to the other, they all actually are echoes from concepts that I’ve put together while writing feature-length scripts yet to be reigned in,” he says. “There’s things I’m trying out as well as introducing to lay down the ground work for the next time we return to D’Arcadia.”