Camille Solari’s Video Scream screened Sunday at the Indiewood Film Festival, bringing together dark comedy, supernatural tension and a visually heightened take on one of the most familiar concerns facing modern families: children spending too much time in front of screens.
Written and directed by Solari, who also created the film’s original music, Video Scream starred Charlie Dean and Blade Dean, Solari’s daughters and longtime collaborators. The film explored what could happen when screen time becomes more than a distraction, pushing the idea into a supernatural world where children are pulled into an alternate reality they cannot escape.
Rather than approaching the subject as a straightforward cautionary tale, Solari framed it through genre. The film blended dark comedy and thriller elements with a colorful, surreal visual identity, turning digital obsession into something playful, strange and increasingly unsettling.
That visual language was one of the film’s defining strengths. The production leaned heavily into neon-lit arcade environments, retro gaming machines, saturated colors and hazy interiors, creating a world that felt both inviting and dangerous. Behind-the-scenes materials from the production showed how deliberately that environment was built, with the film’s young characters surrounded by glowing screens, game cabinets and stylized sets that reinforced the story’s central theme.
Charlie Dean and Blade Dean gave the film its youthful center, grounding the heightened world around them while carrying the story’s sense of curiosity, excitement and unease.
Video Scream arrived at Indiewood with an awards history already behind it. According to the film’s press materials, the project had earned dozens of honors, including recognition for Best Music Video, Best Director and Best Young Actor.
The film also reflected Solari’s unusually broad creative background. Before directing, she built a career in stand-up comedy, performing in more than 30 countries, while also working as a songwriter. Solari is a Recording Academy member whose work has crossed comedy, music, television and filmmaking.
Her path through Hollywood has been equally eclectic. While studying at Emerson College, Solari landed an internship with Danny DeVito. After graduating with a BFA in Shakespeare and creative writing, she worked as a personal assistant to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Her directing debut, A Tale of James Brown, was executive produced by James Brown and featured numerous music icons.
That combination of music, comedy and filmmaking could be felt throughout Video Scream. The film moved between tones rather than staying confined to a single genre, using humor and visual spectacle to make its darker ideas more accessible.
The project was also part of a larger creative universe. Video Scream functions as both a standalone film and an episode of Solari’s Charlie TV, an original Roku series that was later picked up by Prime Video.
What ultimately made Video Scream effective was the simplicity of its central idea. It took something ordinary — children immersed in screens — and pushed it into an exaggerated cinematic reality where the screen was no longer simply something being watched, but a world capable of pulling them in.
At Indiewood, Video Scream stood out as a genre-driven film with a contemporary concern at its core, using neon, comedy and supernatural imagery to ask a question that feels increasingly relevant: when children spend more and more of their lives inside digital worlds, where does the real world begin to lose its hold?