Stabbed

Read the screenplay (PDF) — Original screenplay.

A young couple decides to prank their friend... with dire consequences.

Leila is home alone in Manchester, New Hampshire, about to watch the remake of Friday the 13th, when her phone rings. The caller won't say who it is but knows her name. Leila figures it's one of her friends pranking her and hangs up.

She's right. Her friends Tori and Nick are parked outside in a car with a prepaid cell phone and a voice changer that makes anyone sound like Ghost Face. Nick tells a nervous Tori it's her turn to talk, and that the phone can't be traced back to them.

Tori calls back and asks Leila to play a game. Leila jokes about The Ring, then figures out it's a Stab-style prank call and plays along. The game is horror movie trivia. She names Robert Rodriguez as the director of the first Stab movie. Then she names the killer in the 2003 thriller Identity: the little boy, though the characters were all in one man's head. Tori hangs up frustrated because Leila isn't scared at all. Nick decides to finish the prank in person. He asks Tori to hand him the mask and the fake knife, then heads for the house while Tori keeps her on the phone.

On the next call Leila brags that she won. Tori, still speaking as Ghost Face, quotes Billy Loomis: the killer makes the rules, and whether you get it right or wrong, you die. She tells Leila the killer is already inside, hiding in the hall closet. Leila opens the closet and finds nothing. Nick jumps out of another door in the Ghost Face costume and stabs at her. The knife is real. Tori grabbed the wrong one, and Leila is stabbed to death.

Nick pulls off the mask in a panic and calls Tori inside. They blame each other for the knife mix-up. Tori wants to call the police. Nick refuses because they would go to jail. He reasons that Manchester is where all the Stab killings happen, so if they leave the knife, the mask and the costume behind, the police will think it was just another Stab murder. They get back in the car and agree to act like it never happened. As they drive off, Ghost Face rises up in the back seat, and the short cuts to black.

Release & Reception

• Distributor: StabMovies.com YouTube channel (free to watch)

Uploaded free to the StabMovies.com YouTube channel on October 15, 2012 as Stabbed | Short Film | Full Movie. By mid-September 2026 it had about 25,000 views.

It was released together with two other shorts as the Trifecta of Terror.

Cast

Crew

Production

Stabbed was the first short film StabMovies.com made. In Behind the Mask Joshua Patrick Dudley says they wanted it to stay in the style of their Scream-based Stab series, as a side story set in Manchester. Rachel Alexandria Arnold says the goal was to give something back to fans who kept asking for more Stab content.

The three shorts were made as a thank-you to fans after the channel passed 5 million views on YouTube. Dudley says they came after Stab 4, 5 and 6 to hold fans over until the next feature.

Stabbed launched what they called the Trifecta of Terror, three short films released together. Arnold says the plan was that in years without a feature they would at least make three strong shorts. They made a Stab short first so they could go on to make shorts that had nothing to do with Stab.

The opening came from an idea first written for Stab 6: Ghostface Returns, where it was cut down a lot. The mix-up between a fake knife and a real one also started as a Stab 6 plot point. There, a girl is stabbed to death while filming a death scene before anyone realizes it's real. Dudley calls the two films companions that fill in the blanks for each other.

They argued over the title for a while. They didn't want to call it Stab something, and settled on Stabbed because it was the funniest option.

Dudley wrote the lead for Leila Bafageeh, whom he knew from waiting tables at the same restaurant, and gave the character her first name. He also knew Nicole Ward and Steve Dumais from restaurant jobs. The two had never met before the shoot, and Dudley says neither had any acting experience.

The whole short was filmed in one night at Arnold's family's old house in Manchester, the same house used as Shannon's house in Stab 6. It was dressed differently, and Arnold says the inside had been redone. They started late, waiting for it to get dark, and the shoot took a couple of hours.

Dudley ran most of the camera himself. Rachel Alexandria Arnold filmed while he was in the Ghost Face costume, and he says she came up with some of the best angles.

Arnold says she was mostly hands-off on this one and did little of the filming.

Behind the Mask, Part 8: Stabbed | The Making Of covers the short with interviews with Joshua Patrick Dudley and Rachel Alexandria Arnold. It went up on June 24, 2020.

Filming locations

• Rachel Alexandria Arnold's family's old house, Manchester, New Hampshire: Leila's house, the whole short. The same house and staircase were used as Shannon's house in Stab 6.
• A car outside the house: Tori and Nick's prank calls

Effects and makeup

Dudley played Ghost Face through the stabbing because the stunt knives kept breaking and he didn't want anyone else to break them. The shot then cuts so that Steve Dumais is the one who takes off the mask. The screams and a groan were dubbed in afterward.

Props and costumes

A Ghost Face costume and mask, a prop knife and a real knife. The mix-up between them drives the plot.

A voice changer, which Dudley says he had wanted since first seeing Scream. In the short, anyone can use it to sound like Ghost Face.

The killers

Deaths

No composer or music is credited.

Leila is watching the 2009 Friday the 13th remake, and footage from it plays on her TV.

STABFLIX

Watch the film

Bonus features and videos

▶

Behind the Mask, Part 8: Stabbed

StabMovies.com

The documentary episode covering the Stabbed short films.

Playlists

• The bonus features playlist

Gallery

Stills

Promotional Images