Dad's Fake Movie Poster Captures Bedtime Drama
Photo by Eric Metze
Bedtime, especially with a toddler, is never easy. For a mom and dad in Texas, one night got so out of hand it ended with a 2-year-old passed out on the stairs— and the viral movie poster, which rose to the top of Reddit on Thursday, to prove it.
It all started when Texas parents John and Amanda (who changed their names for the poster and chose not to reveal their real last name to Yahoo Parenting), switched their son Andrew from a crib to a toddler bed. “He quickly learned how to open doors, so after bedtime he could escape his room and wander the upstairs,” John tells Yahoo Parenting. “We initially put up a baby gate but his sister, Ellie, who is 6, taught him how to open it, rendering it useless.”
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One night in early March, Andrew kept leaving his room, and John and Amanda would hear him make his escape and bring him back to bed. “This happened four or five times until we didn’t hear anything anymore and assumed he was asleep,” John says. “An hour or so later my wife and I head to bed and find him like this on the stairs, about halfway down.”
John says he immediately took pictures of Andrew to share with family and friends. Two days later, Eric Metze, a friend who is a media designer, presented them with a movie poster featuring the photo. “Bedtime,” as Metze imagined, is a horror movie with the tagline: “This has gone too far.”
Metze says he thought of the poster as soon as he saw the photo. “It looked like a picture from a horror movie,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “They were heading to bed with the lights off and the only light on was spotlighting Andrew on the stairs.”
The tagline came from Amanda’s comment when she first posted the picture to Facebook, Metze says. “She’d been chronicling all the crazy places Andrew had fallen asleep,” he says. For the next day, Metze pored over other horror movie posters to get his just right.
The hilarious final product, which credits Amanda as the director and John as a producer “in association with the stairs,” points out that the movie is coming soon, “like probably tonight.”
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John and Eric decided to share the poster on Reddit, “thinking some people might find it funny,” John says. So Eric changed their last names — Humphries is a pseudonym — and they posted it on Reddit Thursday morning. It immediately shot to the top of the site, receiving nearly 4,500 likes and more than 400 comments. Now, users are suggesting ideas for sequels, including “Bedtime 3: Same Thing As Last Night, First We Brush Your Teeth And Then We Can Read One Story, Please Don’t Give Us A Hard Time Again.”
Though they never expected the picture to get such attention, John and Eric are both enjoying the ride. “Maybe Andrew has a future in movies, who knows?” John jokes. For now, he’s having a full-size movie poster printed to hang in Andrew’s room. And Eric says the popularity of the poster came at just the right time. “Today is my birthday, and I’ve given myself the best present — and the Internet has just run with it.”
Still, the bedtime horror is not quite finished. John says he and his wife are still working on getting Andrew to go to sleep at night. “Last night I tried letting the two [kids] play together for 30 minutes to wind down and then go to bed which completely backfired,” he says. “I found them in his old crib jumping on it like a trampoline all wound up.”
Maybe there will be sequels after all.
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