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Enter the Scareverse
Halloween is fast approaching and we've got short film picks and themed collections
Jason Sondhi
October 27, 2023
This week kicked off what will become 9 days of Halloween-themed programming for us. Is that too much? Honestly, there is so much competition for seasonal scary viewing that there isn’t a cynical “traffic” justification for it, we just like having the excuse to give horror shorts some shine!
As a result, this is a content-heavy edition of the newsletter with lots of films to tease you with. Hopefully, we will deliver you a few rock-solid scary recommendations to watch in the dark with your friends or loved ones, but also a few picks that highlight the incredible originality filmmakers are displaying in borrowing + remixing horror tropes and fusing them into other genres. Let us know if you think we deliver!
📅 This Week on Short of the Week
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We kick off with the ridiculous, yet surprisingly effective Rhyme or Die from Max r Lincoln. Channeling classics like Battle Royale, the high-concept horror short delivers both drama and a sneaky satire of the “cutthroat creative industry”.
Rob also writes about Homeless Home, from indie animation’s Spanish hero, Alberto Vázquez. A 4-time winner of the Goya in his home country, this latest short film from the celebrated auteur utilizes “nightmarish beings to explore current social issues with startling effect.” Vázquez has a habit of turning his shorts into features, which he did with Birdboy, Unicorn Blood, and currently Decorado, so perhaps this will get adapted in the future too?
Then, Jessy Hodges’ short film is, admittedly, an unusual one for the season. Not really a “scary” movie, the film is instead a dramatization of an interesting moment of the director’s adolescence, but happens to be connected to a horror movie touchstone. She explains, “Many of us can point to a moment when we learned something about our parent that reframed them as a person. Finding out about The Evil Dead – and the fact that my mom had been violently raped by a tree in it (classic, right?) – was that moment for me.”
Another great example of the flexibility of the genre is Catching Spirits by Vanessa Beletic. Rob writes, “Blending the dance film with elements of the horror/thriller genre is a combination not often seen in the world of shorts, or features, but Beletic makes it look effortless, her film is constantly gripping and hugely entertaining.”
Finally, today Georgia wrote about the directorial debut of Jess O’Kane. Familiar to us as a co-writer of the Sundance-winning short The Devil’s Harmony, she stretches herself to produce a primarily visual film that reworks femme fatale tropes into horror. Indebted to Under the Skin, O’Kane tells a similar story of an otherworldly predator in a woman’s body.
🪐 Shortverse Collections
The Short of the Week programming team has compiled a bunch of themed playlists over the years and Rob went wild translating them to Shortverse collections this week, like the one pictured below which originated as a fun piece from 2021, where we went to a bunch of horror filmmakers we admire and asked them to recommend a short they couldn’t get out of their heads.
🍿 New releases you’ve been enjoying…
Shortverse viewers are making great discoveries on their own too, like these workplace horror/comedies, and also a bit of Taylor Swift thrown in to acknowledge 1989 (Taylor’s Version) dropping ^_^
Thanks for reading! Enjoy a few more days of Scareverse!