If you love horror like me,Do Clothes Make the Woman?: Gender, Performance Theory and Lesbian Eroticism Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year. While, sure, I also love costume parties and candy, the reason I wait all year for the end of October is because I expect somereal scares. Halloween is a license to consume endless horror flicks.
And while supporting your local theater is great, some of my favorite shocks come from short indie films, where a content creator may only need as many as two minutes to suck me in and make me turn my bedroom light on.
Below is a list of some of the best disturbing, unsettling, spooky shorts from the past few years. Grab your safety blanket and dive in to the worlds of these absolutely unique directors!
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1. Salt by Rob Savage
Into the occult? Encompassing yourself in a salt ring is considered a magical solution to keep demons and poltergeists away from you. Drawing on that, Saltis a two-minute horror short about an unrelenting paranormal monster which keeps a mother and her sick daughter indoors at all times. By drawing salt circles around themselves, they're able to stay safe. But what happens when they need to leave?
SEE ALSO: Is my chronic fear of horror movie jump scares actually a phobia?2. Cooking with Abigail by Jack Stauber
Artist Jack Stauber takes a lot of inspiration from children's shows. In Cooking with Abigail, Stauber creates a world in which the little girl, Abigail, appears to be a child star while the show's jingle devolves into a tell-all by one of the fruits she works with.
Stauber's creations are otherworldly and surreal. In another project, called Lima Bean Man, Stauber takes one man's insurmountable grief and turns it into a dance jingle for a girl named Sabrina. But beyond the dark stories and catchy songs, Stauber's melted, twisting animation style makes takes these projects to a whole other level of disturbing.
3. AlanTutorial series by Alan Resnick
AlanTutorialwas a project created by Alan Resnick during YouTube's tutorial-heavy era. The project has dozens of minute-length installments, where the narrator shows the audience how to perform an incredibly mundane task. Over the course of the series, however, you get a glimpse into the inner mechanisms of the narrator, and watch his grip on reality break, Finally you get this video, the last in the installment.
Much of Resnick's work is cryptic, andAlanTutorial is no exception. The above video comes from a point in the narrator's life where everything seems to have fallen apart. He seems to be trapped in a room of trash, funneling money out of a small hole in the wall, while someone nearby writhes in dirt. Yet even at rock bottom, Alan is still too dedicated to his brand to stop filming the tutorial. To feel the full impact of the work I highly recommend you start from the beginning.
4. This House Has People In It by Alan Resnick
If you're a digger, this project is for you.
This House Has People In Itis so much more than just the 12 minute source video, and I don't mean there's multiple installments. On its surface, this unsettling short appears to be about a teenage girl sinking through the kitchen floor on her brother's birthday. But ultimately This House Has People In Itis a two hour content journey about paranoia, disease, fetishization, and surveillance. You are the ultimate voyeur -- not only watching recovered security footage of the incident but digging through archival photos, phone calls, and emails.
The original video is comprised of multiple shots which appear to come from security cameras. At the end of the video, you'll see an advertisement for a security firm's website. Put the link into your address bar and you'll find yourself at a real website, asking you for real login credentials in the upper right-hand corner. If you use the account number from the beginning of the video, 00437, and input the password "bedsheets" (which appears on the fridge in the short) you can gain access to the family's security log, unlocking content that amazingly was created to only be seen by the most dedicated viewers. If you can't find all the clues yourself, you can refer to this explanatory video by YouTuber Night Mind, which tries to put all the rotating pieces in this project into some cohesive order.
Resnick specializes in deeply unsettling content, but This House Has People In Itfeels like a definition project about cryptids. The further you look into it, the creepier it gets.
5. Local 58 by Kris Straub
The tone of Straub's series Local 58is similar to the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Where the latter creates a sense of worldly estrangement by means of a play-normal radio host, Local 58builds a disrupted world via an obviously abnormal community television station.
There are seven clips that vary drastically in length. Some shorts involve mock found-footage of someone being misdirected into the nether by a maps application, while others are an outright rejection of your own participation. Either way, these are fun pieces if you're into world building on the most unusual level.
6. This Must Be The Place by Merlin Camozzi
This disturbing short by Merlin Camozzi is about pain and control. The protagonist, Bonnie, wants to join an urban witch haven, but the trials may be too much for her to handle.
"One thing the film explores is the idea of finding home within a group and what the costs of that can be," Camozzi said in an interview with Directors Notes. "The other question that underlies the story, however, is about how power is used by those who have it."
Camozzi explained that the spiritual inspiration for the short came from observing Trump's presidency.
"That was just mind boggling to me. I mean, this is a guy who could do literally anything at this point, and the only two things he seemed to care about were servicing his own ego and lining his own pockets," Camozzi said. "That led me to thinking about what powers this culty group of witches might have, and how they might use them. I thought it was interesting to give them what are essentially super powers, but have them use those powers for incredibly banal purposes, like robbing convenience stores."
7. The Spirit of Halloween by Bad Movie Night
This somewhat silly Halloween special takes its inspiration from those glossy, holographic-plated "choose your own adventure" Goosebumpsfavorites.
You take the role of an unassuming man who seems to be enjoying his night alone, when suddenly a knock appears at your door. You're prompted with two choices linked to other videos: "Ignore the Door" or "Answer the Door".
Each subsequent one-minute video has its own array of choices as you find yourself running away from an inescapable paranormal murderer. Enjoy!
8. C'est le Citoyen Qu'on Intimide, et Pas Le Délinquant by Olivier de Sagazan
Olivier de Sagazan is a French performance artist who employs his body as a canvas for clay and paint. By piling on heaps of wet paint to his face, de Sagazan is able to manipulate images of how we see ourselves and our leaders functioning within our societies.
In this disturbing political piece from February 2019, de Sagazan quotes some of French President Emmanuel Macron's December 10 speech in which he criticizes the Yellow Vest movement. Generally, the movement is focused on reallocation of wealth in the country, calling for more affordable living, a minimum wage increase, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
But even if you don't understand French or the political climate this piece comes from, de Sagazan's drama and self-disfiguration is enough to make anyone squeamish.
9. It Crawled In Through The Window by Isaac Ruth
This two-minute short by Isaac Ruth is about a sleeping couple awoken by something coming in through the window. Its tone is similar to a campfire story, with most of the action playing out in your imagination.
The acting in this is superb, with the leads Nicole Starrett and Mark Cosby completely owning the brief performance. As an added bonus, the minimal visual effects actually work in favor of the short's atmosphere.
"I spend a lot of my professional life thinking up and searching for scary things, but it wasn’t until I was drifting off and was interrupted by a partner swearing she saw someone outside the window that I understood how unnerving it can be to be," Ruth writes in the director's notes. "It got me thinking that what scared me wasn’t that there might be someone out the window, it’s that someone I shared a bed with, someone I loved, was afraid."
10. Mikus by Todd Spence & Zak White
Mikusclocks in at just under four minutes. In the beginning, the protagonist appears to be sorting through his childhood room when he comes across an old friend he created as a kid. Pursuing a moment of brief nostalgia, the protagonist tapes the disturbing creature to his wall.
Pretty quickly though, the adult-sized purple figure begins falling off the wall and venturing into the room. While I'm not a big fan of jump scares, Mikus's large, red eyes and gaping mouth pulled something out of me that I have to recognize.
Topics Film YouTube