It is Halloween, the day of the Lord of Hell, the feast of Cthulhu and other demons who ask only to conjure hope and joy of life. And as we do in originality on MaG, you have been concocted a small selection of short films worth a visit. Horror, fear, fantastic, animation, a little SF but also and above all the weird of what to titillate your most repressed emotions. A tour of the strange world selected by us! Some are still limited to festivals, but we have tried as much as possible to put official links to movies on free or paid platforms. We will only add one thing: Redrum, redrum, redrum...
Contents
The ABCs of Deaths
Source International | Release date : 2012 | Where to see the movie? VOD, DVD, Blu-ray
Implementation : 26 directors | Production International | Duration : Variable
We start with a "rigolorrific" work“. Designed as an anthology of short films, The ABCs of Deaths is a world tour of horror and strangeness based on alphabet and death. Each letter will be entitled to its way of making the last breath with all types of styles and techniques signed by 26 directors. If the quality is variable, it remains a guilty pleasure increased by the curiosity generated by waiting for certain letters, while the dead chain in an incongruous way. Just for the court of Lee Hardcastle, soberly entitled Toilet and all in clayThis anthology is worth a visit. Black humor as you like: Weddings, orgasms, movements : so many morbid curiosities to satisfy.
...by KillerS7ven
Pingu's The Thing
Source : England| Release date : 2020 | Where to see the movie? Youtube
Production and production : Lee Hardcastle | Duration : 1 ,20 min
Becoming viral a few years ago, this unlikely short crossover between Pingu and Carpenter is burned enough to mark the detour on artist Lee Hardcastle's chain. Less than two minutes but what a feat. That's what we call gore to shape as we say in jargon! We will still advise those who have remained in a cave since 1982 to see the organic before, spoilers oblige!
...by KillerS7ven
Vulvin, Queen of Ecstasy
Source France | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Shadowz
Implementation : 5 directors | Production : Goblins School | Duration : 8 min
Erotico-horrific tale narrates the story of Queen Vulvin, whose husband has just succumbed to the petty death (this is the case of saying it!), now launched in pursuit of a macabro-sexual experience that runs between his fingers... This superb animation offering real paintings with a particularly neat composition, after having escaped the censorship that made it almost invisible throughout the Web, regains the public's way thanks to Shadowz. An animation nugget created within the framework of the Ecole Goblins in Paris, a promise of a bright future for the future of animated cinema!
...by Mr. Wilkes
Zygote
Source South Africa | Release date : 2017 | Where to see the movie? Youtube, Oats Studios
Implementation : Neil Blomkamp | Production : Oats Studios | Duration : 22 min
Neil Bloomkamp, who signed the excellent District 9 Almost 15 years ago, he never hid his love of SF and horror. In his anthology available on Youtube for free, we find all the facets of an independent director who does not lack style. Horror SF uncomplexed, Zygote takes over the legacy of the B series and the tension ofAlien. Two survivors will have to survive in the face of an aberration that may have even inspired incredible sequence of the hospital of the The Last Of Us 2. Stress climbs crescendo until the final pleasure. If we have one regret, it is probably that the South African director did not (yet) break the path of getting out of the long on these particularly gloomy mini concepts.
...by KillerS7ven
Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp)
Source United Kingdom, Australia | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? MUBI
Implementation : Peter Strickland | Production : Prototype, Arcadia, Container | Duration : 12 minutes
A porn movie director comments a movie underground recently rediscovered. The erotic dreams of the young man depicted by the film are then superimposed on the disenchanted narrative of the narrator's love story. This is the director of the noticed Berberian Sound Studio (primed at the Festival de Locarno in 2012) offers a short more fantastic than horrific, resolutely queer and dreamy aesthetics. An ideal offer for a Halloween Not Safe For Work !
...by Mr. Wilkes
The day Mom became a Monster
Source France | Release date : 2017| Where to see the movie? Youtube
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins| Production : The films of La Mouche | Duration : 23 min
First short film by Josephine Darcy Hopkins, already co-writer of the thriller Inexorable (read our critical), The day Mom became a Monster is of formidable effectiveness. As its name suggests from the beginning, a little girl will see her mother turn into a strange creature. The opening sequence can immediately set its felted atmosphere while the mother tells a story in Chinese shadows to her little one. The fantastic seems to simmer between the lines of the imagination, while we share a certain apprehension at the crossroads of reality. The complicity of the mother and her daughter will also accomplish her total motivating towards horror by reversing the roles of parenthood with tenderness.
...by KillerS7ven
Cloud
Source France | Release date : 2020 | Where to see the movie? Channel +
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins | Production : To be continued | Duration 28 minutes
Second short film by Josephine Darcy Hopkins, Cloud is a pre-pocalyptic short that features two teenage girls to the opposite personalities: Capucine is confident in appearance, animated by an insolent fergue and Eugénie is otherwise more reserved. As a radioactive cloud prepares to fall down on the city, the film turns towards the road movie. Writing correctly, the ambiguity of teenage relations is emerging between transfers, desires and angers repressed on the web of mourning. The director signs a second particularly sensitive court where theode to real life – which is known to be absent – comes to push a world marked by standards. A film that breathes freedom and the desire to say shit to social conventions and injunctions.
...by KillerS7ven
The teeth of happiness
Source France | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Arte
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins | Production : To be continued | Duration 24 min
Third court of Josephine Darcy Hopkins, The teeth of happiness Just got awarded at the FEFFS. Well, we don't hide from you that we didn't manage to choose just one of his films as each of them seems to complement and reveal reflections of the personality of this promising young director. An interview on this author will soon be published and will be followed in the future. Probably the most social of the three courts, The teeth of happiness is a sensitive proposition where the world of adults and children is mirrored.
Madeleine, eight years old, accompanies her beautician mother to new wealthy clients. While her mother joins both ends, she is invited to play with other children in a board game where money is the engine of success. The carelessness of childhood is then confronted with a bitter class struggle, where one pays for his flesh because of his social class. Crude metaphor but where cynicism never wipes hope, The teeth of happiness is worn by exceptional young actresses as well as writing to the scalpel. To be seen urgently.
...by KillerS7ven
The Death of David Cronenberg
Source : Canada | Release date : 2021 | Where to see the movie? YouTube
Implementation : Caitlin Cronenberg, David Cronenberg | Production : – | Duration : 1 min
Master David Cronenberg who admires his own death: this is the project of this ultra-court shot with the complicity of his daughter Caitlin Cronenberg. And in just a minute, the director of The Fly and the recent Crimes of the Future (his last) manages to inject with a certain brilliance all the distress that one can feel in the face of old age and the inevitable passage of the mower. To succeed in so short a time to make a perfectly iconic plan and forever engraved in the retinas, we had to do it!
...by Mr. Wilkes
Drijf (Adrift)
Source : Belgium | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? Arte
Implementation : Levi Stoops | Production : Annemie Degryse | Duration : 14 min
Film noticed at the Annecy festival, Adrift the work of confinement. Levi Stoops says that he wanted to transcribe the emotions that were able to pass through the couples, which were suffocated by this exceptional suffocating situation that has extinguished many desires. Jeremy and Aurora are lost at sea. While they wanted to see dolphins, their marine escapee turned to shipwreck and general incomprehension. The desires meet as if the couple were never on the same relationship. Irony of the spell while they are on the same boat. With its minimalist style that fits perfectly with the skin of naked characters like worms, this short shows an absurd tone that gives it an unparalleled stamp. A Belgian nugget to see on Arte.
...by KillerS7ven
Death Metal
Source : USA | Release date : 2016 | Where to see the movie? Shadowz
Implementation : Chris McInroy | Production : – | Duration : 5 min
Un metalleux en manque d’attention – et d’argent – se trouve légataire d’une mystérieuse guitare électrique bénie par nul autre que Satan en personne. Mais lorsqu’il néglige les règles à appliquer pour y jouer, l’enfer se déchaînera autour de lui. Petit court métrage de comédie horrifique, Death Metal offre une bonne dose de gore. Entre effets pratiques et hectolitres d’hémoglobine, le réalisateur de courts Chris McInroy n’y va pas avec le dos de la cuillère… Un court idéal pour un Halloween ensanglanté.
...by Mr. Wilkes
Phlegm
Source : Suisse | Release date : 2021 | Where to see the movie? Channel +
Implementation : Jean David Bolt | Production : Filippo Bonacci | Duration : 6 min
Présenté il y a deux ans au FEFFS, Phlegm fait partie de ces courts au concept radical que ne renierait pas Quentin Dupieux. Au milieu des grattes ciels et des cols blancs qui se croisent à toute vitesse, Oscar est en retard. Dans ce monde à toute allure, un escargot va précipiter le film vers l’absurde le plus total. Un film qui rappelle que les concepts les plus simples sont souvent les meilleurs !
...by KillerS7ven
Carne de Dios
Source : Argentine | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? Vimeo
Implementation : Patricio Plaza | Production : Ojo Jaro | Duration : 20 min
This time we go to Argentina for this adult animation guaranteed without filter. All in all suggestion, Patricio Plaza manages to rush us into his crazed universe with a graphic style where the sharp features of the faces of the characters increase their emotions. While a priest pursues a child in the fields, the figure of the croquemitaine reverses years later.
With its protuberant nose like the character of the comic book Blast, the Church man has a disturbing appearance. Fevery and plagued with hallucinogenic mushrooms, the film turns into a dreadful nightmare where no one will hear your prayers. The Argentine director proposes a descent to hell that reverses the roles of executioner and victim with intelligence. A visual outburst that echoes through the Church eaten by paedophilia and denial. An acid discharge with exceptional symbolic power.
...by KillerS7ven
Is there a virgin still alive?
Source France | Release date : 2015 | Where to see the movie? MUBI
Implementation : Bertrand Mandico | Production : Ecce Films | Duration : 9 min
Faithful to what Mandico usually does, Is there a virgin still alive? proposes the pseudo-biopic of a Joan of Arc who would have escaped the stake. Obviously with this director, he takes the form of a dreamlike and poetic wandering, oscillating between assumed gore and frontal nudity, where Jeanne "the jump" would fall on a semi-virgin that she would decide to capture and train with her...
Not really horrific, Is there a virgin still alive? would rather rank in fantastic surrané that would have digested and regurgitated The Beast of the Borowczyk (He again!) Disturbing and experimental, this is the short selection particularly suitable for froussards...
...by Mr. Wilkes
The censor of dreams
Source France | Release date : 2021 | Where to see the movie? CN
Implementation : Leo Bern and Raphaël Rodriguez | Production : Iconoclast Films | Duration : 18 min
Le censor of dreams marked FEFFS as NIFFF two years ago. "In essence no one believes in his own death and in his unconscious, everyone is convinced of his immortality" said Freud. But had he only thought of the little hands that work behind our conscience? This is the hallucinating response that Leo berne and Raphaël Rodriguez bring to the thinker. Every night, the Censor and his team moderated Yoko's dreams and melted the best they could to mask the dark ideas.
The two loustics find themselves witnessing a succession of unlikely scenes with one side Do It Yourself It's flying. The extras articulate under the injunctions of the two compères blazed and caught up with Yoko's imagination. A film full of ideas that renews itself by playing on and off the field with ever more crazy situations!
...by KillerS7ven
The Nest
Source : Canada| Release date : 2013 | Where to see the movie? YouTube
Implementation : David Cronenberg | Production : – | Duration : 9 min
Short film composed of an interview in an amputated field of his back-up, presenting a doctor (David Cronenberg in person, only to be heard) and his patient (Evelyne Brochu) convinced to have a nest of insects growing inside one of its breasts. Ultra simple but glaucous atmosphere device, where in short the whole cinema of Cronenberg. Body-horror, of course, but more psychological than graphic, where the roles mix to an end that we have not seen come. A little jewel of the horror master, to taste without moderation for Halloween!
...by Mr. Wilkes
Rainer, a vicious dog in skull valley
Source France | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? TBA
Implementation : Bertrand Mandico | Production : Orpheus Films | Duration 26 min
Before you see Conann, a femino-fantaisist version of Robert E.Howard's myth, Bertrand Mandico's court imposes as a test step to enter (or not) into the so singular universe of the director. We find Rainer's character and the many iterations of the Cimmerian heroine in a decor in the image of this author's crazy work where desire systematically crosses fantasy. Destabilizing at first, one ends up gradually being hacked by this deviant universe that keeps feeding itself. A fun-mouth before the psychotrip Conann An interview on MaG will soon be published.
...by KillerS7ven
Birds which Legacy Break Off
Source Netherlands | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Shadowz
Implementation : Dirk Veschure | Production : – | Duration : 7 min
Winner of the Shadowz Prize of the 2023 edition of the Festival Court Métrange, Birds which Legacy Break Off is a small condensed black humor. Close to the tone of Charb's two comics Mauritius and Patapon (the bisexual anarchist dog and his ultra-liberal asexual feline companion), this short film invokes a world where, succumbing to a strange disease, birds see their legs break one after another.
Although bloody despite its Cartoonesque appearance with an ultra simplistic trait, the short film is played with a wildly controlled effect, as funny as it is disgusting, thanks to an expert mastery of sound-design. An ideal short film proposal for a crado Halloween!
...by Mr. Wilkes
Venus
Source France | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? TBA
Production and production : Mickaël Dusa and Jolan Nihilo| Duration : 10 min
It is undoubtedly the shock film of this selection. A short film that was presented in the section midnight movie FEFFS. Attention: sensitive souls, abstain.Venus is not a film to put in all hands. The synopsis announces the macabre color: getting pregnant following a rape, a woman relives her trauma in a nightmare that seems eternal despite the brevity of the film. Venus proposes to share a trauma that takes to the letter the etymology of empathy: "suffering with the other". Designed as an organic and carnal short, the performance of the actress Naya Piquemal Contains both physical and emotional calvary.
In an organic and purulent filth, the fear passes through a supplanted body, haunted by contrary emotions that limit to stigmas. It is also the cry of the victim's lonely distress that is unbearable. The round body of the actress frees diktats and watermarks the question of the taboo of representation. The symbol of Venus, the goddess of fertility, is subverted here, pushed to exhaustion between the disgust of a motherhood that has become burdened and the bulimic impulses that indicate the will to digest horror. From body horror visceral but mirror of the real: if Venus It is also a reflection of a society that has never released itself from rape.
...by KillerS7ven
Jibaro
Source Spain | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Netflix
Implementation : Alberto Mielgo | Production : Netflix (Love Death and Robots) | Duration : 17 min
Signed Alberto Mielgo, this short film made a sensation at the release of season 3 of the series Love, Death and Robots. With its original aesthetic bias, Jibaro mix ultra-realistic sets with characters with chopped animations. Jibaro tells a battle between a knight with deafness and succubus who haunts the bottom of the lake.
The director explains that he wanted "create something like a relationship between two predators". This mermaid, which has taken away many warriors, begins to dance with virtuosity to intoxicate the knight. The desire of death at its climax, like a paralysis of sleep caught up in a macabre poetry that only people with troubled sleep know. Beautiful.
...by KillerS7ven
Asmodeus
Source : Canada | Release date : 2021 | Where to see the movie? Shadowz
Implementation : Eric Falardeau | Production : – | Duration : 11 min
Mute and experimental, Asmodeus (a)The story of man's possession by three female incarnations of the demon with the same name. Bathed with a tablecloth of music with rock accents, the black mass that plays before our eyes will mix as much transgressive images, unbridled lubricity and folk horror To the female.
The director of Thanatomorphosis (a long also available on Shadowz) offers here a short cleavant, silent, black and white and grain typical of Super 8 shoots. This Quebec production combining sex and blood will be the perfect short for a Halloween placed under the sign of possession!
...by Mr. Wilkes
Huldra
Source : Sweden | Release date : 2021 | Where to see the movie? Arte
Implementation John Boisen and Björn Fävremark | Production : Robert Danielsson and Helena Akerström | Duration : 14 min
The lake never stopped inspiring fantastic stories. While his companion left, Emil stays alone with his infant in a forest cottage. After the disappearance of his dog, the father is won by a hallucinatory fiève unless it is reality. The paranormal gradually settles until it generates its own variation of the Nordic myth of Huldra, a creature of Scandinavian folklore that takes on the appearance of a young woman to better recover from her prey. Despite an event not as convincing as his original idea, Huldra offers a fantastic classic but effective narrative in a register that lurks on the side of the story.
...by KillerS7ven
Dog Apartment
Source Estonia | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Arte
Implementation : Priit Tender | Production : 2022 | Duration : 13 minutes
Dog Apartment is one of the worst shorts in this selection. In addition to its animation licked in stop motion, this Estonian film is full of ideas all more barjos than each other, starting with this character in a soft suit to protect himself from his sink, chimera between a sink and... A dog! It is better to feed the beast with a flock of sausages to calm these ardours. Behind the absurd is a beautiful metaphor of fallen dreams and the hardness of the working condition.
...by KillerS7ven
Cigarette Burns
Source : USA | Release date : 2005 | Where to see the movie? DVD / Blu-Ray
Implementation : John Carpenter | Production : Bo Altherr, Lisa Richardson, Tom Rowe | Duration : 59 min
We see you coming: it's a selection of shorts and here's a 59-minute movie. What an unfortunate nenni! The CNC asserts mordicus: the maximum duration of a short is... 60 minutes! So Cigarette Burns has all its place here and nevertheless, impossible not to recommend this unknown masterpiece by John Carpenter. Change in IoFoliary, change the book cursed by a movie, Sam Neill by Norman Reddus in one of his first roles and you get The absolute end of the world or Cigarette Burns in English.
More modern than the 1994 cult film, Cigarette Burns enjoys a heavy atmosphere and this strange feeling of anxiety, nourished by the obsession of this collector played by the vampiric Udo Kier. This rich owner instructs the young Kirby to search for the Grâal: a film so popular that he would have made his audience crazy... This Carpenter of the anthological series Masters of Horrors plays the third wall until it contaminates the spectator. No doubt the most lynchian of his films, the master saventure here on a ground with the edge of the real and manages to seduce his spectator. Unmanageable!
...by KillerS7ven
Sexsomnia
Source : USA | Release date : 2014 | Where to see the movie? Vimeo
Implementation : Paul Minor | Production : Steve Shaw | Duration : 4 min
Particularly visually licked, Sexsomnia Draws the hazy and nocturnal contours of an undressed walk, whose deluge reminiscences offer the spectator. Crashed with an atmosphere Eighties and a square format particularly appropriate, the short touches a real sleep disorder with a finger that gives it its title: sex sleeping. A subcompartment of sleepwalking whose subject succumbs to sexual impulses during his sleep without having any reminiscence at awakening...
Obviously sensitive by the moral and physical problems that the disorder can cause to his victim, sex sleeping is here treated by voyeuristic angle: the subject of the short film appears in a hospital room, connected to a multitude of sons whose one will understand that they come to read in his brain the erotic visions that will follow. More disturbing than terrifying, Sexsomnia is a proposal caliente in this selection of Halloween rather rich in hemoglobin.
...by Mr. Wilkes
Jenifer
Source Italy | Release date : 2005 | Where to see the movie? DVD / Blu-ray
Implementation : Dario Argento | Production : Dario Argento | Duration : 59 min
Since the first giallos of the Italian master, the filmography of the director has ceased to evolve. Like many great names in cinema, Dario Argento has also brought his stone to the building of anthology Masters Of Horros with Jenifer, film of genres that never cease to surprise. Adaptation of a short comic by Bruce Jones and Bernie Wrightson in the legendary magazine Creepy which marked the 1970s, Jenifer Crosses genres and shakes the spectator between thriller, horror and sexual fulgurance. The film opens up to an inspector who saves a young woman from an unbalanced who chased her with a chopper.
This disfigured and atoning victim may seem hideous, yet all the men who cross his black gaze end up being scorned by a bad spell. Without ever trying to explain the springs of the supernatural, Dario Argento manages to fascinate his spectator. By a disturbing body game, the schizophrenic monster immediately turns into an object of desire. Sometimes bestial, sometimes fragile, Jenifer diverts the viewer by crossing genres and subverting codes: from horror to gore, from the B series to a sensory eroticism that flirts with pornography, this short by Dario Argento is indicative of his ability to free himself from all constraints. while questioning the springs of a protective (supposed) masculinity.
...by KillerS7ven
Too many short geniuses discovered thanks to this dear @killerSe7ven, but "The Tooths of Happiness" remains the big hit!
I have to catch up with yours, as soon as I'm back from Paris.^^ Tonight I had guests to go see The Appointment which is very intriguing and The Wicker Man which I have never seen either. And tomorrow little jump to the Korean festival.
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