It's that time again, when we gather around the screen to watch some weird stuff on YouTube. My favorite way to potentially ruin an afternoon, brought directly to you, the fine people of the internet.

Long-time readers know that I adore short films. I love small, self-contained works and worlds. Hand drawn animation. Claymation. Janky 3D rendering. Mixed media. Weird stuff. Experimental stuff. Stuff that chases down a single idea and stays with it until it's wrung out all it can. Most of all, I like to compile short films into lists, which is very convenient for you.

Last year, I put together two similar lists, appropriately titled Some Strange Things You Can Watch Right Now and Some Strange Things You Should Watch for Halloween. These lists were a big mixed bag of recommendations. Some I loved, some I loved a bit less, but all were fascinating works that I felt deserved some shine on them. It's all good stuff, and some of the films I shared are still some of my all-time favorites.

This year, I wanted to make a new list of short films. There are new films, old films, and films that I'm returning to so I can finally gush about them. I originally planned to do a more horror- or Halloween-themed list, but let's be real. I love creepy shit 24/7 365, so I can't even pretend like I haven't been filling up your inboxes with weird horror all year already. The list I ended up with has a little bit of everything: body horror, bleak comedy, melancholy, whimsy, murder, surreality, nightmares, and human (well, skeletal) connection.

So get out your screen and settle in.

Gut and Glory

Kaho Wakiya

A man struggles at the piano. He is weary, almost despondent, his face obscured by harsh black pen marks. His fingers glide across the keys but he can't quite find the right notes. When he strikes a sour note again and again, his body is shocked alive by overlaid images of meat. Meat makes up his fingers, his hands. These failures overtake him, his entire body consumed by the crawl of abject flesh until his brain falls out of his head and onto the keys in a wet slap of meat.

And then it all gets weird.

Well, weirder.

A 2024 film out of the Tokyo University of the Arts animation program, Gut and Glory definitely has art school movie energy. But there's something freeing about that, you know? As the film descends into wailing voices and discordant music, images of eyes and mouths overlaid with meat, the somber atmosphere of the struggling pianist's dim yet elegantly designed room is shattered. He runs free, gleefully rendered in meat, embracing the chaos and entropy it represents.

Gut and Glory isn't subtle, but it doesn't have to be. Making art right now -- capital A art with all its trappings -- certainly feels like you're a squiggly hunched figure fighting at their instrument. The metaphor extends beyond art, too. This could be about struggling with social roles and expectations, and coming up against failure in those performances. Work. Education. Gender. Pick your poison.

After all, don't you want to be free of that? Don't you want to just throw it all away? What if you could? What if you really could just run away? Gut and Glory captures how that moment feels when something within you finally snaps, in howling chaos and rage and relief. A primal scream for a contentious moment, and a much-needed one, at that.

Kontrol Eskape

mAt&SpoN (Stéphane Bève & Mathieu Auvray

Sometimes you see something that you can't quite explain, but that you can still feel your way through. There is a city, a people, a tower, and a priest. The city is a nightmarish labyrinth of concrete and steel, its stark angles made of symbols, letters, as if built from language itself. A regime of disembodied hands oversee the city and its people, a dismal ocean of paper beings that shuffle the streets as if dazed. Wizened and cruel, the priest performs a ritual carried out by its brutish enforcer: sacrifice papers to a machine that bathes the city in shafts of light to chase away the encroaching darkness.

All the while, a lonely figure watches from a tower as light stretches over the city in luminous fingers. Or knives.

Kontrol Eskape is a story about power and the longing for freedom. I think that's pretty clear. The hegemonic power expressed by the hands creates complex systems made of letterpress type, from their buildings to their rituals. A permanent underclass, the paper live in a state of constant fear and danger of violence from the hands. They are attacked for any misstep, snatched, slapped, and squashed against walls by muscular palms. Their bodies are pressed with recognizable letters and symbols from our own world's street signs, but this too is a means to control, as these symbols are taken by the priest in its arcane ritual.

A mixed media animation very much indebted to the vocabulary of German Expressionist film, Kontrol Eskape is a bleak experience. But it's also a very empathetic one. Though there isn't a word of dialogue spoken, the brittleness of the paper as their bodies are crushed and burned communicates their suffering with aching clarity. The hands play the roles of the state and church, from the brutes policing paper in the street to the delicate hands of the clergy hidden away behind high walls. Their use of language as infrastructure enclosing their subjects is at once beautiful and terrifying, and destroying any symbols external to that language to reify their power puts a pit in my stomach. You really feel for those slips of paper, man.

In the end, there's no savior here, no revolution. No one comes to stop the hands or tear down their walls. Within the maze of the city, there is only madness. Kontrol Eskape is a downer of an experience, but it's one I'm glad I had.

Gnome

Ben Cresswell

If you know where to look, you can still find magic in the world. At least, that's the premise of the 2015 stop-motion animated film Gnome. And it's exactly what it says on the tin. A weird little guy, our titular gnome, wanders out at night to encounter the strangeness of the modern human world.

With gorgeous sound design and animation, this piece absolutely feels magical. The gnome is highly expressive and quite feisty, operating on his own forest-dwelling logic and speaking to himself about everything he encounters. He praises the moon and admires the gentle glow of fireflies, and even cusses out a spider who comes out of the brush to scare him. Everything he does serves a purpose only he understands, given that we don't get subtitles or any other context to explain his ends or their means. You're just along for the journey, watching the gnome practice his little rituals in the face of human encroachment. It's honest to god whimsical, and you know we love a bit of whimsy around here.

Sweet but never saccharine, funny yet thoughtful, Gnome is a beautifully realized tale that's absolutely worth your time.

The Bonehead Series

Colin Armistead

It's hard out there for a skeleton, man. Bonehead is an ongoing series of animated short films by Colin Armistead, with a third part in the works at time of writing. The series casts a skewed look at the loneliness of contemporary life and desire through its skeleton protagonist, the titular Bonehead. He's a normal guy living his life, who just happens to have no organs, muscles, or skin.

Looking for meaning and connection in a world that doesn't know what to do with a sentient skeleton, Bonehead approaches his desires for intimacy and companionship with an unflinching honesty that's both funny and rather sad. The ruse of it all becomes starkly clear in watching Bonehead navigate these moments of raw intimacy, struggling and often failing despite how close he gets to reaching something true.

The first film is quite short and more bleakly funny than anything else. It's not bad, it's just more of a dark joke by the end. The second develops Bonehead and his world to give him more texture and nuance. Yes, Bonehead is a horny skeleton who wants to be touched, but he's also struggling to fill a void within him that sex can't do on its own. That void brings him in proximity to death and even sudden acts of violence, as that modest veil between sex and death is snatched away.

All of this works to imbue an otherwise silent, tragically comedic character with an uncomfortable ambiguity. He's funny and sad, but there's something else going on beneath his blank expression that I'm curious to see expanded upon in the future. I'll definitely be on the lookout for Bonehead 3 whenever it's ready.

Three Faces

Gabriel Reyes

Favorite of the newsletter Gabriel Reyes returns with what can only be described as a macabre music video. I last grappled with Reyes’ work when I discussed the short film series Train of Remembrance, which uses real actors in digitally rendered backgrounds that purposely evokes late 90s/early 2000s CGI. Reyes is a prolific auteur filmmaker who does virtually everything himself, using whatever medium or form he's interested in at the moment to tell a story. You gotta respect it.

Animated and scored by Reyes, this 2021 claymation piece is a dark, discordant rumination on industrialized society. I think. It's pretty on the nose, honestly, but there's something compelling going on here. Like all of Reyes’ work, I don't know if I love it, but I'm so glad that I watched it.

The film is surreal and menacing, with fleshy, distorted figures juxtaposed with an oppressive city and cars that slither around like snakes. Said figures and city are composed and animated in a messy, unpolished way, making it all feel quite dirty. Acts of violence are committed against the natural world as trees are cut down, wither, or turn to dust. The music consists of Reyes’ sour vocal notes, a big blown-out drum, and the plucked chords of an electric guitar or other instrument, tinny and whining. It's an unpleasant listening experience, but I think it helps fill out this ugly world in a way that a less antagonistic score wouldn't achieve.

This is a short film I've returned to many times because there's just something about the imagery that appeals to me. Three Faces is ugly and noisy and dark, and there's a palpable anger in it that cuts through. I appreciate that about it.

Speaking of ugly, this is the part where I include my other favorite Reyes animation, The Four Face Worm. Another 2021 film, this one uses that junky, janky CGI style to tell a story of incomprehensible horrors unfolding across a night club.

To say I love this film is a stretch, but I often return to it because it's just such a wild ride. You know I'll be discussing more of Reyes’ work in the future, so prepare yourself for that.

Prends Chair

Armin Assadipour

The first proper horror to appear on this list, the 2023 film Prends Chair uses beautiful, energetically paced animation to explore one teenager's struggle with his body. Venance is fat, and the world has made that his entire identity. His parents at home, his bullies at school, and even his friends. The endless remarks about his food, his clothes, and his movement cut at Venance a little more each day. Every word is a blade that peels just a little more of his dignity and personhood away until his body -- the site of his trauma and struggle -- begins to fight back.

From my understanding, writer/director Armin Assadipour drew on his own experiences as a fat teenager to explore the grotesque body horror presented in the film. I think this kind of horror is a tricky one to land. Externalizing feelings of shame, self-hatred, and rage as a monstrous outgrowth of a fat body could feel kind of jokey if not approached with grace. As a fat person, I definitely came to this one a bit guarded. Not against degradation or offense, per se, but the lack of curiosity people broadly have when looking at fat bodies.

But Assadipour and co-writer Flavien Van Haezevelde come to Venance with so much compassion. His struggle, his pain and suffering, reads as the true horror rather than the spectacle of a grotesque body. A boy like Venance wouldn't have become a monster if the world hadn't made him one first, and that feels like the real tragedy of the film. His parents aren't bad people. His friends aren't bad people. His little sister tries to support him as best as she can. But they are all mired in a society that hates fat bodies and how they perceive Venance ultimately reflects that deeply ingrained disgust.

And in the end, monsters must comfort one another.

ourgirlfriendmaria.com

Chris Barratt

In our current moment of AI-induced psychosis and predatory subscription-based chatbot girlfriends, this little piece of digital horror immediately hooked me.

ourgirlfriendmaria.com uses the now familiar vocabulary of very online aesthetic sensibilities to tell a story that feels familiar, even cliche. 90s retro user interfaces, glitches, the first-person narrative experience of exploring the internet. It all feels artificial in that very online aesthetic sort of way, pulling these artifacts from a bygone consumer computing era and ironically reassembling them with one's tongue firmly planted in their cheek. The cringey humor, stilted performance of creator Chris Barratt, and chunky, clunky Windows 95 everything bring you in expecting an irreverent sort of comedy. A quirky, self-aware sort of parody, perhaps.

You would be, like I was, very wrong.

Our point of view assumes the perspective of a devoted subscriber to the Our Girlfriend Maria service. As the viewer, we have fallen madly in love with Maria. She is our love, our life, our everything, after all. This is why it comes as a shock to realize that she speaks to other men. Like, yes, of course, she does. If you're subscribing to a chatbot service, the avatar you're speaking to is a product accessed by thousands of other users. Only a loser would be tricked into thinking otherwise.

Right?

Only a loser, which we're not, obviously, because we're too smart to fall for something like that. Right? Right. Because Maria is rendered in that off-putting chunky CGI style that we love to regurgitate online. It gives her dead eyes and a fake plastic smile, speaking in a robotic text-to-speech voice. You would never fall in love with her and give her your money.

But the man whose perspective we've assumed has, and he's devastated. He confronts Maria about the truth, that she has other boyfriends behind his back. The chatbot stutters and glitches before crashing. Maria evades him, ending the conversation and disappearing from the screen. She shouldn't be able to do that. She shouldn't be able to leave him. To deceive him. To take his money and run away without answering him.

This is where ourgirlfriendmaria.com stops being funny and becomes genuinely tense. What has up until this point been a rather silly jab at the kind of guy who would assume his chatbot subscription girlfriend was totally faithful and loyal turns into a horror story. Maria may not be real, but she's still a woman. Digital or otherwise, Maria is subject to the same stalking, harassment, and violence that a man could enact on any other woman. All you can do is watch as our protagonist crosses the boundaries between reality and software to find Maria.

All you can do is watch as he clicks through screens that sprint through her neighborhood and bring him to her door.

All you can do is watch.

And the ending lands, stripped of all ironic distance or absurd humor, like a rock to the head.

Barratt has also traumatized me with another recent digital horror short, privateserver.com. It uses the same format and style as the last piece we watched, but the story is a bit more ambiguous.

In this piece, you assume the perspective of a private investigator hired by a client named & to find their missing friend. This friend doesn't want to be found. What ensues is a tense, frankly unsettling hunt for someone trying to escape you and your client. If you didn't know that watching someone else click through webpages on a 90s desktop PC could be so upsetting, well. Now you do!

ourgirlfriendmaria.com is a great piece that left me feeling queasy by the end. I think the first-person nature of privateserver.com, without the obfuscation of another character between you and the actions being taken, makes the horror feel a bit more intimate. ourgirlfriendmaria.com explores misogynistic violence through the lens of digital girlfriends and social alienation under capitalistic extraction, while privateserver.com uses the coercion implied by selling your services to a paying client to reflect on how that arrangement can push us to abandon our morals.

There's also the added layer of distance provided by the presentation of the PC user interface and clicking through webpages, and the fact that privateserver.com feels much more game-like in how the story progresses. It all raises a lot of questions about how we behave in digital spaces when there are seemingly no consequences, and living with the uncomfortable reality that the choices we make can cause unintended harm in ways that we can't fully make sense of. Even if the only face you see on the screen is your own reflection, you still have to look yourself in the eye and know that you made the choices that you did.

All told, both pieces are great in their own ways, and both make me feel terrible in the process. What more can you ask for?

Angry Rabbit

Takena

Takena Nagao needs no introduction. Creating gory, goopy, and gratuitous (positive connotation implied!) claymation films for the last twenty years, Takena is a powerhouse of a filmmaker. If you've been around on the internet over the last decade or so, you've probably seen one of his animations on YouTube. The color palettes are vivid, the camera movements are dynamic, and the idiosyncratic figures are so smoothly animated as they murder one another with chainsaws or axes. The films are also pretty damn funny most of the time, with an almost slapstick quality to the violence thanks to the tight editing and Takena's great sense of rhythm and timing.

Angry Rabbit is Takena's latest film and it's a bloody little delight. A pulpy revenge thriller about a pack of wolves who go after the rabbit who brutally maimed of their own after rejecting his unwanted (and plainly aggressive) advances. But the rabbit is a stone cold killer in her own right, and so predator and prey square off in a deadly encounter that does not go the way the wolves imagined.

This piece is all about gratuitous violence, from the threat implied by the wolf's initial advances and the rabbit's explosive retaliation to the wolf pack's attack on the rabbit in her home. Every act escalates until the bodies pile up in splatters of gore. Gratuitous doesn't mean unnecessary or unwarranted, though. The violence itself is the story. It's exactly the seemingly inescapable nature of that violence that I find really compelling.

Rabbit is completely justified in rejecting the wolf. Did she need to sock him in the jaw? Maybe. Maybe not. She just didn't have to stomp his head in -- right? But what would you have done if a predator cornered you and threw your phone away? Freeze, flee, or fight? What did the wolf intend to do? What would he have done if she hadn't fought back? Does the wolf now have the right to attack the rabbit in kind? And would he have rounded up his buddies to get his revenge regardless of if she attacked him first? Maybe. Maybe not.

The characters don't speak and have no inner voice. We see only the exterior world and the images presented to us without further context or the characters’ intent. That leaves a lot of tension for me as I enjoy the images of brutal violence for all their aesthetic value while admittedly not having a full picture of how we arrived here. Or even how I do feel, should feel, or am intended to feel.

Yes, this is a film where animals made of colorful plasticine beat the shit out of each other. Yes, a rabbit absolutely decimates a bunch of wolves in a very silly subversion of expectations. Yes, it's reductive to frame your male character as a predatory animal and your female character as a prey animal. Yes, wolves are actually very cool and nice in real life. All of that is true. But it still gets my brain firing with all these questions about seemingly simple, straightforward depictions of violence.

Who gets to enact violence? When is violence permissible? To what degree is violence, even retaliatory violence, acceptable? Who are we empathizing with in the aftermath of this violence? Are we supposed to empathize with anyone at all? Are we supposed to just shut our brains off and hoot and holler about a rabbit with a glock? I don't know! That's why art is fun!

Now I'll use this opportunity to recommend Midnight Vampire, a fun spin on vampire exploitation where human traffickers get got by a literal creature of the night.

Takena's women continue to address misogynistic violence and rape culture through gruesome murder. You love to see it!

VCR Willie

Alex Henderson

The final entry is a bit of a cheat because it isn't a film but a series. VCR Willie is an ongoing found footage analog horror project from filmmaker Alex Henderson, framed as a series of tapes. Each tape can be watched in order to piece together the overarching narrative or as a standalone experience, devoid of any context or explanation. I almost think the project works better as a random standalone, algorithmically appearing in your YouTube feed, like a bootleg VHS from some Black Lodge-ass nightmare dimension.

Admittedly I haven't caught up with the most recent entries, which could have completely fallen off by now. Take this recommendation with a grain of salt. I'm not asking you to commit to watching an entire series here. Just go look at the playlist, pick a tape, and watch it for yourself. You can start with the first tape, Scrubs. Or not. It's up to you.

But watch the tape.

Now, let's take a step back and discuss this project. VCR Willie is the manifestation of a dream. Henderson, the filmmaker, begins having strange and vivid dreams about people in his apartment. He is an observer in these dreams. His perspective is reduced to the view of an old consumer-grade camcorder, the perpetual night of sleep lit only by the glow of the attached light. The people in his apartment have paid him to document something that defies explanation. And all he can do is record what happens in a home that's no longer his.

In the morning, Henderson wakes up. He finds the camcorder on his kitchen table. He doesn't own a camcorder. Inside it is a tape. When he sends the tape to a digitizer to copy its contents, his dream from the night before is on it. Henderson uploads the tapes to YouTube, because there's no reason he should be left to go through this alone.

VCR Willie is a special project for how deftly it captures the sensation of dreaming. The tasks that make no sense upon waking but are completely logical and sound while within the dream. The sparse, pitch black apartment with the wrong people living there. The uncanny way the subjects of the tapes speak and move, with their contorted expressions and sudden outbursts of anger. The way Henderson's gaze is limited to the small sphere of the camera's light. The repetition of movements and phrases across the different tapes that reproduce the sensation of a recurring dream.

There is a formula to this series and it reveals itself pretty quickly. As stated above, I don't yet know how well the series walks the line between an established narrative formula and redundancy or staleness. What I do know is that Henderson has successfully produced a series that's eerie, tense, and deeply uncomfortable. Each tape relies on the logic of dreams in a way that feels natural in its incongruity rather than purely random or artificial. And that is a hard thing to pull off and still feel true to the viewer. Tapes like Nak and Salt still live rent-free in my head for the strength of the actors’ performances and commitment to creating a nagging sense of unease that never lets up.

VCR Willie is just a really special project. Whether it sticks the landing is something I have to figure out for myself. What it does well it absolutely excels at, with a tantalizing premise and incredible performances to make up for any soft spots. Again, you can decide where to jump off, should you need to. But VCR Willie is 100% worth your time if you're looking for a unique narrative horror project from people who are putting the work in.

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