March 28, 2025

Some Strange Things You Can Watch Right Now

Welcome to Nature's Corrupted, Magen Cubed's newsletter. This is a place to share writing, thoughts, observations, and personal stories at the intersection of art, fiction, and life.

I've been trying to be better about watching short films. You could call that my resolution for 2025, I guess, one of four or five vague pacts made quietly with myself. Don't get me wrong, I watch a lot of strange little things, but they usually don't fall into the category of film. Maybe a video project? Maybe an internet horror series? Maybe a mixed media tone piece? Who knows!

All of this is to say that I've been doing my best to get off my ass and watch more short, complete narrative projects. While I love the bite-sized nightmares of a Doctor Nowhere and weirdcore acid trips of a Baphex, I'm going to save that kind of stuff for another time. I thought about writing something on claymation artist Taneka's Girl X, but I think that's something you should discover on your own without my editorializing. Of course, Tony Domenico's Good Sky is still hanging over my head, the remaining piece of Domenico’s larger projects that I haven't dedicated a newsletter to, despite how frequently it keeps me up at night thinking about it.

I'll get to those pieces someday. Maybe sooner rather than later, when I have a tighter grasp on what it is I want to say and how it is I want to say it. So watch this space, I guess.

For now, I decided to watch and rewatch a handful of strange little things. I made a list of the ones that resonated with me the strongest, marking off works as I went to make this as a distilled representation of emotionally impactful works as possible. It's just a list of things that I find myself fascinated by, but people seem to like when I put together little lists. And so I decided to give it a place to live.

Here are some strange things that you can watch right now.

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Dinosaur Ghosts by David Romero

I first became aware of David Romero's animations a year or two ago, when his older work would bubble up on my YouTube recommended feed. They were impressively kinetic and well-paced despite the loose, sketchy hand of a developing artist. These were five, six, seven year old animations, but they showed off a lot of skill already.

Then the animated short Mermaids drifted by one day, and I was startled by his eerie creature designs. The minute-long animation shivered with a sense of uncanny dread as these things, these approximations of human silhouettes on the backs of wet, blubbery bodies, simply lived their lives. I took notice of Romero's work and watched all of it in one sitting. Pursuit does a lot with a little, showcasing a victim trying to outrun an invisible attacker in a story cleverly told through closed-circuit TV footage. Even for all its analog horror/found footage jank, The time I caught a ghost is probably my favorite for how well it unspools its quiet anxiety.

But Dinosaur Ghosts is a special kind of film. At only two-minutes long, it beautifully captures the feeling, the kind of longing sadness, the unnamable grief, of mourning for things that you've never known. The specters of things long dead fly over concrete skylines and haunt subway stations. They never knew this world, wanted no part of it, and yet they walk its streets at night.

There's no one to mourn the giant sauropods that stretch their necks high above the suburban developments where humans sleep peacefully on ruined earth. No one can tell the mosasaurus that the seas have receded as it swims silently above man-made rivers of oil-slick asphalt. As a dinosaur-loving child swept up in the post-Jurassic Park fervor of the early 90s, I know I've laid awake at night wondering where the dinosaur ghosts are. If there are Victorian ladies in white dresses haunting every aged home and famous hotel in America, surely the ghosts of dinosaurs lingered somewhere.

Waiting to be seen. Waiting to be acknowledged.

Dinosaur Ghosts gave me my answer, and it wasn't what my seven-year-old self would have wanted to hear. Life moved on without them, the way it will for all of us one day. Each of us will walk an earth we don't understand alongside the shadows of things that were driven to extinction, whether by us or by something far greater than us. Reduced to shadows over the boulevard and things dashing away into the night. That's the saddest fate of all, I think.

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Now and Then by Jack Stauber

I find myself thinking a lot about Jack Stauber's work these days. That's kind of a cliche thing to say in certain corners of the internet but it is what it is. I wrote about it recently and covered my thoughts on his twelve-minute masterpiece OPAL, a work that struck me very deeply. Writing that piece wasn't the exorcism that I thought it would be. Stauber writes such disarming bops and memorable ear worms that I keep coming back to them. I'm especially fond of the understated haunting of Video Man and the playful nostalgia of Back, though the thoroughly upsetting Baby Hotline lives rent-free in my head most days.

Now and Then has stuck with me after repeated viewings in a way that I didn't expect. At just two minutes, this film is concise and to the point. There is the protagonist of the Now, the him of this moment in time, who snaps awake from a raucous. A hollowed-out ding ushers in the silence, the kind that used to chime in when you pressed the assistance button on an airplane. Then, the protagonist of the past, is laid dead on the ground, a shrunken corpse of his former life now that time has killed the person he once was. Two figures alone in a yellow void, Now returns to Then to dissect the corpse.

Now is, as you are, the product of who he was before, a scavenger of his own life. Now opens his corpse with a box cutter and reaches inside the cavity of his chest to examine its contents. There's a ding again and a message telling him to “Pack light.” Now takes what he needs from the junk inside his ribcage and leaves the rest behind. He will do this the same way you will do this again, over and over, until there's no beating heart left to hold.

Upon first viewing, I kind of disregarded this piece, but something made me return to it. Its direct visual representations of time and pain feel obvious, but they are given nuance by the messages delivered to Now. The text is spelled out backwards for his viewing rather than ours, first telling him to pack light for his journey and assuring him when he experiences strange new feelings.

There's a dialogue happening here, between Now and Then and the entity generating the text. Now responds to it like a companion or guiding presence, someone or something helping to facilitate this self-autopsy process. Travel is an important element of the piece, reinforced by the familiar sounds of an airplane cabin and the mention of packing. Now and Then are states of being but also points in time and space. Standing against the yellow void, Now looks almost indistinguishable from Then, occupying the same place just moments and inches apart. Change can feel like that sometimes.

There's something so raw about the optimism of this piece. Traveling from Then to Now is painful. It requires the willingness to take apart and reassemble one's self on the end of a bloodied box cutter. Such work isn't simple, and it doesn't happen on a straight line, but it's possible. Change doesn't always feel like progress because progress feels like it should be measured in miles. Change still happens anyway.

The ending doesn't feel final, but it does feel like progress. And I love that.

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I liked it better when we lived on see-saw hill by Yara Asmar

Like Stauber above, I’ve talked about the video projects of musician and puppeteer Yara Asmar before. Last year I wrote a painful little love letter to Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids and Confused Adults. Since then, I've tried to keep up with Asmar's new and upcoming projects, especially her short videos.

I think Asmar is a sincere and fascinating person. Her work feels like a dream to me. From her airy vocals and tinkling instrumentation to the opaque expressions of her puppets, her work makes me feel as if I'm dreaming while awake. So when I first watched this short film, I was pleasantly surprised at how much it functioned like a dream.

Dropping small touches of humor and playful absurdity, Asmar achieves a kind of Lynchian verve. This piece is no exception. The protagonists speak past one another in languid, looping prose, a cul-de-sac dialogue that ends without truly reaching a terminal thought. Frames of film stutter and the scene jumps around in time and setting, all plain and rather domestic. The blunt and haughty bird is concerned with her appearance, fixing her headscarf in a reflexive sort of preening. Her companion, the clock (previously named Gloomy Madeleine in Mr. Samuel's) moves sharply between her own melancholic introspection and irritation with the bird.

Each character is having a conversation primarily with themselves that only breaks to rebut or ridicule the other. The bird and the clock are preoccupied with the past and the simplicity of life their younger selves enjoyed and yet are dismissive of the other's yearning for that past. Whatever pain either of them have endured is bigger, brighter, more important than the other's. Even in their bickering their communication feels one-sided, like each of them are rehearsing what they would say if given the chance. Seated together on a couch or in matching chairs, they can barely bring themselves to be vulnerable before the other.

The film reads to me like an intergenerational dialogue, with the bird acting as an older maternal figure and the clock as an adult child. Their guarded, indirect clashes feel like conversations between someone who wants to be respected as an authority of some kind, or at least a source of wisdom, and someone who just wants to be acknowledged without judgment. They both want to be seen and taken seriously but can't seem to stop talking at one another to concede to the other's wishes. Not until the end, when the bird extends empathy to the frustrated clock mourning the loss of her steady hands to tell time with.

Upon multiple viewings, that moment stands out to me more brightly. It's a quiet kind of catharsis to see an act of kindness pass between these characters. The moment is not a rupture but it does signal a change, however small, in how they engage with one another. It provides a moment for them to let their guards down and acknowledge one another.

That's such a specific feeling and it's striking to see how well Asmar captures it through her puppets. I could be way off, of course, cultural differences being what they are between my American self and a Lebanese artist. But it feels like an empathetic rendering of familial tensions and the kinds of circular thinking and communication they often produce. Conversations held over and over, things left unsaid, needs never spoken.

Then that moment happens, and the air changes, and it feels like the other person can finally see you. Sometimes, that's enough.

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Perfect You by Alex Casanis

This one is kind of a cheat. At time of writing, this is a narrative told in two parts, two years apart. Alex Casanis is a really interesting figure in the online horror and horror-adjacent spaces. He's best known for The Monument Mythos series, which explores branching paths of alternate histories through the lens of American exceptionalism. Canasis takes the familiar elements of the analog horror genre and repurposes them for a sort of surreal documentary style that crosses the boundaries of digital and analog technologies.

He's a very thoughtful and experimental creator, and takes a staunchly curatorial approach to how he presents his work. The name of his channel and its aesthetics change over time. Videos disappear and reappear based on his relationship to the piece or series. It's deeply personal work that digs into themes of shifting identity, loss of parents or children, and the cascading effects of grief, which reflect known experiences in Casanis’ own life. That vulnerability allows his work and his channel to be a sort of living memory, changing with the ebbs and flows of time. I respect that a great deal.

Also I personally think The Ningen is his best work, but that's a story for another time.

Perfect You was a stand-alone piece until its sequel, Imperfect You, appeared recently. This is less of a full narrative experience and more of two complementary vignettes. As it stands at time of writing, this duology is a kind of speculative fiction nightmare. It begins with a very dreamy, analog horror-style opening before shifting into the more surreal and introspective horror of the sequel.

The promise?

A new body in twenty-four hours. Just in time for the sunrise.

I can't quite articulate what I really respond to in this series. The mood and tone are at once calming yet ominous. The concept seems a bit silly and representative of well-trodden online horror storytelling tropes, at least in its initial twist, but there's something so enticing about the idea. So deeply human.

If you could get a brand new body, a perfect form without the need for strenuous exercise or surgical modification, who among us would say no? Obviously, oppressive standardized, medicalized, racialized beauty standards inform these feelings. But beyond that element, who wouldn't want a body that functions properly without pain or illness? What about a trans person, who could simply remake themselves in one day without surviving the prohibitive cost and degradation of the medical industry? If you could change out your troubled reproductive system for one that functioned, wouldn't you jump at the chance to have children?

Wholeness means a lot of things to a lot of people, but we all long to feel complete. We long for perfect bodies that align with our interior worlds and desires. I can't say that I'd say no if the opportunity, however implausible, presented itself to me.

But therein lies of the horror of Perfect You. Who are you without your body? Who are you without the mind it houses? What becomes of you when you achieve perfection by an unknown and opaque definition?

I really like these two pieces, and I think you should check out the rest of Casanis’ work for yourself.

I'll catch you next time.