SXSW Review: The Weird, Strange, and Spooky Come Out to Play with the SXSW Midnight Shorts
A healthy addition to every film festival are the midnighters, particularly the midnight shorts. With each passing festival, I find myself paying more attention to this programming block because of the creativity on display. It’s reliably home to the strangest, weirdest, and spookiest offerings a festival has, and their form factor lets you sample a smattering of styles, genres, and influences within a two hour window. In that time you’ll typically find classic horror thrills, high concept premises, and hybrid genre benders you never knew you wanted until you laid eyes on them. If you don’t like one, it isn’t long before you get something entirely different. While narrative shorts and short subject docs have their place, midnighters often surprise in more ways than one.
This year’s nine selected shorts lean heavily into the traditionally defined horror genre, forgoing some of the weirder varietals for genuine thrills and chills thanks to macabre imagery and unsettling narratives. The standout among them is Regret by Santiago Menghini. Opening with ominous low level shots of a red and gray city scape, the film follows an all too busy white collar business man in the aftermath of his father’s death. Cooped up in his hotel room late one night, a black monolithic figure, the physical manifestation of regret, appears with a knife, only inching closer whenever the man looks away.
Isolation and a pervading sense of unease characterize the film, as if the world is a nightmare come to life and the man is the only inhabitant. He runs through an empty hotel uncertain of the stalker’s presence, but knowing all too well the figure is chasing him. Every time the camera looks away, you’re on edge, scanning the environment for movement, listening closely for the silhouette figure’s approach. It’s an inner demon horror tale, executed with an eerie stroke of terror and suspense that works brilliantly within the confines of its scope.
Selfie (John Poliquin, 2020)
Body horror made an appearance this year with John Poliquin’s Selfie, a short commentating on the dual personas we live online and the contorted doppelgängers that spawn out of the practice. Sarah is a young teen on the app ‘Selfie.’ She amasses an avid fanbase that adores her highly edited photos, but in real life, she feels discontent with herself. When she decides to give it all up, her monstrous internet self takes on a physical form, trying to eliminate the real Sarah from the equation. The ‘perfected’ Sarah has big eyes, plump lips, and an impossibly thin figure, ultimately leaning into monstrous caricature of the ideal human form. While I won’t say if the real or fake Sarah makes it out, I will say one of them dies by way of grotesque mutilation of the human body. Between this and Hand in Hand (which I’ll get to later), David Cronenberg would be proud.
For those who have seen The Invisible Man earlier this year, you’ll find a handful of narrative parallels between it and Stucco. This short sees twenty-something J moving into a new home after a failed, and potentially abusive, relationship. The past lingers over her, causing her to develop ongoing agoraphobia that cripples her day to day life. One day while hanging up a picture, she accidentally punctures a hole in the wall, a hole that enlarges with each passing night and induces increasingly supernatural happenings. Like The Invisible Man, the film concerns itself with overcoming past traumas through allegorical events in the narrative. In this case, a weird bodily home and possessive night terrors will do the trick. By day, J is terrified of the hole, but by night, she is entranced by it, leading to a symbolic confrontation of fears by the time we reach the finale. Living and dying by the inexplicable — including a strange make out scene with a tongue that emerges out of the hole — Stucco has a knack for a corporal type of horror that festers psychologically and realizes itself physically.
Heat (Thessa Meijer, 2020)
But lest we forget the shortest of the shorts, the ones really pushing their concepst to the highest levels and working on one sentence pitches. In Heat, director Thessa Meijer asks, “What if someone was made of ice cream?” and takes off from there. On a hot summer day, a girl walks into an ice cream parlor to cool off. Sensing the girl’s nervous behavior, the server first thinks she’s into him, but when drops of ‘bitter sweet’ ice cream start to cascade down her face, he starts to reconsider. Full of vibrant colors and an ‘eww’ inducing punchline, Heat is one of the shorts that adds levity between the longer, grimmer tales, but rest assured, it has a charm all its own. While cliche to say, you can practically feel the film’s sticky texture between the melting ice cream and porous sweat in the summer heat as a funky synthesizer plays in the background. Fun, light, creative, and a strong stand out.
Within that same short and sweet, high concept realm is Hand in Hand. It begins innocently enough with two political leaders solidifying a cordial agreement with a hand shake, but it quickly spirals into a chaotic frenzy when the force of said handshake merges the pair into an amorphous mass of human ligaments that sucks in everyone around to become an even larger heap of bodies. At three minutes and a half minutes in length, the short waste no time escalating to the point of absurdity. If you want to read into it, maybe you’ll find a political message about the far reaching influence of diplomatic policies and the detrimental impacts they can have, but more simply, I think the film will simply make you think twice before breaking someone’s hand with your iron grip. After all, it is just a handshake.
Sometimes when you need to go, you need to go, even if it’s in a rundown park bathroom. For Heidi, it means being subjected to a game of hide and seek by a demonic child occupying the facility. In its short time, Seek quickly builds a sense of unnerving tension. First by startling viewers with the unknown, and then steadily ramping towards a frightful reveal — a hide and seek structure if you will. Of note, there is a particularly effective moment where the demon child is scratching the other side of Heidi’s stall, laying down foreboding messages in chalk and leaving behind the phone of her prior victim. With it, Heidi watches a video showing the victim’s frantic final moments, following a trail of artifacts left behind that suggest Heidi’s fate is all but sealed. Not knowing what this creature is or what its intentions are make up eighty percent of the scares, and it’s only a matter of time before the video ends and we know the answer to both those questions.
Seek (Aaron Morgan, 2020)
Playing in the same realm of ‘what can’t be seen, scares the most’ is Laura Hasn’t Slept. The film starts with the titular Laura giving a testimonial to her therapist about her reoccurring dreams in which a man smiles and stares eerily from afar. As the session progresses, she becomes more and more panicked about the possibility this man is coming for her, a reality that starts to come true as the environment distorts around her and she realizes she is in one of her dreams. The fells like a distant child of The Nightmare on Elm Street series, taking influence from the series’ signature ‘living nightmare’ set up where the unknowing protagonist doesn’t realize they’re in a dream before it’s too late. It’s not hard to guess who the eerie creep is, but when he appears, his off-putting stare ominously beats down, exuding a genuinely no-good, very bad expression of harm and ill-will. Plus like Regret, the film has a strong sense of spatial context, defining where the threat lies, subverting where you expect it to come from, and building on the psychological terror of not knowing the menace’s position is until the final release and the payoff is achieved.
The final two in the selection are The Doe and Danny’s Girl. The Doe has a Tucker and Dale vs Evil like set up where a woman walking through a rural French town believes the townsfolk there are trying to kill her. Put in innocent scenarios, but constantly assuming malicious intentions, the woman makes a stand against the forces against her, resulting in some morbidly ironic events where no good deed goes unpunished. Danny’s Girl deploys a surprising cohesive shifting tone setup where an online couple meets for the first time. It starts as a romance, shifts into a dark comedy, then into Misery-like horror, and back towards sensual allure, all while breaking a sweat, lots and lots of sweat.
For young filmmakers, festival shorts like midnighters often provide a gateway to feature film opportunities, allowing them to meet potential investors and strike up future deals. But because of SXSW’s cancelation, those aspiring creatives didn’t get the chance. To make the best of the situation, the festival has made all 75 shorts available online right now with the help of Oscilloscope Laboratories and Mailchimp (yes, the emailing list service). In light of the unfortunate circumstances, it’s a welcomed silver lining, one that will hopefully give these up-and-coming filmmakers the chance to have their films seen by the right people.
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