Well the title alone should tell you you’re in for a little treat, right? Tiny Terrors. No, I’m not talking about Verne Troyer’s abominable Gnome Alone but rather short films which seem to be a constantly overlooked and underrated source of blood, guts, and monster mayhem. Short films have a reputation for being pretentious, Avant-garde ventures that only a handful of people can actually relate to and comprehend, let alone enjoy. Contrary to the popular belief that you have to be some film school major or cinephile to enjoy them, a lot of truly terrifying and imaginative films have been made in the last ten years with run times as short as five minutes and budgets well below a hundred grand. I mean, it’s like any film arena, there are some real stinkers and always those projects looking to be some genre-redefining masterpiece, but most fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum as being scary and fun all at once.
Be sure to click on the movie titles to watch!
Velvet Road (2012)
I’m starting off this tiny terrors list with a 13-minute piece that I love called Velvet Road. Velvet Road is a story about love and loss set in the racially tense south in the 1960s where the local black community is being blamed for the spread of a horrifying zombie disease. The main character, Bobby, is racing down the highway in the middle of the night, the woman he loves injured on the other end of the bench seat in his beat-up pickup truck. Her arm is bleeding, the skin putrescing and changing as she cries and tells him how bad it hurts. Things only get worse when she goes crazy and attacks him, causing the truck to wreck. He wakes up in the debris the next morning, a trail of blood leading through the broken glass and asphalt into a nearby field. Up the road a few hundred yards is a police car. There’s a man in the back who is still very much alive and a cop in the front who, well, I think you’ve got the idea. It’s an emotional film with a predictable but still gut-wrenching ending.
Don’t Move (2013)
I have a soft spot for demonic possession and anything with malevolent, otherworldly entities terrorizing teens. At just under 11 minutes (if you skip the end credits like a lot of YouTubers do) you experience a chilling ride as one-by-one a group of friends is picked off by a demonic force summoned through a drunken game played with a Ouija board. As the title suggests, the demon waits for each one of the players to make a move before snatching them up and slaughtering them in the most violent and bloody ways possible. Down to the last two, a man and woman face off against each other. Fearing for her own life, she leaps into the man’s arms and pulls him onto her. Together they fall to the couch as the demon tears him limb from limb. Thinking that she, the lone survivor is safe at last, she cautiously makes her way to the door only to find out there is still one last surprise in store for her night.
Brutal Relax (2010)
I love this movie so much it’s really hard to know where to begin. With a runtime of 15 minutes, we meet Mr. Olivares who has just recovered from some sort of psychological break and is in desperate need of a vacation. He travels to the beach, puts on his headphones and his Walkman, and slathers himself up in mud to lay out and sun in nature’s playground. Unbeknownst to him or any of the other beach bums, hell is coming in with the tide in the form of terrible green sea monsters -or sea orcs as I drunkenly shouted the first time I watched it- who have mayhem and murder on their minds. Obliviously napping through most of the carnage, the bewildered and unsuspecting Mr. Olivares gets up and, in truly psychotic action movie star way, begins to rip apart the kelp covered army of the damned with his bare hands. Posing for all your standard beach vacation photos with his new, dead friends he seems more refreshed and revitalized than ever before. There is literally nothing scary at all to this one but it’s a great, gore-saturated laugh inside an otherwise dark and twisted setting and it’s worth every last second you spend on it.
Eel Girl (2008) / The Little Mermaid (2011)
These two are equally amazing films that, despite differences in cinematography, setting, and overall feel tell basically the same story. In Eel Girl, a pair of scientists are observing and studying a woman lounging in a steel tub of water. Despite her sallow, slick skin, gills, and shark teeth, she has the seductive, bare curves of a beautiful woman. When his partner steps out, the siren lures the second doctor into the holding area through a secure door. She rises up from the tub and walks towards him. Placing her webbed hands at either side of his head, looking at him with black, emotionless eyes you almost anticipate some strange, monster on mad scientist porno to start. That is, until her jaw unhinges and she swallows him whole. In The Little Mermaid, a Victorian Era traveling freak show has a live mermaid on display. Again, a beautiful young woman with some mild facial deformities and a sizeable tail sits in a tub of water on stage as people come from all around to hear her siren song. Meanwhile, her handler, ever more enchanted by the mysterious and beautiful creature, finds himself drawn closer and closer to her until, at last, he finds himself closer than he should ever have been. They both weave tales akin to the old sailing myths of mermaids and sirens using their sexuality and charms to lure men to their deaths and they are both well worth the watch.
The Many Doors of Albert Whale (2011)
The Many Doors of Albert Whale doesn’t seem like much of a monster film at first. In fact, as Albert begins his seemingly obsessive compulsive daily rituals, it doesn’t seem like much of a horror movie. He has a routine that becomes apparent within moments, a compulsion to make sure that any door, anything even resembling a door, stays shut when it isn’t in use. As he wanders into the kitchen for his breakfast we find a woman sitting patiently in a chair. There’s a door knob and a note in her lap and her lips have been sewn together and look bloody, even infected. With strange, sick eyes she stares intently as he talks to her and continues his ritual. He opens the fridge and closes the door when he’s done, smoothing out a post-it note to remind him it’s a door. The then opens a cupboard and becomes distracted by her. She stares intensely at the open cupboard door as poor Albert suffers a heart attack and collapses onto the floor, but not before dialing 911 and summoning paramedics. The cupboard door still hanging open, the medics rush through the back door. The note vanishes. The doorknob falls from the woman’s lap. The monster inside her leaps up from the chair and a killing frenzy begins.
If you’re looking for original horror, something scary or dark or genuinely twisted, it’s just a quick Google search away. I came across all these titles and many, many more over the years by asking YouTube to show me “horror short films” and “zombie short films.” I’d also like to point out that Daywalt, the directors and YouTube page, provide dozens of excellent, frightening, and strange horror short films featuring monsters under the bed, lovelorn demonic gingerbread men, and a host of other creepy crawlies to make you laugh and scream. Links are attached for all the short films I mentioned above and you can find so many more similar shorts just by typing in a couple of keywords or following the links at the end of the videos. Disappointed at the monsters coming to the big screen this summer? Don’t be. There are lots of tiny terrors still to be had online.