By Salim Garami
What's good?
I'm going to keep it short (pun unintended) this week. The choice to recommend short films that I am extremely fond off for more mood-setting Halloween season watching might seem uneventful to most. But the occasion is of celebration of an event that might resonate with some South Florida filmgoing readers. The Key West-based lesbian apocalypse horror short Buzzcut by Jon Rhoads and Mike Marrero has just won Best Film at FilmGate Miami's monthly 'I'm Not Gonna Move to L.A.' festival in the middle of its festival tour and if you follow me on Motorbreath, you might have seen me singing the praises of that short wishing better things for it.
So, in anticipation of the day that short might be more easily accessible to everyone, here are 3 horror shorts that I usually find myself indulging in to get into the Halloween spirit.
Frankenstein (1910)
Arguably the earliest example of the horror movie and produced by Thomas Edison at the very nascency of narrative film as an artform, this 14-minute short portrays Mary Shelley's iconic novel about how a man creates a monstrous living being that stalks and haunts him in a liberal fashion alike most cinematic adaptations of the book. The story is diluted to only the broadest of moments in unsubtle pantomime that recounts the greatest hits of that story save for a distinct finale that deviates from any other version of the tale to date and redefines the state of existence for the monster outright (played in Golem-esque fashion by Charles Ogle). If being broad is not in the Frankenstein's favor as narrative, it does well enough as a dose of eerie moodiness right down to the inclusion of skeletons in foggy setpieces. And its central scene of the Monster's creation slowly out of fire and dust to be a transparent (it's obviously reversed footage) but still fascinating work of early movie magic in the shadow of Melies' visual tricks!
Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve [Night on Bald Mountain] (1933)
Another silent black-and-white short film certainly illustrates just how much I hate color and sound in my movies, obviously. If I had my way with cinema, I'd surely replace all soundtracks with classical music compositions such as the famous Mussorgsky ode to Witches' Sabbath that this animated short by Alexander Alexieff and Claire Parker is named after. Set to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangement, Alexieff and Parker use the first half to paint solid shadows through landscapes so fluid in their background motion that it's infected with the terrifying sort of energy that runs through somebody standing in the middle of a storm. Those shadows shift into different forms of being that are full of volume and mass yet lacking in detail or visage to make their presence on screen fearful. Objects on screen move free of any logic beyond that of nightmare, like how the moon swerves around a fallen horse or two hags will stand above each other in a weird leapfrog position. But, it still assuages and comforts us with a finale slowly filling the setting with the softest light that could make your eyes water in relief from the gargoyles in the darkness that chased the screen minutes before. In a world with Disney's Fantasia in existence, I can't possibly call this the best cinematic adaptation of Mussorgsky's work but it's so full of chilling atmosphere just from strokes of black and white that it's impossible not to feel like a great accomplishment anyway.
Geometria (1987)
Available on the Criterion Collection release of Guillermo Del Toro's feature debut Cronos, Geometria is one of only two of Del Toro's numerous early short films he allowed to be made publicly available and even then he has expressed his dissatisfaction with the final result. I can't imagine why - Geometria is not the most professionally made piece but it's vibrant and eye-catching in lurid reds and blues to shape something as domestically mundane as a house and the demon and zombie designs are grotesque in a fun Tales from the Crypt grisly manner. And that's without recognizing that the story, based on Frederic Brown "Naturally" about a failing geometry student who summons a demon for help, has a sense of humor about itself that keeps such a dark tale feeling more bouncy and fun about itself than it should be. Del Toro's cinema has always been one of the heralds of how much fun movies are by people who want to make them and Geometria is an early indicator of how much he loved making them, joyously parodying The Exorcist and embodying pulp 50-cent horror sensibilities in an endearingly cheap manner. Maybe it's an embarrassment to the recent winner of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion, but I'd dream of something so entertaining being my worst film.
What are some of your favorite horror short films to watch during this season? Do you think there's a lot of potential in the artform to craft horror atmospheres more effectively?