Film Maudit 2.0: The Shorts - Part Two (2024)

This quick, fun, and gory claymation piece feels like Evil Dead in a closet or The Demon, The Dude, and The Wardrobe.

Crazy Lotus
Written and directed by Naween Noppakun
2024, 15 minutes

Crazy Lotus stuns with its broad color palette, varied visual effects, and a range of images from wildly ecstatic to richly mundane. The voiceover even offers an array of registers and textures. The film creates its own sci-fi lexicon, and I can’t say I understood its entire vocabulary. People use the Crazy Lotus glasses to relive treasured experiences or envision an ideal future. Like the lotus that blooms from muddy waters, the wearers try to escape a painful present and bloom in an alternate reality. However, the space or reality created by Crazy Lotus has its own problems.

De Imperio portrays a revolt and hints toward its aftermath. Giants, like monstrous gods, force their way through forests, game boards, basem*nts, and throne rooms. They lord over smaller beings configured as geometric figures with occasional appendages, who are randomly torn apart, eaten, or thrown into cavernous spaces. As the smaller figures combine to create a larger humanoid that can rival the Giants, a social commentary emerges. The Giants possibly represent larger social systems like religion, government, or abstract ideas like fear and organization. The animation hums with existential horror, and some settings resemble Samuel Beckett’s, while the amorphous characters and social commentary echo aspects of Jan Švankmajer’s work.

Technically, the animation, music, and sound design are exemplary, creating a wondrous yet monstrous universe that resonates with our own.

Sammy, a lost and lonely museum custodian, often unwinds in front of the TV with watery noodle-based foods. After seeing a flier, he tries nude modeling for an art class. He enjoys it until a young artist’s portrait upsets him. The artist draws one of Sammy’s ears on the back of his head, and Sammy thinks about it so much that he sprouts one there.

The Third Ear explores body horror and intersects with themes of self-image, self-worth, and finding purpose. Despite sharing these aspects of the genre and a scene of slight gore, it is also oddly hopeful. Devin Burnam’s performance as Sammy is striking, told largely through close-ups and with little dialogue.

Silent Chirping of Invisible Digits offers a unique experience. The sound design and music by Thelonius Hamel and Vera Sebert partially envelop the viewer in clicks and pops resembling a stereo playing the end of an old vinyl record. At times, the sounds are comforting like late-night cricket chirping, almost like a balm on a humid night. Other times, they buzz and sting like walking through swarms of mosquitoes and flies near a creek. As the soundtrack rises and falls, building to a kind of roiling or burning and then sliding to nothing, images flicker. The film creates its own indeterminate visual and audio rhythms while setting gorgeous and bizarre images to insectile technological echoes–the rasp of old records, the flicker of film projectors, the buzz of electricity in the dark. The effect holds one in tension, like knowing something is in the room with you, but you don’t know what or where it is.

Some may find it thrillingly uncomfortable, while others, probably looking for a story, will find it pointless.

Any exhumation involving George A. Romero, the father of the modern zombie, is going to be rife with symbolism. As expected, no more room in hell, a short documentary inspired by the words, images, and other contents of Romero's archives, gives the viewer much to chew on. It features footage from around the Pittsburgh area, especially working and defunct industrial sites. We see coal bins, storyboards, blueprints, empty streets lit for no one, and a now famous–and mostly uninhabited–graveyard. With few exceptions, living people are absent, giving the footage an apocalyptic air, as if we're surveying liminal spaces. This is true for technical footage like the drone, surveillance, and 3D digital mapping sequences, as well as for shots of empty public streets and industrial areas.

This film reminds me of documentaries by the Sensory Ethnography Lab, but it's less suffocating and singularly focused than something like Caniba. no more room in hell explores transformation as disappearance and dispersal—zombiehood rather than zombies. It presents possibilities, models of disaster, while asking us to consider horrors beyond film.

Worm is an animated music video for the group IC3PEAK, featuring Kim Dracula. It depicts a supernatural confrontation among the artists in the Moscow underground, using a unique style of 2D animation similar to pixel art, full of surreal and horrific images.

I definitely want to see more of the Doviers’ work. Though I’m not much of a gamer, if they design a horror/bizarro video game, I’m all in.

balaena, in part a memorial to a beached whale, opens with a mourning song from Sardinia, which strangely resonates with Vittorio De Seta’s poetic documentaries of the lives of the fishermen in that area. Slow, fading transitions and close-ups of natural textures and fabrics give the images a visceral quality of decay, echoing the whale's slow public dispersal. The film captures the opposite of the grace and sublimity of whale watching as scientists take selfies in their biohazard suits around the rotting corpse. The whale here evokes a sense of helplessness despite its size rather than a cycle of life.