The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is a premier East Coast genre festival with a mission to spotlight films that push the boundaries of what is normally deemed horror. Bloodletter contributors reviewed ten short films and one feature film with female, trans, and non-binary directors that were selected for the 9th edition of the festival.  

dir. Kara Grace Miller

“Are you going to tell?”

“No.”

She sits at a bright computer in a dark room, the wall behind her plastered with scribbled sticky notes. There is a map on her screen, one building highlighted. She zooms in, then zooms in again, her eyes fixed on something we cannot see. Her sink is full of dirty dishes, her counters thick with trash.

Confidently directed by Kara Grace Miller, The Girl With the Grey Eyes is a woozy, bleak depiction of life after a catastrophic trauma. The film is anchored by an intense and focused performance by Danica Lee Clauser as Blaire, its shell-shocked and haunted protagonist. She saves multiple pictures on her phone of a man named Will, the same man she is tracking on the map on her computer. If Blaire is haunted, Will (Jake Robert Robbins, adeptly playing the sort of unobtrusively creepy guy we have all met at bar trivia) is her ghost. She compulsively tracks his location, keeping tabs on him as one might a wasp in the room. Everything has lost its meaning for Blaire. The only thing she cares about is making sure she knows exactly how far away Will is at all times.

Miller wisely leaves the gruesome details of Blaire’s trauma to the imagination. We understand her dark history with Will through a series of brief and jarring flashbacks, the camera momentarily admitting us into her spinning mind. Will’s fist pounding on a door. Blaire desperately scrubbing herself raw in the shower. A mattress stripped of sheets and frantically sprayed with air freshener. The film trusts us to fill in the blanks, and we do. 

Blaire’s obsessive tracking of Will leads her to a party where she runs into an old friend, Sydney (a natural and effervescent Lara-Olivia Scott). Sydney, who does not know about the assault, is delighted to see Blaire, and worried that her friend’s weeks-long silence is somehow her fault. She happily chats about a man she has been seeing, one she wants Blaire to meet. The camera slowly spins, then stops on a familiar face as the background noise of the party fades, replaced by a faint and eerie ringing.

Will is there. He is Sydney’s new boyfriend. Their meeting is a ballet of tension, the unspoken truth of his abuse weighing down every second that passes between them.

The beauty of The Girl With the Grey Eyes is in how the cinematography compliments its protagonist’s state of mind. Distinguished by grim, bruised colour palettes and stark, dramatic lighting, the film’s visual landscape is lonely and disconnected, all empty streets and awkward parties. It is the world seen through the eyes of someone who no longer lives comfortably in her own body. A quiet moment between Blaire and Sydney in a bathroom highlights Blaire’s isolation: the two friends stand at opposite windows, adrift in separate frames. The warm yellow light of the party lies behind them. In front there is only darkness, the enormity of Blaire’s trauma casting a shadow. Even when Sydney confronts her—all but admitting that she knows something happened between her friend and Will—Blaire cannot make herself say what she needs to say. Silhouetted against the light, she keeps her mouth closed.

Although The Girl With the Grey Eyes ends on what could be construed as an empowering note, the film is intelligent enough not to depict it as that—or, at least, not as only that. One violent act births another, and Blaire is left traumatized yet again, alone and lonely in a city that feels as alien as a distant star.

“Because nothing happened, right?”

“Yes. It did.”

dir. Jessica Barr

Jessica Barr’s Tight is a brutally effective masterclass in storytelling—not a single scene is wasted. The film follows a nameless woman, who shall hence be referred to as the Wife (played by Fabianne Gstottenmayr), and her newfound inability to achieve sexual pleasure after childbirth. It should be noted that this is not really a film about motherhood; the child is mostly incidental, and only appears in the final scene. What the film is about is trust and betrayal, a horrific patriarchal “treatment,” and an unexpected amount of plastic wrap.

The film opens to a doctor’s clinic. The Wife and the Husband (Elliot Gross) sit together, hands clasped so very tightly, as a doctor—white, male—asks them questions. The Husband always answers. Meanwhile, the Wife is visibly distraught, teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack, her breathing coming in rapid-fire bursts until the Husband is asked to leave. He does, ungraciously, until the doctor emerges and asks What about you? Are you in any discomfort?

A faint trace of shame, perhaps—as the Husband admits It’s the best it’s ever been.

We discover that for the Wife, sex is now a chore, an unpleasant duty that causes her nothing but pain. The Husband is aware enough of this to feel guilty about it, but not, of course, to stop having sex with her. Her face twists and contorts as his eases into pleasure. She shoves him away when he’s done. Even solo masturbation is ruined for her. She feels the loss intently—she watches happy couples hold each other in public with the keenness of a hawk.

The only kind of gratification that the Wife displays is when she wraps something in plastic wrap. We watch her cocoon pillows and benches in lifeless plastic, running her hand lovingly along the trussed-up furniture and closing her eyes in the first real pleasure we see from her in the film. She finds relief when things are bound, inert, protected. Kept whole. A barrier wrapped tightly between the object and the world, one that she controls.

She goes to another doctor.

This one is a gynaecologist, a woman of colour. It seems significant that this is the first character who truly empathises with the Wife—the American medical system is infamous for accumulating accusations of misogynoir, after all—and the first person who tells her the truth. I’m sorry. In the Wife’s most vulnerable moment, a birth in which she has already confessed to being so heavily medicated that she doesn’t remember it —her husband had requested the doctor do something unforgivable.

It is not mentioned by name in the film, simply explained. The husband stitch. A woman is sewn up after she tears during birth, a routine medical procedure; but might the Husband ask there to be an extra stitch or two put in? A little tightening of the laces, so to speak. So things go back to normal in the bedroom, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and hey, maybe they’ll be even better than before? A man can dream.

And the doctors, already shown in the film to be so concerned with the comfort of men, of course comply. What’s the harm? The woman—unconscious, exhausted, recovering from one of the most agonising things the human body can experience—probably won’t even notice. Best not to tell them. You know how they are. There’s no real harm, remember?

Except, not quite, as the gynaecologist explains.

The husband stitch can cause extreme pain during intercourse, and the effects are not reversible. The Wife is visibly dazed with the slow-dawning realisation of betrayal. What happened to her was no medical mishap; it was deliberate, and this recontextualizes every encounter we’ve seen between her and the Husband. The film ramps up the tension with a soundtrack as eerie as it is simple; the repeated chime of a bell.

We are reminded of that quote about the bell tolling, and who it might toll for…

The Husband returns to a house that has been bound in an excess of plastic wrap. The lampshade, the table, the counter. A thread of unease creeps in, until lust burns it away; the Wife emerges, the perfect image of a dominatrix but for the odd look on her face, as tightly clad in latex as the furniture in plastic.

She backs him into a chair, ties his arms and his legs together with her faithful plastic wrap. When he tries to speak, she hushes him, in a beautiful reversal of the first scene where he spoke over her at every opportunity. The panic does not truly kick in until she wraps his face. Finally, it is the Husband’s turn to be breathless and helpless, to be betrayed in a moment of intimacy. The film ends on a good-for-her note as we see her turn and walk away, baby safe in her arms, her control finally regained.

For such a short film, the characters are impressively vivid, the messages of patriarchy and control clearly present without slipping into melodrama. You’ll want to reach into the screen to comfort Gstottenmayr’s Wife when the gynaecologist tells her what has been done to her; you’ll want her to hear you cheering through the screen when she gets her revenge, too. A tightly-plotted—pardon the pun—feminist horror film with fantastic direction and acting.

dir. Nina Noël Raaijmakers

Two years after graduating from the St. Joost School of Art and Design with the film “My Mother the Atomic Bomb,” genre director Nina Noël Raaijmakers is back with her remarkable body horror short film “Femme.” In just 17 minutes, “Femme” is a captivating, bold, gritty exploration of cisgender female bodily autonomy, femme body integrity, and consent that earmarks a bright future for Raaijmakers.

“Femme” wastes no time jumping straight into the action, disorienting the viewer alongside protagonist Fem (Nola Elvis Kemper) within seconds as she is dragged from her quiet, isolated bedroom and into throngs of people at a party. She is plied with alcohol before her roommate Luna (Jatou Sumbunu) sheds light on the situation—as part of what appears to be a college hazing ritual, the women must have sex to be given back the doors to their rooms. Unhappy with “how long it is taking” for Fem to make a move on a man at the party, she thrusts one upon her and the duo go to her room. After Fem noticeably isn’t enjoying the encounter and asks him to stop, he continues regardless and then leaves abruptly to continue partying. The following morning, Fem wakes up with an unusual rash which marks where the man touched her, and she and Luna get to investigating what could be the cause of her mysterious ailment. Fem soon embarks on another mission, one of carnal pleasure and sexual discovery as she enjoys anonymous sex with various men, and soon discovers her rash begins to clear. 

What is immediately apparent about “Femme” is the in-your-face delivery of its hard-hitting topics, never shying away from the double standard in which female sexuality is often treated in society compared to men’s, and the danger that women face when undergoing the exact same explorative period of their formative years. Exquisite cold blue lighting is used to personify Fem’s loneliness, even during sexual scenes, as opposed to the warm, glowing rooms she inhabits alongside Luna. Mid to long shots make up the sexual encounters the women do not enjoy, or they’re hidden entirely, while close-ups and a focus on their animalistic breathing bring their pleasurable rendezvous to life. The effect is that it places the audience right into the highs and lows of college life and the female experience right with these characters, which makes the body horror that comes so much more shocking.

As well as these societal anxieties, Raaijmakers injects spine-chilling body horror into the mix as Fem begins to discover that her sexual prowess and pleasure have restorative properties—and she uses this newfound ability to avenge Luna when she becomes the victim of a sex crime. Raaijmakers counts Julia Ducournau among her influences, and her homages to Raw (2016) are apparent from scenes of Fem drifting through a party with blurred shots and sounds while throwing herself at men like a predator hunting prey, to her embracing her animalistic side and attempting to use meat to heal her blistering wounds.

“Femme” is a triumphant short film from budding director Raaijmakers, both celebrating female autonomy in a “good for her” narrative that shows a young woman harnessing her sexuality after an encounter that saw her choice stripped from her. At the same time, it casts a scathing eye over the way in which sexual women are shamed by those around them in a way that their male counterparts are not, offering a nuanced look at women’s sexuality in a modern society with impressive body horror effects that are sure to see Raaijmakers achieve great things in the future.

dir. Nicole Tegelaar

Dreamlike and surreal, “Poppy’s Saturn” pulls one by the hand into a whirlpool of vivid symbolism, vibrant colours, and madness. The short film begins with nightclub singer Poppy, who is unable to continue with her performance after the appearance of “the black-eyed man.” She must face and accept herself as she sets out on a journey of acceptance, self-redemption, and identity. Nicole Tegeelar redefines conventional storytelling by crafting horror rooted in the character’s personal journey. This representation of horror in film highlights Poppy’s inner struggles, as well as the external horrors she comes across. As the plot rolls out, one is invited to share in the experience, observe and participate, not to sit back and watch. The uncertainty of new situations is mirrored in the viewer, just as it is in Poppy.

We join Poppy in her search for answers and are performers in Madame Rose’s house (and theatre) alongside her and the women. There is no escape from the stage, even the viewers are not exempt from it. Even in total deconstruction, it is still a play. As the stage collapses, her roles blur, becoming both performer and character. In Madame Rose’s house, reality fades. The descent into madness begins.

The pervasive use of pink hues in the house and the pink, glittery tint in the dream-like sequences contribute to the overall surreal quality of the film. Despite their prominence, the colours are muted, subtly reinforcing femininity and dreaminess. The cinematography brings colours to life. Colours bounce on the main character’s body, encasing her within the dreamworld and ushering her into it. 

The turning point in Poppy’s journey comes when she takes the black-eyed man’s eyes. In this scene, rather than showcased by action, it is represented by colours—a bursting red hue overshadows the violence, after which we see his gouged-out eyes in her hands. By taking his eyes, she takes control of the narrative. This part of the film explores sexual traumas and the male gaze, where oftentimes the victim loses control and body agency. Watching the film, the viewer might find themselves asking if this is intentional. Does the symbol of performance allude to the almost performative roles of females under the male gaze? If there is estrangement, is it perhaps from the self?

Like the use of colours, the use of the article “the” is intriguing. The article often implies specificity, and the use of this article in “the black-eyed man” highlights the same; regardless of whether it is interpreted as a representation of past trauma. The use of “the” makes the black-eyed man less of an anonymous figure and more of a physical representation of Poppy’s trauma. She begins transitioning in Madame Rose’s house under the female gaze rather than the male gaze—a subversion of the initial first all-men audience. Here, she drops her coat, her heels, her tights, and confronts herself. The shedding of these articles of clothing mirror the rejection of roles imposed on her, and women in general. 

Marie Van Onvegal’s performance as Poppy gives life to the character. Her movements and actions are akin to a teasing dance. Every turn and gesture appear to be intentioned and breathtakingly powerful, and the viewer can only watch with impassioned amazement. This film is a testament to her brilliance as an actress. The intentionality of each symbol is laudable. Layered intricately, each symbol and image builds upon the last. To become, Poppy has to first lay down and surrender what she is—substitute her softness and vulnerability for the coarseness of a rose’s thorn, and accept the madness as defiance against the perceived softness of femininity. Only by surrendering her perceived softness does Poppy become powerful enough to defeat the black-eyed man.

Through “Poppy’s Saturn,” viewers are invited to surrender their expectations and be part of the experience. It is a film that will haunt its viewers after completion.

dir. Emily Bennett

While horror films have long explored feminine hysteria born out of mental illness or revenge, Emily Bennett’s short film “Accidental Stars” confronts the horror of a woman living truthfully. 

The short film opens with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Hysteria:” 

“As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.” 

It’s certainly a unique choice, as Eliot is perhaps best known, outside of his poetry, for being a misogynist and an overall bigot. But here, the placement of this quote, from this particular poem, from this particular poet feels awfully intentional, and it is the framework for which the rest of the short film operates. 

Starring Madeleine Charmaine Morrell as Nerissa and Kyle Minshew as David, “Accidental Stars” follows Nerissa (Morrell) as she embarks on “a simple acting exercise” with her coach David (Minshew). Nerissa is tasked to wake up in her bed in a believable manner, but David says that her work isn’t believable. He insistently repeats the word “less,” and later the audience witnesses a glimpse of his notebook which is filled with pages of the word as they become sprawled on the page in an increasingly erratic manner. 

In a feverish progression, David tells Nerissa that she is taking part in the workshop to “live truthfully in imaginary circumstances,” transitioning the plot into an absurdist nightmare. The score becomes nausea-inducing, the lighting adopts a red hue, and there are several close-up shots of the actors’ faces, namely David’s mouth. 

The mouth is arguably both Bennet’s primary setting and object as the film descends into its final nightmarish sequence. We see David’s mouth grinning widely as he torments Nerissa while she tries to leave the exercise, and then we see shots of Nerissa’s laughing mouth both externally and internally as she gives a truthful performance to an audience in an imaginary circumstance. 

The significance of this perspective from inside the woman’s mouth isn’t lost on me, and I believe it is the most telling sign of Bennet’s purpose in making the film. After David’s repetitive “less,” commanding Nerissa to do less to become believable, Nerissa unleashes unrestrained laughter to a full audience, and we see this from the perspective of her standing inside her own mouth, giving a performance. A screen projects her red lips, smiling mouth, and laughter flowing behind her. 

Horror films have long explored the hysterical woman, the crazed woman, the perfectionist woman, and the all-too-familiar woman who suffers at the hands of a man. Many of the elements present in “Accidental Stars” are reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), as the main character Nina Sayers becomes crazed with perfectionism under the guidance of her ballet director. But the trend of the madwoman trope and feminine hysteria can be traced back to the inception of horror as a genre. 

Here, Bennet presents the trope of the hysterical woman—the woman who is less rational and more overtly emotionally-charged than her male peers—and employs it to confront the undermining and restraint of Nerissa’s character throughout the first half of the short film. Instead of “less,” this character unleashes it all. And what better vehicle for catharsis than laughter from the mouth? 

Nerissa is not vengeful toward others out of repression (Carrie, 1976), nor does she inflict harm onto herself (Black Swan, 2010). The release in this imaginary performance sequence is entirely emotional. As the film concludes, the sequence abruptly ends and audiences are provided with a shot of David’s shocked face while Nerissa’s laughter continues. 

It is pure purgation, and it’s delicious.

dir. Christine Nyland

Everyone knows that monsters are real. When explaining the appeal of horror and the longevity of its centuries-old gallery of stock villains, the genre aficionado will often fall back on the explanation that these monsters stand for something. We reify mental illness as lycanthropy, nationalist paranoia as body snatchers, and we of course have Marx to thank for drawing the line from vampires to Capital. Horror manifests our monsters to forms and spaces where they can be captured, examined, explained, even defeated (at least until the sequel); it is a fictional lens that grounds anxiety in narrative.

Implied Monsters asks: is this actually helping anybody?

Through snapshots and still lifes of a night shared by a mother and her daughter, director Christine Nyland illustrates the breakdown and failure of this dynamic. We first see the daughter, a reticent and withdrawn Dorothy Ashley-Jones, doing what you do when you are a child in a horror movie: drawing and being correct. We agree with her that the monsters are real; of course they are, this is a horror film. We watch as the mother, a delightfully condescending Meghan Jones, treats these monsters as a behavioral problem, the same as picky eating. She attempts to contain the blast radius, to make the problem go away and keep things moving. And she does. Her daughter smiles and believes for a moment that her mother has the solution to monsters.

We do not learn what these monsters are until later that night. The mother lifts the foreshadowed drawing into frame and we see that the monster is not some eerie figure that lurks between them, in the home, but a gnarled hand that reaches in (itself a foreshadowing for a delightful visual pun near the scene’s conclusion, as we learn why the child’s worried gaze lingers on the light outside).

The mother is pulled from the drawing by a phone call, and we learn whose hand encroaches. The daughter returns to explain further what her mother begins to grasp: they share the same monsters. The hand that takes, that grasps, that wants nonexistent money and, failing that, will settle for taking your life from you. The mother asks whether her daughter saw her monsters in a movie, but she inferred their existence from observation. She has seen hunger, felt it starting, and knows that it will not spare them. The mother’s affected self-confidence falls to sobbing; looking at her, we might think she’s watching a monster leap through the screen and take breath.

When the mother learns that her daughter’s monsters are hers as well, she cannot say she will handle them. She embraces her daughter and the hand looms over them and the phone still rings, stopping only when credits roll. But we know that the phone will never stop ringing, the same way we know monsters are real. In our world, there is no end to the film, and there are no narrative contrivances to cushion our fall. Everyone knows that monsters are real, and no one seems able to protect us. Is there anything to do in the face of this nauseous fact but cling together? 

dir. Alisa Stern

Memory is the subject of many films, but in Alisa Stern and Scott Ampleford’s VHX, it is the main character. This short film follows a day in the life of animated videotapes, or personified memories, as they express anxieties about “getting chosen” to be watched. The terrifying fate of being forgotten looms over these tapes, and when one of them is selected to be played and later comes back disfigured, the horror of impermanence threatens to become all-consuming. 

In Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, she writes, “I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape.” As time passes, we cannot help but feel its cyclical loop, pulling us back to the previous year, the previous fall, the previous time we were sitting in this exact same spot. Like a videotape, our memories play out as a series of images and feelings. As we recall memories, we are transported in time, our past and present conflated.

VHX challenges the reliability we attach to visual forms of documentation. Even if we meticulously archive our lives, can we really save all the past parts of ourselves from being lost? This deep and unsettling anxiety about time passing begins with the very first shot of the film, a series of fragmented video clips playing on a TV: a children’s birthday party, a band concert, a young boy bowling. Then the camera zooms in on a bookcase full of videotapes, and the abstraction of memory becomes concrete as one of the tapes coughs and asks, “would it kill her to dust every once in a while?” 

How common it is, then, to conceive of memory as a movie or a videotape—something that can play and rewind. Throughout the film, these videotapes move, sleep, speak, eat, hide, and die. They have feelings, hopes, and dreams. And yet, this depiction is revealed to be unnatural, horrific, even. 

In reality, memory inhabits our mind much more like the opening scene of VHX, fragments of people, time, and space that evade clear narratives and sequencing. Instead of a thing, memory is a force that changes, fades, distorts, and disappears. It is something so elusive that we seek to understand it through extended metaphors about videotapes. VHX is self-aware of this. The closing scene returns to the same TV from the beginning, on which a sea monster roars and a woman asks, “What is that?” The man responds, “That? That’s mankind’s hubris, finally catching up with us.”

It is, of course, our own hubris that compels us to extensively record, archive, and replay our life in the effort to “accurately” capture a present that is meant to be transient. Ultimately, the film poses questions about the dangers of preserving the past as some thing that is fixed in time. Rather, VHX posits that the past is very much alive, and it does not always come with the warmth of nostalgia. If we are not careful, the past can haunt, scare, and consume us, too.

dir. Sally Tran

As a New Yorker and a young filmmaker, Don’t F*ck with Ba is one of those rare moments when something hits all the way right. Being lovingly familiar with the street location is part of it. Seeing a cast that’s all sexy and vibrant is a kick. The clubby soundtrack lifts you up. But there is so much more to this short, landing somewhere between a thriller and a horror movie.

We know that it’s harder to find a movie that isn’t set in New York than a movie that is. Come to think of it, you’ll realize that most of the films dear to anyone in the global west are filmed here, whether it’s noticeable or not. But Don’t F*ck with Ba is not about that over-saturated Manhattan Gossip-Girl look, where only grandmothers and designer dogs live now. This is about the New York Chinatown of exactly this zeitgeist, sharply hitting the spirit of what’s cool and happening in this rapidly changing, high traffic corner of the world. Very hard to define, and even harder to depict, yet Director Sally Tran somehow did it, and it seems like she had a lot of fun as she pieced together this buzzing work.

The story is simple. A gang of boys thrives on crime, terrorizing the neighborhood while backed up by a corrupt policeman. In an evil spree, the boys murder the grandma of our main girl Thao (Dinh). This crime will have its consequences. As it turns out, the grandma was extremely cool, and taught Thao not only how to smoke cigs but also some mix of martial arts. Extremely beautiful Thao turns to her friend group of no less stunning women (Yuka Taga, Yēn Sen, Akiko Fugiwara, Tran Thi Hgoc An, Tingying Ma, and Benedict Nguyen) who protect and support each other. Most importantly, in this sisterhood each woman is a master of a different lethal art. Together they fight the boy gang, and the result is highly satisfying.

Set in a neighborhood of Asian immigrants, the film does a clever job of representing different communities. The subtitles are color coded, so the English speaking viewer can tell if they are hearing Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. This is a fundamental feature of the film, which isn’t only a representation of Asian culture in the US but is actually trying to create an illusion that the plot is taking place in an Asian country (for example, the policeman is not wearing an NYPD uniform, rather something that looks more like a Chinese Police uniform, and even though the location is recognizable as Chinatown, there is no English being spoken and the focus is on store signs written in Chinese or Vietnamese).

Lastly, the practical effects. This movie is not made to make you think that any of the wounds, punches, or weapons are real or scary. And that makes it so much more fun to watch. The fight scene was shot in a white cube with light effects that create a visual scene somewhere between an anime movie and a night club. The film as a whole is shot beautifully, heavily relying on saturated lights. This is a campy, joyful puzzle of cinematic conventions that are used in a straightforward manner, leaving space not for illusion as much as the charm of the cast and the script. And really, what more can you want from a short?

dir. Haley Z. Boston

“The Beach Logs Kill” is a dreamy horror short written and directed by Haley Z. Boston. Set in a world where sports are led by girls and cheered on by boys, the film follows the football team’s star player, referred to only as Number 36 (played by Ryan Simpkins from Fear Street Part Two: 1978). Everyone worships Number 36, from the people in the parking lot doing cheer routines before the big game to her fellow players, but nobody seems as enamored with her as The Bad Girl. Sentenced to a detention of scrubbing sharpie dicks off of the walls, The Bad Girl watches Number 36’s powerful speech to her teammates from the back of the room. Number 36 hypes the girls up for their game, reminding them that this is her last game as a senior, and that at the end of the game she will select someone to take over her number, and in doing so, they will claim her very essence. The girls look on hungrily, but they’re quickly interrupted by The Bad Girl, who has been drawn forward to Number 36 by her siren call of charisma. The Bad Girl is so inconsequential that Number 36 even wonders aloud if she has been in the room with them the whole time. Once The Bad Girl disappears back to her cleaning duties away from the group she is immediately forgotten about again.

Or so she thinks. As the other girls run out to their game, Number 36 confronts the girl. She tells the girl that she wouldn’t get detention, or have to wear the school’s detention shirt, if she was on varsity. The Bad Girl explains that she can’t be on varsity because she can’t catch anything. Number 36 tosses a tampon at her, which she doesn’t even attempt to catch. Flirtingly, Number 36 tells her that she can help her practice, but she really needs that tampon back. Before leaving, she marks the girl with her number, seemingly choosing her.

The viewer stays with The Bad Girl as the team plays. We hear the play by play as she sits alone in a bathroom stall, listening. She isn’t about to leave any room for error on whether or not she has been chosen to gain 36’s essence, as she pulls the other girl’s used tampon out of the disposal bin and inserts it in herself. As she inserts we hear that something tragic has happened to 36 on the field. She’s down, and she isn’t moving.

In a dreamy sequence akin to the end of Carrie (1976), The Bad Girl watches Number 36’s lifeless body on the field. People come to mourn, leaving flowers and balloons, and hovering over the girl’s fallen body. At first everyone seems respectful of 36’s body, but without warning a boy pees on her corpse, quickly followed by another boy leering over her with 36 carved into his face, culminating in one of her own teammates straddling her body and choking her lifeless corpse. The Bad Girl finally makes it to 36, dropping down beside her. She looks longingly at the #36 encased in a heart the girl left on her arm. Suddenly 36’s body jolts. The Bad Girl intertwines their fingers, happy to see that her idol has woken up just for her. The two share a kiss that seals the deal Number 36 set into place when she wrote her number on the other girl’s arm. The two are now swapped, but The Bad Girl isn’t gifted with 36’s charisma, athleticism, or high school fame; now it is her who lays dead on the field in an array as Number 36 struts off into the night.

“The Beach Logs Kill” is a great look at the obsession that can come with high school sports, and how so many of us would rather be anyone else. It creates a fun world by focusing on the girls as being rough and tough and the guys as their loyal supporters (who might resent their lot in life as mere accessories). The film, shot by Siobhan McCarthy, is reminiscent of De Palma, shot through a slow moving vaseline lens—everything feels like a dream. Clocking in at only nine minutes long, this short treat isn’t one to miss.

dir. Vanessa Beletic

In any time of great transition, I enter something of a return to childhood. I find myself living back in someone’s mother’s home: going on long walks with hot coffee as the leaves turn, or as the neighbors train dog after dog in the front yard. Tied to this state is an intense desire for answers. I want there to be a plan, one with succinct steps that I can carry out until I reach the end and I have successfully made something.

*

Two months into another round of this mode of being, twenty-eight and in a new neighborhood where I am still learning the fastest route to walk to the gas station for coffee in the morning, I watch Vanessa Beletic’s short film “Evil, I”. The film follows a Haitian teenager (Faith Archer) with slight acne and scared eyes in the aftermath of a classmate’s accident (Yindra Zayas)—one that she believes she has caused with her newfound powers. In a horror-tinged homage to a coming-of-age tale, she is looking for an adult to tell her if she is innately evil.

The film opens with a mural. The girl walks past the larger-than-life painting on the side of a building in her city. We do not see all of it, instead, the framing holds us so that we only see the mural’s figures from the waist down. These expansive legs loom up the side of the building: jeans and white lab coats, work-reddened hands. Each stitch on the jeans is a brush laid to the wall by a still hand.

*

A mural moves away from the hands. It takes the intimate drawing and pushes it to such an extreme that it often takes many people and no end of tools to complete.

Years ago, C and I sat in the back of Document Coffee in LA’s Koreatown and watched a mural go up on the side of a building half a mile away. An ad for a phone company, the image of a hand holding a phone, its giant thumb waking up the screen. The image scaled for the height of the building, bubbling out to as large as it needed to be to fill the frame. We watched it far above our heads, like watching the clouds not to make a shape of them but because they are making shapes of themselves. About seven small bodies moving on scaffolding to plaster the mural one piece at a time.

We had both been living in new cities for about a year. It was unclear whether the transition period had officially ended, or if we were still feeling it only in more subtle ways. I was in a new relationship, we both had new jobs, new couches. It felt itchy having her visit, having to present all of my newness like I was sure of it. The mural covered the sky and I found myself promising her I would move to her city when I was done with mine, or that together we would try a new place. It wasn’t a lie; it was the answer I needed to keep from feeling like I had to be making the right moves. Those would come in the future. For now I could retain a childish unsureness about all of the choices I had had to make so fast and overlapping.

Years before that, when I lived in Chicago, I would drive past a mural every day on my way home from work. At least once a month it got painted over, made new. The passage of time could be marked in the fluctuations of this concrete wall. It was never redone in a single day, and so there would be a period of time where it was only partly painted over. Always from the bottom up, the future rising to consume the past. An accidental exquisite corpse.

Watching one mural climb up to gut another denies, in a way, the reality murals attempt to create: something larger than life existing simply and easily in the middle of all this.

*

“Evil, I”’s opening mural does what they all do: makes the world into its frame: the exposed innards of fire escapes, grubby city benches, pale blue sky. And the girl inserts herself into that frame, making the figures something of a horror as they become suddenly huge and monstrous. Her head bouncing along at the level of their knees.

Their bodies suddenly so large, as some bodies are, and hers suddenly so small, as proof that there is an order to things.

A mural is its own god. Muraled bodies seem like a promise.

The girl is looking for answers.

*

At Document Coffee there was an art exhibit hanging on the wall opposite the baristas. A wide grid of photos, each of a regular at the coffee shop, each asked to bring in what they would grab to save if their home caught fire. Portrait after portrait of these shop regulars and their paint sets or tea sets, their dogs, cats, grandfather’s jewelry, great aunt’s porcelain. And in each photo, their hands. Hands gripping a thing they can’t live without.

The hands in “Evil, I”’s mural are large and peachy shadowed. Certainly understood as capable. Holding nothing. Cupped loosely in the air above the girl’s head. Her own hands, clean, even as she begins to cause destruction in the bodies of her peers. Her hands remain sweaty and worrying at her backpack straps until an older woman holds them.

*

It has been about a decade since I went to church for a mass, about five years since I regularly stepped foot inside of one. There was a period in between when I found myself ducking into them in the middle of the day or odd hours at night, sitting on hard pews that helped me feel less far away from home. The place where you grew up is an answer.

In a hand-me-down red felt coat I sat through cold Chicago nights on the mosaic tiled floor of a church’s vestibule, rubbing fingers over the rough grout. The tiles had been laid by hand, each of them only the size of a thumbnail and crowded together to create the clunky images of fruits and branches to be stepped on as people entered the building.

I am saying that I understand walking into a church no matter what is being shouted about inside. Churches are often hand-made.

The Haitian church the girl in the film ducks into has hand-painted crosses on either side of the door. Hand-painted book and praying hands. Hand-painted DEUT18:10. Sunday School 9:30am. Worship Service 11:00am. Wednesday Healing 6:30pm. She goes into the church like it will have answers.

I have always conflated answers with safety.

Inside the girl’s church is a painting of a white Mary and baby Jesus—Madonna and Child. Pink-cheeked, cherubic as usual. This painting, too, even in its infinite reproductions, beginning with a hand. An image created by a person.

The painting is important because it is in the film’s frame. The frame holds on it, caresses it.

For stretches of the film, the frame holds endlessly on the girl’s face.

In the church, the girl sits next to a woman who plays with the evil eye necklace at her throat. In the frame: her fingers, toying at the metal. To finger a necklace: to blame it, to pleasure it. She pulls her hand away from the necklace only to pass the girl a note.

The evil eye is a frame. A curse is a frame. The girl’s seeking is, itself, a frame. Inside it Jesus’s face melts into grimace, language is a paranoid sky.

Madonna and Child is a cleanly framed relationship. Even in its language—the child is exactly that. The child is understood as child. We know the child to be Jesus, and how tongue-in-so-many-cheeks to just call him the child. His personhood makes things complicated, begs questions. To call him the child is an answer.

*

The frame holds. 

Each time I move, each transition, its own brief and bright new youth. The new life exquisite-corpsed with the last: the move allows old mannerisms to peel away, makes me embarrassed I had them in the first place. I am trying not to fake an answer this time. To live, instead, through every night of staring at the ceiling until the pillow warms enough I have to shift positions. To not have an answer, but to have time.

On the outside of the church all the numbers are painted by hand. There is something unbelievably innocent and sinister about hand-drawn numbers.

“Evil, I” knows the horror of human construction. How something can turn from wholesome to horrific on a dime, the aesthetic of being made by hand is one that belongs to children in the same way waking you in the dead of night with loose screams belongs to children. There is an innate humanity that children are allowed, one explicitly tied to the horror of being conscious in a human body.

Holding something human-made is precious, and horrible — we have rendered these things. We have made them.

*

The girl does not find an answer, and yet the film ends on the kind of optimistic note that horror as a genre specializes in. Dark street. A bloody smile in the night. She makes an answer.

dir. Izzy Lee

Jennifer Coolidge is characteristically coy with her audience. “I’m going to get a lot of hell for saying this,” she begins. “This is going to be something I might regret saying, but I think one of the best things to cure self-doubt is just. . . to go to really bad stuff.” The audience cheers while her fellow panelists laugh. “I’m talking about plays you hear about that are terrible. Go to them. There are shows on television that are terrible. Watch them.” She relates a time when she was at a low point, saddled with self-doubt and attended a production of Oliver. “I mean, everyone was bad in it! The whole show! . . . and I felt like the seas had parted. Like, I felt like I had a chance in this world.” This wise conclusion is met with thunderous applause from the Vivid Sydney festival attendees. 

House of Ashes, director Izzy Lee’s feature film debut, is the lousy production of which Ms. Coolidge speaks, the sort of thing budding filmmakers and horror enthusiasts should watch when searching for a boost in self-confidence or a laugh. The film stars Fayna Sanchez as Mia Sheldon, a grieving widow under house arrest for miscarrying (she lives in an unnamed red state where this is presumably illegal). She is suspected in the death of her late husband (Mason Conrad) and lives in a suburban home done in a cheap house-flipper style with Marc Winters (Vincent Stalba), an old flame who has returned to her life to keep her warm at night and help her see this challenging time through. The film opens shortly after Mia’s conviction. Her verbally abusive parole officer (Lee Boxleitner) straps her with an ankle monitor, reads off her responsibilities under house arrest, and warns Marc that “two people have died around her,” before making his exit.

There’s something off about Marc. For one thing, he can’t act (but then again, neither can she or really anyone cast in Ashes). The lines he delivers with the same stiff inflection might have slowly clued the viewer into his insidious intentions had he tried to put on a convincing performance of care and affection for Mia at least some of the time. Instead, he comes off as robotic from the start, and no one is shocked when it turns out he’s a twisted killer with a hatred for women. But he’s not the only force for chaos lurking within the enameled corners of Mia’s McMansion. As it turns out, the ghost of Mia’s late husband haunts her abode, causing various household possessions to disappear ad nauseam, with appropriately clumsy CGI rendering. We initially believe this specter seeks to harm his surviving wife. However, after a sequence implying that Marc is the one who killed him, we learn that the husband’s ghostly interventions are meant to protect Mia from Marc’s bloodlust.

Ashes is supposed to be a deeply political film. It’s supposed to symbolize the horrors of the reactionary backlash against women’s autonomy currently gripping Middle America, with Mia standing in as the everywoman, confined to domestic servitude and entirely reliant on a male provider for care, financial support, and access to the outside world. To hit us over the head with this theme, the parole officer refers to Mia and Marc as “snowflakes.” But beyond the fact of Mia’s miscarriage, the viewer has no reason to believe our hero is a bleeding-heart liberal, leftist, or feminist. There’s granola in the cupboards, no MSNBC droning on in the background, no magnets from Portland, Oregon, on the fridge, or #HateHasNoHomeHere signs in the yard. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t have much to say about the reproductive injustice of her confinement at all. Instead, we’re left with a dull movie that mainly consists of a woman sitting around her home, feeling frightened and then empowered by the ghost of her dead husband. 

On a technical level, the film is poorly executed. Scenes are lit up like an arcade with unnatural hues of orange and purple that look wildly different from shot to shot, turning each scene into a patchwork of visuals that do not come together into a semblance of a continuous narrative. Unnamed characters pop in and out with little explanation, subplots are briefly considered and then set aside, and once we know the supernatural forces in the house are a force for good, all tension immediately dissipates. Lee hardly gives us any gore or thrill to underscore the political message she thinks she’s conveying. On this point, perhaps the worst crime of Ashes is the director’s hubris. At one point, we watch Mia relaxing in her living room with a good book. The book in question? It’s the director’s own novella, a narcissistic plea to viewers who have taken the film seriously thus far to recognize their folly.

As far as its merits go, House of Ashes is quite funny when viewed as an intentional failure of political allegory, suspenseful thriller, or both. It’s what you tune in to when you’ve got something else on your mind and need to be mildly amused to pass the time. Or, taking a page out of Ms. Coolidge’s book, Ashes works as an aesthetic foil to any insecure young filmmaker, actor, writer, or artist seeking the reassurance that they have something to offer, that perhaps their perspective is entirely fresh and that there is still time to make art about a new era of female subjugation that is far more terrifying than this “horror” film would have you believe.