dir. Virginia Powers Hendry

There are few things more frustrating in the world of horror cinema than an ignorant or oblivious protagonist. Whether it’s a new homeowner tiptoeing down into a creepy, creaky, aging basement, or a soon-to-be-slashed group of teens splitting up during their search for the killer, scary movies have long been riddled with bafflingly naive characters making mind-bogglingly bad decisions. Gaslighter is well aware of this and plays with those expectations through its use of split screen and the tongue-in-cheek inclusion of a true crime podcast, exploring one woman’s relationship to safety with ample tension and wit. 

The short follows Anne, portrayed by a firm but empathetic Anastasia Washington, who arrives home to the tune of two women introducing their aptly named podcast, ‘Horror Movie Survival Guide.’ As she reaches her doorstep, Anne–whilst on the phone with her husband, Jeff–realises that the porch lights aren’t on, and the front door is unlocked. She expresses her concern to a seemingly unfazed Jeff, who assumes that Anne must have forgotten to set the timer and lock the door, respectively. His tone drips with a subtle, condescending brand of misogyny as he swiftly shifts the conversation to his new job offer. Jeff is out of town, but insists that he hasn’t told anybody that fact, and that Anne is fabricating any unease that she’s carrying. “We live in a nice neighbourhood,” promises Jeff, “nothing bad ever happens here.”  Anne’s response, “You sound like the beginning of every Dateline episode,” will ring particularly true for anyone who has ever practiced womanhood in the wild. 

As Anne explores the rest of her home, accompanied by the dismembered voice of her husband, she’s unable to shake the feeling that something is wrong, despite not being able to prove that gut instinct. This exploration of domestic anxiety through home invasion horror tropes holds a saddening mirror to the all-too-common stories of women being refused protection against abusive partners due to insufficient evidence. There is a conversation around believing women that lives at the forefront of this film, and Virginia Powers Hendry handles it with care and precision. Powers Hendry explores true crime as a knife that cuts both ways; it can educate and engage women who are not adequately supported by our legal and justice system, whilst also normalising and even romanticising unsafe circumstances. Virginia Powers Hendry’s screenplay is timely, smart, and introspective, offering thoughts on gaslighting (as the title suggests) within romantic relationships, as well as how a culture obsessed with true crime can both equip and desensitise women in dangerous situations. Gaslighter is a self-aware and suspenseful short for anyone who’s ever screamed “GET OUT OF THERE, NOW!” at their television screen.

dir. Grace Hanna

“Once an adult, twice a child.” My 5th-grade teacher projected this quote on the whiteboard and asked us to interpret it. After a long silence, I raised my hand—I understood because I was living it. I felt this recognition again when watching Lola (2025), Grace Hanna’s thoughtful, 11-minute sci-fi about a girl and her grandmother’s dementia. 

Thirteen-year-old Tessie wants to help her Lola (“grandmother” in Tagalog) save her memories. A science whiz, she creates a contraption that lets her jump into her Lola’s mind, something she’s already done 342 times. Dementia—personified as a small but menacing robot called Mena—is deleting her Lola’s memories in its unrelenting path. But Tessie wants to fight back. There’s one memory she is desperate to save. 

I was Tessie’s age when my own grandmother’s dementia reached its peak, and when she first moved into an assisted living home. Lola strikingly reminds me of the summer that I spent with her there, just months before she passed away. 

For its short runtime, Hanna uses all levers of storytelling to convey the pain of loving a mind in decline. In the first scene, when Marisol calls Tessie by her mother’s name, it’s clear that she has forgotten the time that has passed and the place they’re in. Tessie tries to remind her Lola of who she is, and Hanna’s camera rests on Tessie for what feels like too long. But the pause is deliberate, to show the sting of being forgotten. When the shot finally cuts to Marisol, she looks surprised to be expected to know this young girl. 

When I stayed with my grandmother in her assisted living home, my mom gave me a book filled with questions meant to capture her life. But quickly, I came to see the book as a grim reminder of the history and wisdom we had already lost. I felt a similar absence when my mom and I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Our earliest ancestor we could find amid thousands of documents was born in 1891, though our family had been brought to the U.S. as slaves. 

Memory doesn’t stack infinitely; it adds, warps, and deletes. That sense of erasure returned to me as Tessie ventures into her Lola’s mind and finds herself in a library. She is searching for a book, but the shelves are in disarray. The metaphor of books as memories may be imperfect—memories are not discrete nor do they rest neatly on shelves—but the metaphor of memory as a library still opens a powerful connection. The existential threat that Tessie and Marisol are facing is like the archival silencing that their indigenous ancestors faced in the Philippines, as their lives went unrecorded or deleted from documentation under Spanish and American colonization. What Lola reveals—though it’s unclear if the film intended this connection—is that, like colonization, dementia strips the record of a life fully lived.

Tragically, Marisol is watching this process in real time. Inside of Marisol’s mind, Tessie meets Marisol’s homunculus, who guides Tessie in her mission. At first, this version of Marisol who can remember her own granddaughter feels reassuring, but her position is actually heartbreaking. It recalls the “Sunken Place” in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017)—a capable self, trapped. As Mena is deleting Marisol’s memories, she is physically powerless to prevent her own erasure. 

Before my grandmother moved to the assisted living home, I was part of her care schedule. I made sure she took her medications and caught her Access-a-Ride shuttle to appointments. I had time to do it, yet I somewhat resented the responsibility. When my grandmother would tell the same story she had already told, my exasperation grew with each repeated loop: “Grandma, we’ve talked about this before.” 

In Lola, Hanna smartly builds that kind of repetition into the film’s form. Occasionally, scenes glitch or rewind, with the zipping sound of a tape. In one moment, Marisol’s homunculus asks Tessie the same question twice. In another, Tessie abruptly retraces her steps. In the outside world, Tessie witnesses her grandmother’s forgetting as an unending loop. Inside her mind, she is caught in it. 

In moments, my grandmother’s life experience—and homunculus—surfaced in flashes. Like the time we heard a mouse in my mom’s apartment and I cowered, and she pulled out pots and ladles for us to bang to scare it away. I followed my grandmother’s lead as we laughed and whooped through the apartment like a marching band. Living together, we were a contradiction and a team, trading the roles of parent and child. 

Tessie and Marisol share this dynamic too; the young girl who thinks she knows what’s best and her grandmother, who gently humbles her. After finding the memory they’ve been looking for, Tessie and Marisol jump into it, thrown back to when Marisol was well and they sang “Auld Lang Syne” from a karaoke machine. Mena tells them that they must replicate the memory perfectly to save it, but Marisol sabotages the mission in different ways, like turning the microphone into a banana. 

Marisol: You can’t save my memories. No one can. 

Tessie: If you knew that, then why’d you go along with it? 

One day, I take a printed copy of the daily activities that week at the assisted living home. A free spirit and world-traveler, my grandmother complains often about being bored in the home. There are old movie nights and listening parties for classical music, which she ends up enjoying the most. “I have an idea, let’s go to an activity each day,” I suggest to her. “What do you want to do?”

With dementia, there comes a point where we face a juncture—to fight it and grow resentful toward the one we love or to realize there’s a different choice. When Marisol tells Tessie that there’s nothing they can do, and Tessie looks crestfallen, I remember that feeling, that powerlessness to repetition. Tessie has tried 343 times to save her grandmother’s memory. But the irony is that in trying to force our grandmothers to remember the past, we recreated the hollow repetition we were always powerless to fix. 

Marisol and Tessie sing “Auld Lang Syne,” but this time without the shackles of chasing a memory and time gone by. Now they can enter alternate universes, one where Tessie and Marisol are cartoon characters who can fly, another where they sing on a stage with confetti surrounding them. Lola reminds us that we can try something different from the loop. Rainbow facepaint decorates their widened eyes, of a knowing grandmother and a humbled girl. 

The memory of that summer with my grandmother lives with me. It’s the last memory I have of her before I came back and saw her feeble in a hospital bed. In that time, we lived for the moment. We listened to classical music as she would mime playing the keys on the table. I would sign her out, just old enough at 13, to go on walks in the nearby park. When we returned home, we made our own tradition. I’d suddenly run, pushing her wheelchair down the hallway, and we’d laugh. These moments of acceptance are what Hanna’s Lola reminded me of, when I was a girl in her first childhood and my grandmother in her second. That summer, that love, existed in its own time—even if she didn’t remember it for long.

dir. Mack Breeden

Praying Mantis proves that a slow burn doesn’t need a long runtime. In just 14 minutes, it coils with tension from the first frame, using eerie music, shadow-laced imagery, and deliberate pacing only to snap with sudden, jarring bursts of action. Well placed long shots evoke the feeling of being alone in the dark while the tighter shots remind you that you definitely are not. The story focuses on two sisters who are isolated in a remote cabin and find their fragile world upended when a Confederate soldier intrudes, demanding food and shelter. The film plays on the natural unease without feeling overdone, using sparse, purposeful dialogue to steer the story toward inevitable turns. There’s a dark sense of humor played out in the final scenes, when seemingly unimportant details suddenly click, and the narrative shifts into something else entirely. Beyond its surface suspense, Praying Mantis also doubles as a sharp commentary on power, gender, and survival in oppressive systems, making it linger well past its runtime. It’s a remarkable short that manages to be as thought-provoking as it is unsettling.

dir. Stephanie Paris

Ghosts are scarier when we can’t see them. This is what drives us to summon them, whether through spiritualism or on the silver screen. In that light, our appetite for the horror genre doesn’t seem too different from what the Fox sisters built their livelihood on in the 1800s. 

In Speak With the Dead, it’s 1850, and Maggie and Kate (respectively played by Audrey Grace Marshall and Aster Laine) are holding a séance as part of their travelling act in Rochester, New York. A small audience—some skeptical, others haunted, most bereaved—sit expectantly in front of the well-intentioned sisters who con, yes, but also provide comfort to grief-stricken parents after the death of their young son. The rest of the performance takes a turn shortly after that, in ways the sisters could never have anticipated. 

The “Sprinkler Sprinkled”-esque situation begins to reveal itself through the performance of Stacey Marie Keba as a widow, whose unsettling smile hints at the shift taking place. By the time a mysterious guest has appeared out of nowhere at the back of the room, disconcerting the hoaxer sisters, the rest of the audience seems less like a distraught bunch and more like an amused predator circling its prey. Opting out of the classic horror plot device of a revelatory jump-scare, the film sticks instead to seemingly conservative and static shots / reverse shots, insisting on the symmetrical relationship of spectacle between audience and performer. While it is through this construction that we can appreciate the sisters’ trickery at play, it is also in this way that we become aware of their loss of control, making us accomplices first of the sisters, and then of the townspeople. When Maggie Fox dares the skeptical reporter (played by Joseph Schwartz) to stay for the entire show if he is brave enough, it is again an eerie smile on his face that gives it away. The show he came for isn’t the one the sisters—or we—think. 

LA-based horror director/producer Stephanie Paris gives us a woman-driven plot of spiritualism paying homage to Leah, Maggie, and Kate Fox. Lit with a stage-show sensibility, we can appreciate the quality of the production design (from costumes to set) of this period piece. But beyond aesthetics, the light plays an intentional role by taking away from the potential « monster in the shadows terror », and allowing instead for a clear appreciation of the shifts in performance that convey the real, haunting threat: that no one is who we expect them to be. This crisp visual quality pairs neatly with the sisters’ familiar and nostalgic archetypes, notably with Kate sporting the black braids of a Wednesday Addams figure. The Halloween-esque display of monstrous transformations at the end heightens these theatrics of entertainment spectacle over fright. A celebration of the dimension of horror that is artifice beyond gore, showmanship beyond shock value. With a background as a burlesque performer, Paris is no doubt better attuned to this than most. 

This nod to dramaturgy extends to the film’s central subject: the stagecraft of spiritualist mediums. The high mortality of 19th-century America made for a time plagued with grief and the subsequent superstitions—fertile soil for (fraudulent) spirit communicators to live off the bereaved’s need for answers. Though many sought to debunk these practices, most conceded that a willing suspension of disbelief was worth exchanging for some emotional solace. In this way, both the séance and the horror film rely on audience complicity in exchange for something to fear.

Did the real Fox sisters ever experience genuine contact with the spirits amidst their ruse? We will never know. And that is what keeps them, and the horror genre, alive.

dir. Rebecca Thomson

What if Audrey II, the outrageously chatty, bloodthirsty plant from Little Shop of Horrors, had cried “Love me, Seymour!” instead? The Australian short film A Green Affair has the imagination to wonder exactly this. Written, directed, and produced by Rebecca Thomson, the film uses an absurd conceit to enact a stylized, confined domestic horror. 

A Green Affair finds its woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the timid and sensitive Rosie (Katie Robertson). Her home life revolves around caring for her countless plants, nurturing them with gentle affirmations that she herself plainly needs, and negotiating with her demeaning husband, Jeff (Nathan Spencer), who keeps up a steady stream of his own affirmations for her, in the form of patronizing, dismissive comments. After the couple’s dinner plans fall apart, Rosie retreats to her safe space within the 70s kitsch home, a room so meticulously overgrown it resembles a greenhouse. As her tears roll, Katie finds them gently brushed away by the quivering appendage of “Boston,” her monstrous fern. (A “frond” in need is a frond indeed?) 

What follows, naturally, is the carnal union between a woman and her houseplant, spurred by Boston’s crawling tendrils that grab hold of its caretaker. A transgressive sexual encounter of this kind is an effective shorthand for Rosie’s unmet needs, and plant anatomy, with its dewy fleshiness, feels particularly ripe for an erotic frisson. To swiftly undercut any comical tones to the scene, Thomson leans into the alien nature of plant life, interspersing jarring scenes of bubbling, palpitating tendrils. 

The fern and its determinedly creeping, rustling fronds are the film’s clear breakout star, cleverly puppeteered to somehow make a houseplant exude malevolence. Boston is unrelenting in its advances on Rosie, who exhibits conflicting pleasure and discomfort at the bizarre dynamic of being pursued by her own plant. As tensions in the household reach a violent fever pitch, a much-needed unravelling of Rosie and Jeff’s relationship follows. The film is unrestrained in its grisliness, flirting with body horror to convey the lasting effects of emotional abuse on a woman’s psyche, reanimated over and over. 

Despite the B-movie plot conjured by the film’s premise—a sinisterly horny plant—A Green Affair plays it all with a straight face. The film hits potent emotional beats in its taut 18-minute runtime, eschewing any campiness to focus on Rosie’s loneliness and shaky sense of self at the hand of a toxic relationship. Never straying from the verdant enclave of the house, the film cranks up the fraught, claustrophobic quality of domestic life, suggesting that what we ought to fear is often closest to home.

dir. Aimee Hoffman

The nightmare starts like this: you are a once-accomplished screenwriter, turning the corner on a decade dried up of ideas. Sure, you are a loving, present father and husband—but what’s the point if no one remembers your (critically acclaimed) debut film? 

Or maybe it starts like this: you are a novelist on the rise, fresh off your first book tour. You’re just closing the deal on a TV adaptation when your husband’s steadfast support curdles into a bitter resentment that distorts his body. 

Both nightmares play out in tandem in Aimee Hoffman’s Dadda (2024), which juxtaposes the core paranoias that maintain patriarchy with the actual perils of living under it. Dadda follows Jacob, a filmmaker turned stay-at-home dad whose professional insecurities begin to manifest physically as his wife Sophie’s writing career takes off. 

Early in the film, Sophie sells the television rights to her book. Just after Jacob hears Sophie’s good news, his hands shrink to the size of a child’s. The premise is almost Freudian—if we take Jacob’s hands as a stand-in for his sense of empowerment and conventional masculinity, his wife’s success is basically a boner-killer. In this sense, Dadda offers a clever (if occasionally silly) metaphor for a cisgender masculinity so fragile it’s threatened by merely considering a woman’s perspective. The scares are both surreal and too-real as Jacob desperately tries to restore his hands to their normal size. While Jacob’s hands balloon grotesquely and begin to ooze blood, Sophie grits her teeth through a meeting where a producer mansplains her own book’s characters to her. (The former gave me the ick; the latter, chills of recognition.) 

The irony of Dadda, of course, is that Jacob’s deepest fear—being erased from his own story—is just another Tuesday for many working mothers and gender-marginalized artists. Women still spend twice as much time on domestic labor and childcare as men do on average, while gender inequality continues to skew the media landscape. Of the 250 top-grossing films released last year, over 75% employed no women writers. Against this cultural backdrop, Sophie and Jacob’s dynamic is depressingly noteworthy: Sophie, awash in professional opportunities, has the freedom to pursue her creative ambitions in part because Jacob takes on a primary role in parenting their son, Levi. 

The film opens on a mundane and tender exchange between father and son. Jacob carefully places a bandaid on Levi’s palm, distracts him from his injury with a game of peekaboo, and tells him “I love you” without hesitation or self-consciousness. These initial moments of attentiveness are what make Jacob’s ultimate transformation so heartbreaking. As Jacob’s hands shrink and then expand, his openness and care mutate into a version of fatherhood uninterested in actually connecting with his son. Instead of preparing meals or spending quality time playing with Levi, Jacob becomes obsessed with “making Levi proud” by selling a film script. 

Jacob’s artistic collaborators, Lion and Cole, refuse to see the value in being a supportive father or equitable partner. If anything, they treat these accomplishments as roadblocks to Jacob’s “true” path—which doesn’t seem to be about making art at all, so much as maintaining the spotlight. (In one early scene, Lion brags about turning down an acting role because he didn’t have enough lines.) 

From the outset, Lion and Cole are unsettling caricatures of the kind of manhood they value. They coach Jacob through a workout session (punching a boxing dummy while complaining about his wife, naturally), then squirt whiskey directly into his mouth from a water bottle.

As Dadda satirizes alpha male culture, it acts like a funhouse mirror for horror tropes that historically pathologize women. Jacob is surrounded by what I can only think to call a coven of hypermasculine peers, who egg on his hysteria, perform otherworldly rituals, and at one point, lead him in a breathing exercise as though preparing for childbirth. This scene seems to invert a similar image from Midsommar (2019), replacing the collective catharsis of female pain with one man’s frantic attempt to regain power he already has. The expression on Jacob’s face shifts ambiguously, rage giving way for just a moment to fear of what he is becoming.

At once haunting and funny, Dadda’s social commentary is occasionally weakened by its wavering tone. The body horror is particularly inconsistent: though the practical effects and camera angles used to render Jacob’s ever-shifting hands are undoubtedly clever and resourceful, there are key moments where they don’t fully land. The first time we see Jacob’s shrunken hands, they are clearly not attached to his body, their movements stilted and strange. Compared to later scenes that depict Jacob’s hands as more realistically unsettling or repulsive, the shot reads as comical—but it’s unclear whether humor was the intention. Hoffman and her cast show they can lean into Dadda’s absurdity; I only wish they had sustained that commitment throughout. 

The nightmare starts like this: a man sacrifices his humanity to reclaim narrative control he never really lost. With Dadda, Hoffman keenly wrests it from him.

dir. Yerkezhan Baizhan

I was captivated by the dark fairy-tale imagery in Yerkezhan Baizhan’s short film Ürei, and it made me think about how we inherit trauma from our mothers and grandmothers and potentially pass it down to our daughters. This poem was inspired by both the grandmother’s plight of voicelessness and the granddaughter’s need to navigate the treacherous new world she finds herself in. 

Matrilineal

by LeeAnn Olivier

~inspired by Ürei, directed by Yerkezhan Baizhan