Best Creature Feature Horror Short Films
The creature feature is the id of horror cinema. It does not ask to be taken seriously as art. It just wants to show you something enormous and horrible and let you enjoy the spectacle of it. Short creature features are particularly pure examples of this impulse: no time for ecological commentary, no room for the scientist's speech about what this thing means. Just the thing, and people running from it, and the filmmakers doing their best with whatever they had available.
The best short creature features have a quality of genuine enthusiasm that is rare in larger productions. These are movies made by people who love the genre and want to participate in it, and that love shows in the choices: the practical effects, the creature design, the commitment to the bit all the way to the end.
Why it works in short form
Creature features in short form work because they can deliver the creature without the setup tax that features pay. A feature spends forty minutes building to the creature's appearance. A short can do it in thirty seconds and spend the rest of its runtime giving you the creature in full. For viewers who know why they are watching, that economy of delivery is exactly right.
Films worth watching
Giant robots attack Montevideo in a four-minute proof of concept that landed its director a Hollywood career.
A man discovers what his downstairs neighbor has been keeping in the spare room, and it has clearly been there for years.
Two lifeguards on a beach close for the season discover why the water has been empty all summer.
A city park ranger is called about an animal acting strangely near the duck pond and the call is the last transmission the ranger makes.
A couple camping in a national park discovers that the insects that have been following them since day one are not insects.
An entomologist studying an unusual colony documents, in her final entry, that the colony has started studying her back.
Watch short horror on FinTV. Or find out which Scream trope you are.