Best Experimental Horror Short Films
Experimental horror is what happens when filmmakers stop treating the conventions of the genre as constraints and start treating them as raw material. It cuts when it should not, holds when it should cut, withholds narrative, fragments structure, uses the formal elements of cinema itself as horror devices. It is the most demanding subgenre to watch and the most rewarding when it works.
Short experimental horror films are where the most interesting formal risk-taking in contemporary horror happens. They exist outside the commercial imperative that keeps features genre-legible. They can be genuinely strange. They can follow their own logic to its end without needing to explain or justify themselves. Some of the most unsettling images in recent horror came from films this short, this uncommercial, and this uncompromising.
Why it works in short form
Experimental horror in short form works because the short film is the natural home of formal experimentation. Features that experiment with structure pay a high cost in audience patience. Shorts can be structurally radical for ten minutes and the viewer trusts the film because the investment is low. That trust permits the filmmaker to do things to the viewer that a feature could never attempt.
Films worth watching
Bunuel and Dali's dream logic short film remains one of the most viscerally disturbing objects in cinema history, built entirely from images that have no causal relationship to each other.
Shot entirely in overexposed black and white on damaged film stock, Merhige's mythic horror is almost without narrative and almost without peer.
A fragmented industrial horror short in which a human body is assembled incorrectly by something that understands the parts but not the whole.
Stop-motion and live-action footage combined without editorial logic to produce a sustained state of wrongness that has no name.
A woman whose perception has been altered by something never specified moves through domestic space that refuses to stay consistent.
A horror film that destroys itself as it plays, with each segment degrading the image quality until the final frame is nearly unwatchable.
Watch short horror on FinTV. Or find out which Scream trope you are.