The second half of SCFF resumes with a convincing nod to Art Bell-type radio shows in  Distant Signals (Dir. Marielle Brinda),  about a paranormal radio host whose childhood experience with a strange man (whom he believes to be an extraterrestrial) in the woods becomes the defining moment in his life, to the point where he believes that this extraterrestrial (or his companions) are the protagonist’s only hope. The overall style feels very true to the types of media that explore these phenomena with a scientific veneer.

In another example of using spaces traditionally assigned to women to find strength, The Book Club (Dir. Johnnie Brannon) is a tidy story about self-empowerment and the power of solidarity, which dovetails nicely with the next film, The Power Within (Dir. Bo Youngblood). Power explores similar themes to The Book Club, but rather than couching it in spousal abuse, Power puts those themes in the context of a group of women who seem to have always known their power—until the film joins them being held in black site-type captivity while being remotely gaslit via monitor by a single man at a desk in an office alone. Power is slick and satisfying; it makes great use of camera angles to emphasize the separation of the central characters as the main obstacle to be overcome.

This block ends with near-future science fiction—Event Virus (Dir. Andrea Fantauzzi)—where overdependence on augmented reality leads to an apocalyptic event. I think it’s challenging to make something so close and well-explored seem dangerous, but Event Virus does manage to present a believable vision integrating what we have with what could be.  Ultimately a film about moving forward, it deserves extra kudos for the grace it allows its main antagonist.

Saturday Ritual (Dir. Sydne Horton) is a fun palate cleanser about a group of friends who visit a psychic every Saturday, only to be annoyed by the psychic’s refusal to make any sense of her predictions—and worry about how one of them might come true.

Saturday Ritual in no way prepared me for The Girl with The Haunted Vagina (Dir. Samantha O’Rourke).  I thought I knew what Haunted Vagina was going to be about going in. I thought I’d be watching a spectral version of Teeth—but I was wrong. Thankfully.  TGWTHV is really about the mystification of women’s bodies, the fetishization of women’s sexual purity, and the glibness with which actual women (as people) are often treated. Aside from Meghan (the titular Girl, there is a boyfriend who tries way too hard, a dead priest, and a clueless doctor. As funny as it was, much of it rang a bit too true.

After that nice reprieve, we were plunged back into darkness, literally, with Wind Up (Dir. Matthias Zentner), wherein a family of two children, their uncle, and their grandmother live in a lighthouse on a benighted island. The youngest child keeps the only lamp on the island.  We learn through the grandmother’s ominous intonations that outside, the darkness is a living thing that will take anyone who strays too far away, including the children’s mother, who was “engulfed.” In the meantime, the uncle is planning for a way off the island, using the only lamp to so. However, this plan rests on getting the lamp away from the youngest child—and the youngest child is beholden to his grandmother’s fears, and the only “truths” he knows about his mother. Another nicely atmospheric piece, the Wind Up uses top-notch sound design to really sell the sense of isolation, with judicious use of visual effects to convey each character’s state of mind.

In Hair Wraith (Dir. Jenny Popovich), generational trauma takes the form of a Victorian hair wreath, as an abusive mother haunts her daughters and tries to turn them against each other from beyond the grave. This was a generally satisfying short, though it had the bones of something a little more languidly paced. Still, it was quite enjoyable.

Speaking of bones, Ascension (Dir. C.J. Revan) has good bones. The initial presentation of the premise is interesting: a demon uses a witch to get through to our dimension, but the logistics of this are presented in a relatively novel way. A way, I think, that could have gone places. I’m going to blame the mix on the sound here.  At some point, I just gave up trying to understand the dialogue which I think, unfortunately, was most of the meat of the story.

Shame on You (Dir. Philippa Ghosh) follows Anne and the unnamed goth dopplegänger who follows her through her daily life, mocking her with every one of her shortcomings, perceived or otherwise. The opening is very strong. There is some meandering in the middle, a sense of something undone, maybe some idea was discarded that would have made this a fuller piece. As it is, the ending is great and makes this worth a watch.

There was more than one highlight of the day, but one of the highest highlights was My Boyfriend Stole My Kidney (Dir. Coven).  It’s all right there in the title. It’s funny. It’s authentic. It’s well-acted. Technically, everything comes together and looks great. This is the trick with a movie like this, in this setting: is it just a funny movie with an absurd premise that ties up in a nice bow? Or…OR did I catch myself reading too much into it? Was I just seeing subtext everywhere? I don’t know if it’s here, but if it was, it would be this: women have been socialized to die rather than inconvenience anyone. Not to bring Barthes into this, but even if that wasn’t what the filmmaker intended, that’s what I got from it.

From Me to You (Dir. Simret Cheema-Innis) is a body horror sci-fi gem that goes from Bladerunner-esque noir to something else entirely over the course of its runtime. We’re given by way of opening text a backstory about visitors coming to Earth and blending in to survive. Cut to a middle-aged man at the height of a mid-life crisis, leaving his wife to go for a walk on the wild side. After some rambling through the city’s seedy neon underbelly, our man ends up in a very bad way. “Gnarly,” I said out loud, in my seat, as credits rolled over a dark screen and the sound effects kept going. It was fantastic.

The Last Mermaid (Dir. Sophia Seraphim West) digs deep into mermaid lore to set up the story of Ophelia, a mermaid who lives in a bathtub, where she is (kind of) tended to by her (not a merman) husband, Declan. This isn’t really about an abusive relationship, though it could seem at first glance to be where the story is heading. It’s really more about suffocation, about when compromise becomes toxic, about when a relationship can no longer be saved. The details here are nice—the character names, Ophelia’s red hair, the scale-like tile pattern of the bathroom wall, and the clever use of a bath bomb.  It’s quite a different experience than the mermaid story that looms on the horizon.

Now, I have seen The Shining more than I’ve seen any other movie. Ever. I’m not in counting-carpet-pattern-repetitions territory quite yet. Yet. So, I was immediately delighted by A Shining Example (Dir. Clarke Wolfe), which plays with the root narrative of The Shining with Aidan, a mother who is trying to re-enter her career as a television show-runner while juggling motherhood and a husband who is the personification of weaponized incompetence. This is not just “Jack Torrance, but a woman.” This is, “What does it look like when a woman is in this situation? What is she dealing with? How does she react, and why?” The answer is: it doesn’t end well, but it doesn’t really look like Jack Torrance, either. A lot of nice nods to both Kubrick and King.

Spearfinger (Dir. Tessa Morrell, Riley Scarborough) imagines the Cherokee legend of the same name through the eyes of a young girl, Jackie, while on a camping trip with her family. Being the youngest (by far) in her family, she has a special relationship with her great grandmother (who appears to be stricken with some form of dementia). Things ramp up quickly when the great grandmother disappears in the middle of the night and the family goes searching for her. Spearfinger does a great job of putting a very relatable character (a child trying desperately to understand her place in her family and the world) into a relatable—though terrifying—situation (the woods at night.) There is a lot of expected technique in Spearfinger; it saves its surprises for the payoff, which pulls no punches.

I always appreciate having the rug pulled out from under me, and The Fisherman’s Wife (Dir. Jared Watson) does just that.  It sets up a picture of abject desperation—a fisherman scrounging through trash at the shoreline comes across a mermaid caught in a net in her death throes. He reassures her that everything will be okay and takes her home. Just as I was beginning to wonder where exactly this whole thing was going, The Fisherman’s Wife revealed itself to be an eight-minute setup to a pitch-black punchline. Nicely done.

Still(Dir. Rakefet Abergel) is the distillation of a mother’s grief, as pure a visual manifestation of that inner torment as I’ve ever seen.

Korpus (Dir. Alexa De Hoyos, Sinhué F. Benavides) pares down the day’s oft-repeated themes of self-identity with the straightforward use of shadow symbolism. It’s a brisk, clean piece—no dialogue and visually efficient—and stands out rather singularly for it.

Different in every way from Korpus,  Scout (Dir. Jill Letteny) features a pushy youth scout who invades the home of Jordan, a woman too polite to deal with the girl as firmly as she should from the outset. Scout runs on old-fashioned “protagonist makes bad choices at every turn” storytelling, and is familiarly frustrating in that respect, even as the Scout herself is genuinely disturbing.

The final film of the day—Nosocomephilia (Dir. Michèle Kaye)—is a commentary on the shallowness of the unafflicted and the commodification of basic needs.  After Lily, Francis’s maid, passes out during breakfast service, Francis accompanies her to the hospital. The visit sparks in Francis a bad case of nosocomephilia, and we watch her return to the hospital again and again for any number of made-up maladies. “Exam me!” she declares, over and over, even as in the background, poor Lily seems to be falling apart, forgotten—because she’s the sick one, not the one with the credit card. I like the thoughtful use of the various payment devices, and the way Lily drops into the background so purposefully, almost as unnoticed by the viewer as she is by the main character and hospital personnel. It was a good way to wrap up a widely diverse array of films.