For however long I’ve been going to The Boston Underground Film Festival, The Dunwich Horrors block has always been an extremely creative mix of bold concepts and effects-rich horror. The BUFF 25 lineup for the shorts block this year is no different, with ideas that touch upon gender roles, social injustices, war, and politics, all while bringing the blood, dread, and jump scares of the features we’re seeing alongside them at the festival. These films knocked my socks off, and The Dunwich Horrors block has once again shown the immense talent of our future feature filmmakers.

Good Looking Out

Seth Chatfield opens The Dunwich Horrors segment with his satirical spin on car navigation anxieties in Good Looking Out. This quick skit is about a man (Andrew Hannah) and a woman (Toni Nagy) looking for a specific street to turn on to. It’s perhaps a bit dated given the fact we all have GPS’s in our pockets, but long, tiring road trips that create unwarranted animosity and make exaggerative idioms funnier when you think about their literal contexts is a universal kind of silly I can get along with.

Good Looking Out is a bit on the brief side, but it sets the tone for the fun you’ll experience throughout The Dunwich Horrors block, and the gruesome effects at the end are sure to garner a response.

Followers

In Miriam Olken’s Followers, a young woman (Megan Malcolm) receives a cryptic invitation for more Followers on her social media app only to find that her privacy is not covered under the terms and conditions. A surreal nightmare of a most threatening nature, Followers centres around the woman’s wish to make new friends online that makes her a target of horndogs and incels, all of whom want a piece of her.

Again, this is a bite-sized short, but there’s a lot of depth to Followers. With frantic energy, this non-stop story efficiently provides a claustrophobic atmosphere through the endless barrage of bullying texts and threatening moments right up until the end.

Katie’s Skin

At the onset of Steven Schloss’ short film Katie’s Skin, we see a woman (Amélie Iselin) meticulously scrutinizing the mole above her lip as she prepares for a meal with her husband (Rosario Corso). As he arrives home from work, a very Stepford tone is set. The woman’s dress, her makeup, and her temperament are immaculate as she sits across from him at the table while he obnoxiously proclaims new sexual positions he wants to try through a mouth full of food. Then, it gets sinister.

A twisty little detour that considers the duality of gender roles in a domestic setting, Katie’s Skin shows Schloss incorporate the high standards pressed upon women against the low bar of their male counterparts. Katie’s Skin then pulls the rug out from underneath the audience by setting up one hell of a reveal that you won’t see coming and, in doing so, furthers the narrative by ostensibly suggesting that the wife has been taken for granted or that her husband never really saw her for who she was in the first place, and was only ever interested in what she was capable of doing for him.

Rosario Corso has written a damn fine script here, and it’s impeccably directed by Schloss with wonderful mood-rich lighting, vibrant color, and great art and production design. Katie’s Skin will have you methodically study every imperfection on your partner’s face, hoping you don’t meet the same fate.

Forever War

One of the supreme highlights of The Dunwich Horrors block, writer-director Shana Figueroa’s Forever War is a Russian Doll death loop where a soldier’s leave time comes to a screeching halt when a zombie-like outbreak begins to make people sick. John (John Potvin) is called back to base by his commanding officer when he encounters a woman on the road asking for help. However, when trying to facilitate her request, she attacks him. John ends up respawning on his couch playing a Call of Duty-type game moments before receiving the phone call from his C.O.

John runs (and reruns) through different iterations of the imminent event with different results every time as he desperately searches for a way out of his predicament. Vespers of Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, and Rick and Morty are thrown in, capturing the horrifying Twilight Zone John has found himself a part of. Even if it may feel like you’re experiencing a little déjà vu, Figueroa’s thematic and photographic implementation helps elevate Forever War into a space that captures the psychological effect and anxieties of PTSD.

There are small, nuanced moments in how John poises himself or how the tragedies he encounters frame him, and watching him struggle to compose himself when speaking to his Commander or parents offers the volatility of John’s agitation toward retrying his mission. Even when John finds some semblance of happiness, he eventually arrives at the same respawn point, proving this never-ending nightmare is a torturous hell.

Damn Handy

Peter Filardi’s Damn Handy is possibly my favorite short in The Dunwich Horrors block. This film is bonkers and has more twists than a pretzel. Every time I thought I knew which direction Damn Handy was going, it switched itself up.

The short begins when plumber Roger (Round the Decay’s Roger Clark) arrives at Marge’s (Kaili Vernoff) house for an appointment concerning a leaky faucet. But Filardi doesn’t just drum up exposition. He embroils us in a Hitchcockian thriller to start. Most people don’t consider the disadvantage service workers put themselves in when arriving for a call and the civil social barriers observed. But as Marge talks about the losses and health issues a nearby factory has caused her family, there’s rising tension as she grips the heavy-duty wrench Roger left on the counter.

With dread and immanence hanging in the atmosphere, Roger finds himself between the slab and the house. The story then takes inspiration from The People Under the Stairs to serve its ecological themes, likely tearing into headlines about the health concerns of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis and/or the Teflon PFOAs that have contaminated the area surrounding the DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Damn Handy is claustrophobic and tense, and it goes to some pretty creative places to consider towns like these that are still reeling from ecological catastrophes, the results of which we won’t know the full extent of for years to come.

Ache

In Mike Canale’s Ache, a mother becomes increasingly concerned with who her son is destined to become, given his bloodline. I love Canale’s patience and the color palette he uses within the story, as the woman mentions that the boy’s father was a violent soldier capable of terrible things as he runs around being a kid and doing kid-like things.

The short is based on the poem “Katarina” by Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko and ends with a bit of a mic drop moment if you understand the philosophies of autocracy promoted by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It’s a bold short that understands the fears of a nation ravaged by war and aptly processes them through the eyes of a woman who sees the video games her son plays and likely hears the verbal onslaught of incel vocabularies processing in her son’s head as he embodies a soldier. Her fear comes from the ideologies of the next generation as she firmly puts old-world ideologies to bed. Bravo.

Sogno Rosso (Red Dream)

Probably the most experimental of the shorts in The Dunwich Horrors block, Coco Roy’s Sogno Rosso (Red Dream) is a psychedelic fever dream with no dialogue and a ton of overlays and lens effects, all seen through the textures of a 16mm camera. The silent story seems rooted in Shakespearean mysticism, namely Macbeth, as three witches visit a grief-stricken woman who is lost in her thoughts.

The over-saturated colors bleeding into one another, along with the ghostly moving images on top of other moving images, are incredibly stylistic, and the eerie musical score helps provide trepidation as Roy’s film shifts from frame to frame. Sogno Rosso is undoubtedly the kind of film meant to elevate blood pressures and perpetuate a fear response, probably more so than being wholly understood, and the heightened reds and images of drowning certainly help the film complete that task with gusto.

Methuselah

There’s no short film more effectively haunting than Nathan Sellers’ Methuselah. The writer-director captures the essence of existentialist thinking through the monologuing musings of Jordan Mullins. Mullins considers the sycamore tree she’s standing beside as she recalls a friend telling her its history when she was seven years old. As she soaks in the information, she realizes this tree has lived through and unwillingly participated in humanity at its worst. The overture offers a rush of philosophical connective tissue, proposing unsettling questions about civility and nature. Are we disconnected from nature? What about the past? Can a tree feel the violence humans have included it in?

Referencing a man said to have existed for almost a thousand years, Methuselah has a deep and heavy historical connection to the atrocities of man. The film is beautifully Lynchian and unrelentingly dread-soaked. The profound poignancy in Sellers’ film hits hard at limited viewpoints and the derision for other’s perspectives. Methuselah may be the most arresting short film I’ve ever seen. I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since it ended.

My Child

Capping off The Dunwich Horrors block, Deniz Akyurek’s out-of-control schoolroom horror short My Child is guaranteed to provide nightmare fuel. Featuring twitchy eyes on hallway artwork and a monstrous Adulthood spewing blue goo, this surreal story considers the limitless nature of being a child and the trappings of adulthood, as seen through the anxieties of a child leaving for college.

Akyurek uses some Bergman, Del Toro, and Linklater to articulate the fears of major change in the life of a child (Frederick Durate Trankels) transitioning into adulthood. There is brilliant dreamlike imagery and effects, and the personifications of Adulthood (David Albert) as a cantankerous old man and Time (Sarah Munson) as a mysterious shrouded figure. Plus, the comparison shots of his young mother (Eve Costarelli) crying as she drops him off for his first day of school is lovingly bookended with her crying as she sees him leave for university are wonderfully envisioned to enhance the confusing empathy he likely felt when he first saw her like that, to the realization that they are happier tears when he’s all grown up. Ultimately, I would have liked a little more from this dark fable, but that’s the thing about good movies: you always want more of them.

My Child is a heartfelt and bittersweet film, supposing that the idea of growing up can be a scary thought. Akyurek balances the worry with the hopeful and suggests that in these moments, we must try to keep some semblance of our childhood selves. Life is an adventure and can be whatever we make it.