The name alone—Sick Chick Flicks—creates a set of expectations, which the festival’s offerings met and confounded all at once.

The day opened strong with Hannah Franklin’s The Sitters, a fun animated short with the vibe of an old-school Saturday morning cartoon from Hell about a hapless cat sitter getting unexpected help. There is a bit of whiplash going into the next piece. Miranda Jacoby’s Where Can I Live? is about a bird chased through its life cycle by human encroachment. It’s elegantly simple and melancholic, beautifully scored and animated. The contrast between the two pieces, between over-the-top bloody humor and dark melancholy, sets the tone for SCFFF.

Hope Chest (Dir. Dycee Wildman, Jennifer Boniors) is narrated by Eve, who for a class writing assignment imagines herself as the victim of an unsolved murder that haunts a haggard detective. It brings to mind Twin Peaks, and more generally plays off well-worn procedural tropes in a novel way, while also capturing the kind of pervasive despondency that would result in such an essay.

Eating Me Alive (Dir.  Jessica Bachman) is eight-ish manic, sugar-pink minutes about Cutter, a film editor whose director leaves her to finish editing Candy Cutie 3, a Barbie-esque movie (it seems) as she sees fit. As the title suggests, Cutter’s ambition to make the film her own consumes her.  Eating Me Alive is the first of many films where being unappreciated/unseen is at the heart of the story.

The last animated piece of the day was Mistletoe (Dir. Andrea Schmitz, Andrea Sparacio), which takes on the Legend of the Mistletoe Bough but with a twist. Everything just kind of works here: narration, music, animation style. It sits with Where Can I Live? as one of my favorite moments of the festival, precisely because everything feels so of a piece. It also makes me sad that there wasn’t more animation in the line-up.

Izzy (Dir. Yfke van Berckelaer) continues the thread of ignored/downplayed women, showing the titular character at work, at home, and at parties being treated as furniture to other people’s lives. This is what I wrote in my notes: “Every woman.” I stand by that.

The next block was overall my favorite of the day,  starting with Lost Boys Pizza, (Dir. Cassie Llanas) which opens cheekily with a Twilight quote before plunging headlong into a frenetic punk-rock vampire story to make Kathleen Hanna proud.

The bright energy of  Lost Boys gave way to two very different forays into folk horror. Valley of Souls, (Dir. Edileuza Penha de Souza, Santiago Dellape) is a foreboding tale of alienation and witchery. The cinematography here is breathtaking (and in fact won SCFFF’s award for it), but what I appreciate the most about Valley is the fullness of its world-building, a feature it shares with The Thaw.

The Thaw (Dir. Sarah Wisner, Sean Temple)—wherein a 19^th century Vermont family struggles to survive the winter by use of a tea that might put its imbibers into hibernation, or kill them, or worse—feels like a feature-length movie in the best possible way. The burden of the story falls on Ruth (the daughter), who we learn early on is “the cause” for the family being in this predicament since she is unable to have children and was therefore rejected by her fiancé. This, in the eyes of her fiancé and ultimately her father (as representatives of a sort of feral misogyny) means that she has no more purpose. The Thaw deftly uses its winter setting to pull the viewer into Ruth’s despair.

The biggest surprise of the day for me was The American Bean (Dir. DC Dzoja).  The American Bean is dense, every single moment drawing the viewer in deeper to notice fresh detail, as we follow Eva through her days being harassed by an ever-present can of  Beinz Beans, which serve as a shorthand for the relentless pressure of daily life: a disappointed boyfriend, troubles at work, the struggle to keep one’s own identity as conformity tempts from all sides.  There’s an interesting but cohesive mix of styles here that accelerates into deep absurdity as Eva spins out.

The overall focus of the films shifted from this point, with most of the next several shorts being explicitly about relationships.

Nereid (Dir. Lori Zozzolotto), like several of the day’s films, uses traditionally female-centered mythology to tell a modern story about abuse and control. Even once it seems obvious where Nereid is heading, it still has one surprise left.

Vespa (Dir. Olivia Ramos) takes the viewer down the familiar path of perceptions of maternity to an unexpected place, disorienting the viewer by seamlessly blending the mundane with the surreal (visually and audially). Ashley Carvalho’s performance as “V” is Unsettling. Yes, with a capital “U.”

Love in A Bottle (Dir. Janna McPartland)—which vibes with The American Bean on multiple levels—follows one woman’s struggle with the decision of whether or not to start her own baby Botox journey after all of her friends do. She is accosted by a Botox influencer in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, sneered at by the doctor’s assistant for her hesitancy, and condescended to by the doctor herself. It’s a tight look at so many of the forces that are brought to bear on women in the age of social media.

Not Him (Dir. Sarah Young) sees an abusive husband as possessed by a demon that can fool even the couple’s closest friends. What Young does best here is make the viewer feel the protagonist’s frustration and desperation at not being believed. It’s a successful exercise in being once-removed from subtext without losing the edge of urgency.

The sole feature-length film of the day—Taylor Martin’s Silent Bite—is, as the name suggests, a vampire movie, pitting a mother vampire and her brood against a band of burly bank robbers on Christmas Eve, with a little love story nestled in the middle. It’s a fun ride and broke up the day nicely.

The next block was wild, starting with the absolutely delightful The Murder Party: Offering Unconventional Solutions to Heartbreak. During one panel, director Katie Weatherford revealed that people told her that this film wasn’t funny. These people have no sense of humor. Like, at all. Murder Party is a cozy dark comedy, is hilarious,  and includes one of the most memorable scenes of the whole day.

From this high note, there’s really no relief from the malaise of the rest of the films in this block.

Home (Dir. Wilandy Castelin) is an extended metaphor comparing a woman’s slow falling apart to a haunted house. Home takes the viewer on a tour of the house through the eyes of a woman who ultimately gets left behind, using visual chaos to put the viewer into the main character’s psychological space at the film’s climax to good effect.

Sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum from Home—at obsession rather than neglect—Raw and Red (Dir. Brooke Elliott) is a stalking told from the stalker’s perspective.  It’s an uncomfortable watch because of this choice of perspective. This choice (as well as the ambiguity around the nature of the stalker’s subject) doesn’t really illuminate anyone’s motivations. With this particular unreliable narrator, the piece leaves the viewer entirely unsure of the reality of anything that happened.

The block ended with My Silence, My Grave (Dir. Donté Larry) in which the protagonist must clean up a particularly gruesome crime scene in her apartment building under threat of eviction by her shady landlord, all while a malevolent entity haunts the building’s hallways. There was a lot going on here about complicity in one’s own exploitation, but it sometimes felt as if two distinct stories were being told that never quite came together. Nonetheless, the climax was very grim and oozed the hopelessness that the rest of the film was building to. I was glad to get some sunlight afterward.