[Event Review] Brooklyn Horror Film Fest Short Film Blocks Review - Creeping Terror

In Brooklyn Horror Film Fest’s “Creeping Terror” block of shorts, the works are linked by a shared atmosphere of slow-burn dread. 

The opening film, Listen To Mother, takes place in a remote English farmhouse, where 12-year-old Paul has been seemingly abandoned by his mother. A social worker visits, but finds herself drawn into arcane medical practices and unable to escape. This harrowing examination of grief finally breaks the tension with a shocking visual that mirrors the enigmatic opening scene. 

In Shut, there is grieving of a different kind, as a pair of siblings struggle to come to terms with their father’s apparent dementia. He is fixated in keeping something from getting out of his shed, but his son insists on investigating, with horrific consequences that show that even the bonds of family cannot compete with some terrors. 
Familial strife is also a theme in Miltown. A family of four are gathering for dinner, but normal bickering descends into bizarre violence when the son insists that his father is not who he seems. The paranoid atmosphere swiftly ramps up to a full blown horror where nothing - and no-one - is what they seem.

Tistlebu finds its uncanniness in stripping away the notion of the idyllic pastoral landscape. A young couple in Norway are on a working holiday on a remote farmstead, helping the older woman who owns it to build fences on the property. Their duties also include tending to the Tursemorkel, a kind of organic monolith that has a protective relationship to the land, and which holds a strange, hypnotic fascination for both partners. 

The isolation in OST comes not from geographical remoteness, but the protagonist being cut off from others through stress and overwork. A young Thai film composer is struggling to finish her pieces, and is being pressured by her overbearing boss. When she’s tasked with scoring a horror film from Thailand, she warns him that the filmmakers may have risked angering a spirit, and events seem to prove her right. Cutting between the film footage and the recording booth, the film blends layers of fiction and myth with a compelling human drama. 

These films all make great use of the shorter format, which allows a slow pace to be sustained throughout but without the risk of the runtime starting to drag. Throughout this selection there are some superb frights and fantastically unsettling tension. 

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