[Event Review] Brooklyn Horror Film Fest Short Film Blocks Review - Nightmare Fuel

With the “Nightmare Fuel” shorts block, BHFF ramps up the fear factor, with intense shocks and visceral body horror. Interestingly, most of the films have a common theme of inevitability - something relentlessly coming for the characters with malicious intent.

Death In A Box features the unavoidable approach of death itself, as a woman persuades her friend to visit a mysterious box that cryptically predicts time of death. The knowledge the friends gain leads to betrayal and violence, although one doesn’t realise that her fate was sealed before she even heard of the box.

A past trauma haunts the main character in Sleep  - a woman who struggles to rest due to fear of her home being invaded again. An ultra-short but highly effective film, this tale of self-fulfilling prophecy concludes with one of the most chilling screams in recent horror memory. 

It is a familial legacy that is fast approaching the protagonist in Aftertaste. A young chef in a high-end restaurant is under intense pressure at work and also facing the looming prospect of inheriting a spiritual family gift, which she describes as a “curse”. The everyday horror of kitchen work under the abusive head chef combines with glimpses of otherworldly threats - half-seen ghosts that are gone in a second but seem to always be getting closer.

Red Room is a lucid nightmare of a film, set in claustrophobic rooms that seem cut off from anywhere else, and contrasting scenes of dark, dreamlike woodland. The three main characters seem bonded by terrible past events and are struggling to make sense of what future fate may bring. The film as a whole has a deeply unsettling air and features a truly terrifying entity which exudes a quiet but determined sense of menace.

There’s a healthy dose of farce in Ringworms, in which a young couple head to a cabin for an ill-fated holiday. Keys can’t be found; an engagement plan is discovered but found to be unwelcome; a ring falls down a drain. But the presence of a bizarre cult in the basement means that more horrific trouble is headed the couple’s way, and a gross-out climax takes the gore up a level and certainly places it in the Nightmare Fuel category.

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