Every year, the Carolina Theatre in downtown Durham hosts the Nevermore Film Festival showcasing horror movies. Typically since the pandemic we manage to catch one film or stream a couple; it’s a lot harder to go hang out there for a weekend when we have to walk dogs. This year, our pick was It’s Only A Nightmare Charlie Brown, the festival’s name for the animated shorts block.
In The Creature of the Deep a lesbian college student grudgingly endures her parents dragging her to her uncle’s home on spring break. Then it turns out she’s there to be her generation’s sacrifice to the underwater horror the family worships …
113 Words for You Today is set on a mining planet where speech is tightly rationed, and one miner is doing his best to save al his words for an evening phone call.
Dungeon Crawler has a woman pick up an old Atari adventure game (the director said in the Q&A that it’s not the only Haunted Atari film out there), somehow connect it up to her computer but hmm, some of the warnings and instructions seem … ominous. Striking, partly because the director uses the voice actor’s real eyes in the animated body to create an uncanny valley effect.
In the extremely creepy The Other, a woman goes looking for her husband and finds him under the bed, hiding — but from what?
The Paper Ghost has Edgar Allan Poe literally pouring his heart out to bring him closer to the dead spirit of his lost love.
Elvira pits a killer in a farming community against a psychic crime-solving rooster.
Foreign Bodies has a woman scratch her skin. Her skin peels back and things crawl out …
The Last Bell is a relatively straight horror story: a vampire hunter warns his wife if he returns after the midnight chimes ring out, he’s been turned. He arrives exactly as the bells finish — should she let him in?
In Lights, kindly little aliens help out an inventor; I liked this, though TYG is right that it’s not at all horror.
The thought of Moving from his home outrages a tween to the point he turns to stone; what’s his family to do?
In Hellwriting, a teacher discovers bad handwriting is the least of her problems with the dark things the students are writing. This was the weakest — it needed some sort of explanation or rationalization to work.
And in A Voice in the Mist, an old woman and her plucky dog protect a young girl from the local sirens.
Links to some past Nevermore viewing here and here (I know there’s more but I haven’t time to find the links).
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