Carousel (2025): Directed by Christopher Kosakowski, Carousel takes the classic cursed object story and gives it a grim, carnival-noir coat of paint. It’s the kind of lean, mean and twisted storytelling that hits all the right buttons for those of us who prefer our horror served with a side of greasepaint and existential dread.

The story follows a lonely circus clown whose world is defined by the melancholy of the big top. His life takes a sharp, nightmare turn when he is gifted an antique zoetrope, that early animation device that relies on the persistence of vision to create a loop of movement.

It doesn’t take long for him to realize this isn’t just a nostalgic toy. The images whirling inside the device begin to bleed into his reality. What starts as a way to brighten up his solitary birthday plans rapidly descends into a chaotic, hallucinatory loop of terror. As the clown becomes trapped by the device’s dark influence, the boundary between the performance and the predator dissolves, turning his dressing room into a claustrophobic stage for his own undoing.

Kosakowski demonstrates a clear grasp of atmosphere over excessive exposition. He understands that a clown in a dimly lit, cramped space is inherently unsettling; he doesn’t need to overplay his hand. And it doesn’t hurt that the poster for this is a reference to Romero’s The Amusement Park.

Sleeping Princess (2025): The protagonist is a professional princess who has reached the absolute end of her rope. Stuck in a high-stakes, high-stress gig, she’s tasked with keeping up the illusion of a magical, regal persona for a group of demanding children and even more demanding parents. As the party drags on, the veil of her character begins to fray. The glitter starts to look like grit; the fake tiara feels like a shackle. She even says, “I just do this for the opportunity to kick a kid in the chest.”

Director Callie Bacon does a masterful job of turning a suburban living room into a claustrophobic prison. As our lead struggles to keep the Sleeping Princess persona intact, the film leans into a place where the mundane reality of cheap cake and screaming kids starts to warp into something far more jagged and uncomfortable. It is a brilliant, ugly look at the labor behind the fantasy, including a manual that forces our heroine to refer to Cinderella as “After-Midnight Princess.” And I have to say, the line “Plug it up, princess!” made me laugh and pleased me because it references Carrie.

This does a great job of taking the futility of a day job and transforming it into a cathartic experience.

Bootstrapped (2026): Time travel movies usually need almost two hours to untangle their own paradoxes, but director Joe Heath ignores the rulebook entirely. Bootstrapped is a high-concept, low-budget exercise in narrative compression that squeezes a full-blown sci-fi headache into 60 seconds of frantic celluloid.

The narrative is a closed loop of absolute chaos. We follow a desperate protagonist who discovers that the only way to prevent a catastrophic event is to set it in motion. It’s a classic bootstrapper’s paradox. He travels back to stop himself, only to realize that his intervention is the exact catalyst that triggers the original disaster.

A cute, fun film that doesn’t overstay its running time. Well, because it’s only a minute.

Cotton Candy Randy (2026): This short follows two friends who discover a UFO in the woods and bring their findings back to their town, leading to an odyssey of stop-motion wonder. The project was a significant undertaking for The Skeleton Key Workshop, reportedly taking 15 months to produce using DIY materials such as foam, hot glue and repurposed packaging. A fun look and an interesting take on aliens!

Blackout (2025): Directed by Logan Nipper Synopsis YOU GOT YOURSELF IN. YOU CAN GET YOURSELF OUT. After a night of drinking, a college student finds a dead body in the trunk of his car and is determined to discover the truth.

Finn F. Finch & the Clock Contraption: The Lunar Lovers (2026): Directed by Toby Darling Synopsis Flustered Finn F. Finch may have met his match at the Lunar Cafe. Will we see what Finn will finagle out of this time? Or will Finn finally find true love?

Veil of the Vanishing (2026): The film opens with a woman awake in her own home, but it’s no longer hers. It’s a distorted, shifting labyrinth where rooms don’t lead where they should, and the architecture seems to breathe in rhythm with her own rising panic. She’s haunted by two things: the memory of her abusive husband and the desperate need to reclaim her rosary, which was stolen from her as a final act of control. As she navigates this void, she is pursued by a presence that moves through the house like a glitch in the walls’ reality. It’s a brutal, poetic metaphor for the trauma that refuses to release its grip, with the house itself serving as a manifestation of a life interrupted by abuse and spiritual isolation. Director Mason James Ulery isn’t interested in the usual slash-and-burn tactics of modern genre cinema. Instead, the film uses long, static takes and disorienting sound design to create a sense of dismal unease. I loved that the rosary wasn’t just a prop, but the only lifeline to the real world and escape. Beautiful, black-and-white, strobing and floating fear in seven minutes.

The Judgement (2026): Directed by Harry Corney, this is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1912 short story, “Das Urteil” (The Judgment). It looks absolutely gorgeous, but if you’re not prepared for Kafka, you may be shocked by how systematically his father dismantles Georg Bendemann’s sense of reality and independence. This shot is so beautifully shot and just looks above and beyond so much of what I’ve seen lately. I’d love to see this as part of an anthology of Kafka, but perhaps a short like this is perfect and of itself.

The Gilded Mirror (2026): Directed by Jack Dudley Gewant, this centers on Charles Randolph, a formerly famous performer struggling with the lingering trauma of his wife’s death. The narrative takes a dark, psychological turn when a young woman arrives to audition for him, drawing Randolph into an unsettling world where the lines between illusion, obsession and reality begin to dissolve. The true joy of this movie is that it totally looks and feels like it was made a hundred years ago or more. Just an incredibly immaculate effort.

Closing Shift (2026): A trauma-at-work slasher that balances the mundane exhaustion of closing a theater with the sudden onset of survival-horror. KC is a burnt-out employee nearing her breaking point and Reggie is the manager, serving as the weary anchor of the nightly routine. Then, an argument in the theater leads to murder, making them wonder if they really will be stuck working at the theater until they die…which could be soon. Director M-Alain Bertoni has created a really nice short here that could totally be a full film.

Cast & Brew (2026): Directed by Priscilla Zanni, this sharp, satirical short film mines the high-pressure environment of film production for comedic chaos. When the global coffee supply runs out, everyone loses their minds. Trust me — if there was no caffeine when production happened, people would end up killing each other. By placing the narrative on a film set, Zanni highlights the often-insular nature of show business, where the minutiae of production (the scene, the lighting, the schedule) can be completely derailed by the personal demands of the star. Trust me — I have plenty of stories of the wrong coffee being served and people having cups thrown at them. If anything, this may not go far enough!

Don’t Leave Me (2026): Directed by Jennifer Saura, this is the story of Dr. Elena Vance (Clara Rossi), a brilliant anthropologist whose life’s work is the comparative study of funerary rites and the space between life and death. Her professional detachment shatters when her husband takes his own life. Instead of processing her grief, Elena descends into a mania. She begins using the occult rituals she has spent her career to bring her husband back. What starts as a desperate act of preservation quickly warps into a grotesque attempt at resurrection. As the line between academic inquiry and necromancy blurs, the house becomes a tomb, and the rituals demand a toll that Elena is all too willing to pay. While the resurrection is pure fiction, the production team drew on actual anthropological texts on death rites in remote regions of the Andes and Southeast Asia to build the scientific basis for Elena’s madness. It gives the ritual sequences a grounded, unsettling weight that makes them much harder to watch.

The Recluse (2026): Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Sirens and a radio report indicate a containment breach at the National Laboratory. The authorities slap a hard, mandatory curfew on the area, and for “the man” (played by Brian Childer), that’s a death sentence for his solitude. He’s a man who likes his own company, but when a group of frantic, soot-stained strangers bangs on his door, his better judgment forces him to let them in. They claim to be fleeing the whatever has happened at the lab, but as the night wears on and the radio reports become increasingly contradictory, Arthur realizes the threat isn’t just radiation. It’s the people currently turning his living room into a pressure cooker of lies and shifting loyalties. The film leans heavily on the real history of Oak Ridge, a secret city during the Manhattan Project. Director Matt Webb uses the location’s eerie, industrial legacy to make the setting feel like a character in its own right. “It was really peaceful here, until all of you showed up,” the man says, and you feel how exhausted this has made him.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.