Undertone (2025): Shaun Munro’s Undertone reminds us that the scariest things might be the ones vibrating right beneath our floorboards. The film follows a sound recordist who picks up strange audio frequencies emanating from beneath their home. What starts as a curiosity—the kind of professional obsession that usually leads to a third-act demise—quickly spirals into an obsessive hunt for the source. As the recordist digs deeper (both figuratively and literally), the line between ambient sound and malevolent presence begins to blur. It’s a descent into sonic madness, where the house itself seems to be broadcasting a warning that nobody is meant to decode.

Nail-Biter (2026): There are some habits your mother tells you to quit, and then there are the ones that will literally eat you alive. Joseph Burch’s short film takes that old parental warning—”stop biting your nails, or something bad will happen”—and turns it into a creature feature nightmare. Amy Heller is about to become 18 and is obsessively gnawing on her cuticles. She finally corners her mother to get the truth about the family curse, which is a finger-devouring beast that tracks down nail-biters. The gothic horror setup creates an eerie, unsettling atmosphere that heightens the suspense and draws viewers into a dark, foreboding world. And guess what? It’s arrived for dinner, and Amy is the main course. It’s a nasty, gothic little setup that turns a mundane, nervous coping mechanism into a visceral survival struggle.

The Binding (2025): Directed by Ryan Kennedy, this starts with a botched exorcism that goes wrong in the worst way imaginable, resulting in the death of a young girl. Instead of finding closure, her father is consumed by a singular, destructive purpose. He’s not interested in holy water, prayers of the power of Christ anymore. He’s interested in absolute, devastating retribution. He descends into the darkest corners of ritualistic lore, deciding that to kill a demon, you have to be willing to become something just as monstrous. It’s a classic “deal with the devil” setup, but Kennedy plays it with a grim intensity that strips away any hope of a happy ending.

Cockroach (2026): If you’ve ever had a sleepless night with a crying baby, you know that the walls start closing in on you. But in Cockroach, directed by the duo of Paolo Mancini and Daniel Watchorn, those walls aren’t just metaphorical. They’re crawling with filth. Beth and Sergio are living the dream: new parents, a fresh start and the exhaustion of bringing new life into the world. Or so they think. Very quickly, the bundle of joy transition turns into a psychological grinder. The sleep deprivation is bad enough, but their suburban sanctuary is breached by a massive cockroach infestation. What starts as a pest control problem quickly evolves into a metaphor for the breakdown of their relationship and the crushing weight of postpartum struggles. As the infestation grows, the boundary between the parents, the child and the vermin begins to dissolve in truly stomach-churning fashion.

Darkroom (2026): Directed by Matt Black, this has a crime scene photographer developing film from a particularly nasty scene. As he heads into his darkroom to develop the shots, he notices something terrifying: the images aren’t just capturing what was there. They’re evolving. With every print he hangs to dry, the scene shifts. The body moves. The killer’s position changes. Whatever he captured in those frames is no longer contained within the paper. It’s finding its way out into his own home. Cool idea and well made!

Halfway Haunted (2025): Every once in a while, a movie comes along that reminds us that ghost stories don’t always have to be about soul-crushing dread or ancient curses. Sometimes, they’re about the struggle against the real-life villains. Like, well, predatory real estate developers. Directed by Sam Rudykoff, Halfway Haunted takes the roommate comedy trope and injects it with enough paranormal spirit to make it feel like a modern-day answer to those cozy, spooky flicks you’d find airing on late-night cable in the 90s. The story centers on a tenant who realizes their apartment isn’t just a steal in this economy. It’s also occupied by a resident specter. Before she can get the exorcist on the phone, a ruthless developer swoops in with plans to bulldoze the building and put up a luxury condo. Facing homelessness, the tenant and the ghost have to put aside their differences and form an unlikely alliance. Fun!

PELACARAS (2025): Directed by Ricardo Albarran, this begins with a husband vanishing without a trace. Instead of going to the police or screaming for help, his wife chooses the path of silence, hiding the terrifying truth from their young daughter. But in a house built on lies, silence isn’t just an absence of sound. It’s an entity. As the mother’s secrets fester, they begin to manifest into something physical, something that shifts and wears faces like masks. It’s a harrowing look at how grief and deception can transform a home when the trauma of the past literally comes back to peel the skin off the present.

Silver Anniversary (2026): If you thought your marriage was heading for a rough patch, at least you don’t have to deal with the fact that your husband turns into a man-eating beast every time the moon hits the sky. D.M. Harring’sSilver Anniversary takes the suburban domestic drama and douses it in gallons of gore, proving that till death do us part”gets a lot more literal when your spouse has a coat of fur and a set of fangs. Our protagonist is a housewife who has made a dream home for her and her husband. As their marriage reaches the twenty-five-year mark, she finally has to confront the scary and hairy truth: her husband’s late-night business trips are actually him running off to feast on the neighbors. When he turns up for their anniversary dinner with more than just a box of chocolates—and with a hunger that isn’t satisfied by the pot roast—the relationship takes a sharp, violent turn. I have noticed from this year’s shorts that every marriage is in bad shape.

Bloom (2026): Directed by Chloë Levine (who acted in The Ranger), this is about a teenager struggling with a hair-trigger temper and a history of impulsive, violent outbursts. When a particularly volatile incident leaves her world in shambles, she’s forced to confront the wreckage of her own psyche. But Bloom isn’t interested in a tidy, therapeutic resolution. Instead, it tracks her attempts to reconcile with a past that is actively trying to pull her back. It’s an internal struggle made external, where the most terrifying thing she encounters isn’t a slasher or a ghost, but the person she sees in the mirror. This does so much with subtle moments instead of having to talk out everything and would make an interesting full-length.

The Cauldron (2025): There’s a specific kind of dread found in isolation-based folk horror. Thomas Pierce’s The Cauldron taps into it with the precision of a scalpel. By setting this nightmare against the backdrop of the 1918 Spanish Flu, Pierce isn’t just giving us a period piece; he’s giving us a claustrophobic masterclass in how fear is the ultimate contagion. Our protagonist is holed up in a remote home, tasked with the impossible: keeping his family safe from an unseen, unknown threat lurking just outside the treeline. As the isolation deepens and the paranoia sets in, he realizes that the danger isn’t just the sickness or the woods. It’s the darkness manifesting within his own mind.

The Chosen (2026): Directed by Brady Richards, this is the tale of Reed (Holden Sakran), a young man whose life is falling apart because he can’t stop seeing—and hearing—things that force him to commit acts. The visions are violent, the guilt is overwhelming, and his social circle is shrinking by the day. Nobody believes his claims of an external influence, not his parents or his court-ordered therapist, Faye (Adams Family member Toby Poser; her parner John shot and edited). But in a movie like this, you have to ask yourself: Is the doctor there to provide a cure or just to observe the decay? As the sessions progress, the boundary between Reed’s reality and the therapist’s agenda gets blurred. This has an insane ending and is, well, pretty perfect.

Trad (2025): Directed by Dave Bekerman, this is about Mary (Milly Sanders), a struggling influencer who is desperate to fix her husband Jay’s (Andrew Perez) mounting financial wreckage. She decides to pivot to the tradwife aesthetic just for the socials, at first: baking bread from scratch, wearing flowy dresses and preaching the gospel of domestic subservience. But the problem with the algorithm—and her husband—is that it’s never satisfied. As her follower count climbs, the demands from her fans become increasingly unhinged and invasive. What begins as a cynical marketing ploy turns into a psychological prison, where the persona she created starts to exert more control over her life than she does. It’s a claustrophobic look at how the pursuit of perfection can lead to a very ugly reality. Really well-made film.

Once Upon a Time in the Apocalypse (2024): Directed by Tiago Pimentel, the plot centers on Ernesto (Sérgio Godinho), an older man living with his daughter in a frozen, fallout-ridden world. The arrival of a government inspector, Colonel Salavisa (Paulo Calatré), reminds him that he lives in a fascist regime. The desolate landscape outside serves as aperfect metaphor for the cold, unyielding nature of state control everywhere else in this small and dying world.

Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done (2025): Directed by P.J. Germain, Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done is a tension-packed 18-minute short film that serves as a visceral homage to the teen slasher tropes of the 1990s. The short trails two best friends, Aaron and Keith, who attempt to navigate the social minefield of a graduation party—only to find themselves trapped in a psychological game that escalates into violence and dark revelations. There are plans for this project to expand into a feature film. Best of all, Brady Gentry and Benjamin Nowak bring a raw, believable friction to the friendship between Aaron and Keith.

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