Severed (2025): Megan Duffy directed, co-wrote — with Danielle Bauman — and stars in this short as Abigail, a woman who keeps finding fingers in the streets of her town. There’s been an epidemic of missing digits, whether that’s through accident, a finger cutter or a strange disease. Her partner Mark (Ben Giroux) doesn’t even want to hear about it, angered by all the sympathy that the fingerless have been getting. Yet those who look down on others often find themselves dealing with whatever they’ve been close-minded about. This is a fun, quirky and totally unexpected offering. Loved it!
Spiral (2026): Imagine celebrating one of the happiest milestones of your life—your engagement—only to have the entire vibe completely derailed by a jaw-dropping family secret reveal. That is the exact nightmare scenario facing Sean in Spiral. Right in the middle of celebrating his upcoming nuptials, he makes the awkward, earth-shattering discovery that his future brother-in-law is packing an unnaturally large endowment. What starts as a casual piece of news spirals out into an absolute psychological freakout, forcing Sean to grapple with jealousy, insecurity and the most bizarre measuring contest imaginable. Seriously, this is more than a giant cock. It’s like something out of a Japanese hentai comic. Great reveal of the brother and the strangeness around him is just so…unexplained. Great!
House Cat (2026): Living out of her car and grinding away in gig-work hell, a broke woman at the end of her rope thinks she has caught a lucky break. She accepts a strange, high-paying gig to house-sit and look after a house cat. But when she arrives at the house, she quickly realizes the horrifying truth: she isn’t there to care for the pet—she is the pet. Kyle Spleiss’s short dives headfirst into a surreal nightmare where domestic dependency, identity and obsession blur into something entirely unexpected. Katy Wicker stars as the titular house cat, delivering an intensely physical and emotionally demanding performance that anchors the entire film. I loved the evil cat in this, as well as nearly every performance, which were all committed.
What If We Kissed On the Operating Table (2026): In the landscape of modern body horror, few films are brave enough to take a scalpel to the psyche quite like Sydney Mills’s What If We Kissed On the Operating Table. Set within the sterile, stark confines of a secretive, women-only clinic, the short film wastes no time plunging the viewer into a grotesque surrealist nightmare. The narrative follows Patience (Scarlett Pomers in her first acting role in decades), a woman desperately seeking a radical cure for her treatment-resistant depression. What she finds, however, is a medical regimen that redefines invasive as she’s partially consumed by an enigmatic clinic nurse before re-emerging as a pool of sentient sludge, eventually bubbling and stretching back together into a fresh-born clone of herself. But the cruelty—and the genius—of the clinic’s protocol doesn’t stop at duplication. This freshly minted clone assumes the role of her personal caretaker, shepherding Patience through a recovery process that has no bedside manner.
By forcing Patience to literally stare down, care for and grapple with a physical manifestation of her own self-destruction, Mills explores the strange dichotomy of healing. Maybe you really do need to tear yourself to pieces if you want to put yourself back together. Also: this has some of the most gorgeous colors I’ve seen on screen in a long time.
Heliolift (2026): I guess there’s some humor in this short about how women start to feel better about themselves when a device is attached to their bodies, allowing their breasts to be perkier (when all it is is helium holding them up). It all seems like some kind of excuse to attack women for worrying about aging, unless I didn’t get that everyone is in on the joke. It really didn’t feel like it.
TeleXXX (2026): Directed by Johnny Massahi, TeleXXX dives headfirst into the fevered mind of a middle-aged recluse (Laurence R. Harvey from The Human Centipede 2), whose world shrinks down to the glowing phosphorus of his living room screen. Isolated from society, his routine is shattered when he tunes into a late-night phone sex line channel. What starts as a passing distraction curdles into a full-blown obsession, as the broadcast begins to warp his reality. The television morphs from a simple household appliance into an active, seductive entity, drawing him into a downward spiral of techno-body horror, graphic mania and surreal, flesh-altering perversion. Using stock from Kodak Motion Picture and processing from Cinelab London, this feels gritty and real, even if its subject is fantastic.
Cream Style (2026): Directed, written, produced and starring Bob Rose, Cream Style discovers Lond Pickleman as he makes the fateful error of eating a bad batch of creamed corn. What follows is a cosmic punishment of the highest order, trapping poor Lond in an eternity of bizarre, yellow-hued torment. The dude gets fucked in the head with a corncob, spoiler warning. You know, I hung out with some people who thought creamed corn, the very idea of creamed food itself, was gross. Maybe they saw this.
Never Fingerbang a Wendigo (2026): Directed by John Patrick Brennan, Never Fingerbang a Wendigo throws caution, good taste and polite society straight out the window. The premise is as gloriously unhinged as the title suggests: three thoroughly terrible men venture deep into the wilderness and choose to violate the sacred boundaries of the legendary beast’s domain. What ensues is a rapid-fire descent into absolute analog madness, blending outrageous sexual humor, gnarly practical creature effects and a relentless assault on the senses that treats the mythical monster’s turf with zero ounces of respect. Eschewing slick, sterile digital formats, the production was shot entirely on vintage VHS camcorders. This gives the short a genuinely authentic, degraded tape texture that makes it look like it was unearthed from the bottom of a bargain bin in 1988. And of course, Brennan has a song at the end.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is a one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers, celebrating genre filmmaking in an approachable environment. Described by Movie Maker Magazine as Summer Camp for Filmmakers, we screen the latest in independent, cult, niche and underground films that aren’t easily accessible. Other events include filmmaker Q&As, special guests, giveaways, after-parties, and an awards ceremony. The GenreBlast team is hard at work creating a destination event that will have the independent film industry talking about it all year long. GenreBlast is a festival for filmmakers, by filmmakers, that strives to become one of the best independent film festivals around. We celebrate the finest in true genre cinema, and we look for the best features, shorts, animation, music videos and screenplays you have to offer. For more info and tickets, visit the site.
