Directed and written by Karsten Runquist, this is a movie about how a man found a bag of dirt, became introduced to the world of dirt culture, met more dirt collectors, then nearly killed a young girl when the bag of dirt he’s desperate to give away gives her a peanut allergy. By the end, I worried that he’d developed a new addiction to plants, because my mom and wife have that.

You have to make a pretty great movie to keep my attention if it’s about bags or dirt for eleven minutes. Guess what? This one did exactly that.

Also: do not pick up lone bags of dirt.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

Daniel (Billy Flynn) and Toni (Tipper Newton, who directed and wrote this short) have been matched by a video dating service that feels inspired by the Found Footage Festival Videomate videos. The date is awkward, as every time Daniel seems to impress Toni or gain ground, she tears him down, builds him up and then cuts him down all again, sometimes in the same moment.

So how does he make it back to her place? And if he’s the first date from the service she’s been on, why are there so many videotapes everywhere? And who is that threatening her on the answering machine?

Wild Card gets exciting right when it ends, right at the moment that it has been teasing and it demands that you watch more. I loved it and it got me — so please, give us that second date.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

A young woman tries to grow and use the time of the COVID-19 lockdown to grow and change, yet as she struggles to be productive, time becomes obsessive and she loses touch with reality.

Directed, written and produced by Laura Sheperd and starring Harley Davies, this feels like a time and place that we’ve all been in over the past two and a half years. I actually can’t think of the last time I sat in a bathtub. Maybe that’s a guy thing to just take showers, huh?

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

Fed-up prosecutor Lott (Lance Henriksen!) has given up on the justice system and devoted what’s left of his life to leading a team of criminals who work to pardon other lawbreakers by destroying crime scene evidence. In this twelve-minute short, his team is protecting a murderer named Melissa (Tasha Guevara) from going to jail by cleaning up the scene of the crime, including sawing the victim’s feet off to it him in a special sarcophagus.

The team believes that by allowing people to atone for their crimes in the real world, they will actually become better people than if they had gone to prison. Driven by his faith in the healing power of unconditional forgiveness, Lott and his team of vigilantes intercept 911 calls and fix things before the cops get there.

Working with Bangs (Scott Allen Perry), Wylie (Michael Schnick), Donna (Clara Francesca Pagone) and Missy (director and writer Polaris Banks), they find their mission tested when a killer returns to the scene of this crime, as Melissa as been set up.

At one point Lott tells Melissa, “Punishment without love behind it, you’ll come out worse. Everything you need for rehabilitation is out here.” It’s an intriguing idea and begs for way more than a short. I love the look of all of this, from the strange eye-covered lens the team wears to the shock ending. And I want so much more.

You can learn more about Rekaw at the official website and Facebook and Twitter pages.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

Written, produced and directed by Alison Peirse, an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Leeds who “is drawn to the untold stories of women working in film, both in front of and behind the camera,” Three Ways to Dine Well is the kind of horror documentary we need more of. It’s not concerned with celebrities telling us things like, “Well, that was the best sequel” and instead getting at the bloody heart, brains and soul of those behind the lens and on the screen with a meal before them.

Her director’s statement says “I had three aims for this film. First, I wanted the audience to discover that women worked in major creative roles on horror classics including The Shining, The Evil Dead and Rosemary’s Baby. Second, I wanted to illuminate little known horror films helmed by women, such as Nettie Peña’s Home Sweet Home, Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil and Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner. Third, I wanted to showcase the work of the women filmmakers who are now — finally — being written about in horror scholarship: Daria Nicolodi, Mary Lambert, Karen Arthur, Stephanie Rothman (and many more).”

The inspiration behind this documentary came from a lecture that Virginia Woolf gave at Cambridge University on the subject of women and fiction and the author’s summation that “a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

By exploring food causing trauma, women eating men and dining table horror scenes in more than seventy female-made horror films, this movie shows the horrific side of mastication alongside the fact that women have been represented behind the sinister lens of horror and it’s time more people knew that.

The films covered in this short documentary are:

Bakjwi/Thirst, beDevil, Blacula, Blood Diner, Cat Girl, Chopping Mall, The Lure, In My Skin, Dark Waters, Dead Alive, Ginger Snaps, Raw, Hair Wolf, Happy Birthday to Me, Hausu, Haxan, His House, Home Sweet Home, A Tale of Two Sisters, Jennifer’s Body, Jungle Trap, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Kuroneko, Kwaidan, Wolf Devil Woman, Les Diaboliques, Eyes Without a Face, Meshes of the Afternoon, Messiah of Evil, Mirror Mirror, Dearest Sister, Audition, Office Killer, Peeping Tom, Persona, Pet Sematary, Ravenous, Rosemary’s Baby, Saint Maud, Savita Damodar Paranjpe, Se7en, Sightseers, Sleepaway Camp, Suicide by Sunlight, Suspiria, TESTEment, The Birds, The Boogeyman, “The Box” chapter in XX, The Company of Wolves, The Evil Dead, The Faculty, The Fog, The Howling, The Itching, The Lighthouse, The Lost Boys, The Mafu Cage, The Night, The People Under the Stairs, The Shining, The Spiral Staircase, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thirteenth Guest, The Undying Monster, The Vampire’s Ghost, The Velvet Vampire, Tower of Terror, Us, The White Reindeer, Vampyr, Wolf’s Hole and Weird Woman.

You can check out all of the films on this list on the Letterboxd list I made to track them, as this movie did what all great film documentaries should: make me watch more movies.

Want to learn more about Alison Peirse? Visit her official site.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here

Voyeur (s) is the story of a man who turns his hotel into a laboratory for his own twisted fantasies, watching others play out what once existed only in his mind.

I mean, all I had to do was read this write-up to know this was something I was going to watch: “A motel, its owner, a woman who no longer blinks, bizarre customers, going back and forth from room to room, a woman with pink, black, blonde hair. A dealer, sunken eyes, a murder, an aquarium, dolls, a cop, a model, a TV.”

Trust me, the whole thing makes even less sense, a barrage of images, one of which I can remember is a nude woman holding a gigantic pig head over herself. What’s it all about? I’m probably going to watch it a few more — maybe ten — times to figure that out.

Co-directors and writers Arthur Delaire and Edouard de Luze have made something covered in red tones that feels like something Jess Franco would have either liked or been jealous of because he never got a budget like this, no matter how small it is.

The fact that they claim it’s based on a true story is just the strange tasting frosting on this very curious cake.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.

Haruka, Nana,and Takanori haven’t heard from their band member Souta for some time. Souta’s been busy. And weird. And has a mouth full of, well, cockroaches.

The girls walk in to a newspaper-windowed apartment and as Sota offers them tea, one of them steps into green muck and goes full Regan.

Directed and written by Kenichi Ugana, Visitors is filled with small moments of fright and huge moments of gore. Yes, a chainsaw gets involved. Yes, it invokes Evil Dead. Yes, it’s pretty great. It really goes for it with the gore and pairs nicely with another film I saw at Chattanooga, PussyCake, another story of a band being destroyed by possession, bile and gore.

Ugana also made Ganguro Gals Riot (a movie that explores the Ganguro — blackface — fashion subculture), Extraneous Matter Complete Edition (a movie that explores the creatures of tentacle hentai in a more human way) and Wild Virgins (in which a virgin man turns thirty and becomes a witch).

As Danzig sang back in Samhain, “A kick in the head, a gouged out eye, your intestines explode and your eyeballs pop and the taste of your blood will drive me on. You see I get what I want, and I want when you bleed. ‘Cause the things I can cause have the seal of the dead in humanity’s fading glow. All murder, all guts, all fun!”

Visitors lives the fuck up to that.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.

It’s a retail employee’s nightmare: two women want the same necklace at closing time and no one is taking no for an answer. Jennifer (Stella Baker) and Cheryl (Grace Rex) see the neon hue in the center of that simple jewel and it becomes about more than just a fashion statement.

Short, sweet, simple and well made by director and writer Beck Kitsis (whose The Three Men You Meet at Night also starred Baker), this will make you stay out of the mall — if it’s even still open around you — and just stick to online shopping, which seems so much safer.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.

Quinn (Anatasha Blakely, who also directed and wrote this short) is a daydreamer set adrift after losing her soullmate Max (Jacob Sorling).

Adrienne (Whitney Morgan Cox) is the woman who may have caught his eye.

There’s no way these two are going to get along, right?

This may start with mannered conversation but stay with it. It looks great and both Blakely and Cox have the opportunity to really dig into their roles. The camera stays with them and the conclusion of their words, as they spiral out of control, finds the camera locked on what we can see of the aftermath. You may never boil a pot of tea the same way again.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.

Colin (Bernard David Jones) is being chased throughout the night by something invisible, something terrifying, something that won’t stop. The more that he runs, the more that he learns that confronting his greatest fear may mean confronting himself. Or maybe that really is some kind of demon behind him.

Director L. Gustavo Cooper started as a pro skater, moved into making skate videos and then advertising before making films. He was the second unit director on one of my favorite modern horror movies, Sinister 2, and also directed June, The Devil Incarnate and the upcoming Crawlspace. He also co-wrote the script to this short with Ben Powell.

It’s more a quick peek into a world, but there’s still plenty of talent on display.

You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.