A young girl’s fantasy becomes the playground for a gang of women who set to create the perfect man, one limb at a time. One very, very gory limb at a time. Dystopia is a neon-hued cotton candy dreamland where body parts can be plastic, where beauty is all and where director Laura Ugolini and her co-writers Maria Galliani Dyrvik and Anja Skovly Freberg can make a camp yet solid statement on how  today’s generation views beauty.

Set in an imaginary pop-glam world of dolls, young social influencer Linnea and the four women inside her mind transform not only the bodies of others, but their own as well, pushing parts well past the typical standards of today’s beauty.

The film’s distribution site says, “Dystopia invites us to revisit, rethink figures, stereotypes and social mandates; both those that involved the same creators, who grew up in the 90s, and what the exposure, pressure and anxiety imposed by social networks implies for Gen-Z.”

It looks great. I’m not the first to mention that the subtitles need some color tweaks, but otherwise, I had fun watching this.

Dystopia is now playing Salem Horror Fest and you can watch this short and all of the features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.

Filmed in one of America’s oldest deep coal mines and featuring practical FX from Emmy award-winning makeup artist Santino Ferrese (Star Trek Discovery), Fire on the Mountain is all about the battle that a young woman must take on to stop a centuries old demon from unleashing hell on Earth.

Director Patrick Corcoran has recently made a full-length called Schimbarea that I want to track down after seeing this. I mean, how can you not love a movie where “a ragtag group of chainsmoking teenagers must join together to keep it from terrorizing their small Pennsylvania town.” Reading, PA represent!

It looks great and shows plenty of promsie. Exactly what you hope from when you check out a short film!

Fire on the Mountain is now playing Salem Horror Fest and you can watch this short and all of the features with their virtual pass now until the end of October. To learn more, check out this movie’s official Facebook page.

Within the structure of an album that teaches you how to scratch — and sounds like something out of The Avalanches — Chinese-American DJ Logan Lee is poised to make his live debut at his best friend Beatrice Pan’s house party. He’s a nervous wreck, she has a potentially evil — and cybernetic alien — boyfriend and his mom has given him perhaps the strongest strain of marijuana ever made.

Director and writer Raymond C. Lai has taken a small budget and short running time and infused it with plenty of big energy and bigger ideas. I had a blast with this and really hope that this becomes a full-length feature at some point. Great ending, too!

Logan Lee and the Rise of the Purple Dawn is now playing Salem Horror Fest and you can watch this short and all of the features with their virtual pass now until the end of October.

You have to admire the kind of audacity that it takes to make a near-perfect slasher pastiche and then set it in a world where every single person is a clown except for the mime hero.

It shouldn’t work but it does. It wonderfully and absolutely does.

Liam Wals has only made four short films, but you can see that this movie would stand alone as a full-length movie. It just works on every level, from the exciting energy of a slasher to the comedic play at the genre’s conventions to, well, the fact that yes, everyone is a clown. And the closing battle — in which the mime uses his pantomine skills to battle the killer — must be experienced.

Here’s how I know a short works: when I feel like I needed more at the close. I want so much more of the world of this picture and I want more films by Wals and the writer of this short, Micah Fusco.

By all rights, this should be a silly Troma or Full Moon affair. And yet it transcends.

You Missed a Spot is now playing Salem Horror Fest. When we have streaming info, we’ll share it in this post. For now, you can follow that link to buy a festival badge and check out several other films during October. You can learn more on the official site for the movie.

Seeds is the second feature by filmmaker Skip Shea. An avid fan of folk horror films, Shea decided to follow up his first feature Trinity with a story about a pagan cult that is about to go to war with the Catholic Church. It’s also a very personal story Macha and Andrew both process the death of their daughter in very different ways. She’s lost and adrift, seeing images of her daughter, while he is driven to make a statement by writing a book about New England cults. And when one of them informs him that his uncle has passed on and left him a legacy, the opportunity to live his dream is closer than ever.

The cult’s religion is based around the metaphysical properties of the apple, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge from Genesis and the symbol of man committing original sin while gaining knowledge. As Macha discovers that she has a gift for seeing more than most people, her husband is being ensnared by the machinations of this secret church.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, worried about the growing power of this secret cult, has sent a priest into its midst to learn all it can.

Shot on location in the Blackstone Valley, Seeds also uses the same locations that were used in another American folk horror film, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. It’s shot in black and white, which works for the darkness of the story, and features Suspiria actress Barbara Magnolfi.

Seeds is unafraid to take things slow, to build tension and to have conversations that feel improvised and fresh along the way. This movie is why independent horror exists; this isn’t a quick cash-in horror to get on the shelves of WalMart and content on Amazon Prime. This is a work of art and a labor of love.

Seeds is now playing Salem Horror Fest as part of the Showcase of Massachusetts Filmmakers series. When we have streaming info, we’ll share it in this post. For now, you can follow that link to buy a festival badge and check out several other films during October. You can learn more at the Facebook page and official site for the movie.

While the logline for this movie says, “After a moment of total teenage angst, a young punk finds himself at odds with a psychedelic monster of his own creation,” the truth is that this film is a film within a film inside, well, maybe another film.

While the script started as Cop Killer, which followed Officer Pete Chambers as the film’s lead, it changed to be about Dood, a young punk who takes way too many dummy gummies, which has perhaps permanent psychotic effects, sending him into a tailspin of cops on his tail, romantic entanglements and even a monstrous creature that looks like a Boglin crossed with a Frank Henenlotter creature along with plenty of goo and teeth.

Rocko Zevenbergen wrote, directed, edited, produced and probably drove everyone back and forth to the set. This is his vision and with how dark things get, it feels like the act of creation may have taken its toll on him at some point. The film keeps breaking from the main narrative and revealing the pains of the creation of the movie inside the movie.

Just a warning to those with sensitive ears, this movie plays with some drone and whirring tones that may unsettle you. They totally fit the film, but the audio tone of this is incredibly abrasive in parts.

While not a perfect film — what movie is? — this is a great experimental narrative and really deserves to get a bigger audience to see it. Zevenbergen is definitely talented and I’m excited to see what he does next.

I Need You to Die! is now playing Salem Horror Fest. When we have streaming info, we’ll share it in this post. For now, you can follow that link to buy a festival badge and check out several other films during October.