cucalorus

Cucalorus was really awesome. I was lucky enough to have a Pegasorus pass this year, and I attended several screenings, including several shorts blocks. I really enjoy attending shorts blocks because it reduces the risk of randomly selecting screenings at a festival. If I don’t like a film, it’ll be over in a couple minutes. I also really enjoy them because I like the short form film as an artistic medium, and I think there are a lot of stories that are better suited for, or can only be told through, short film. One screening I went to, I believe it was called the Devils Tongue Shorts, was a midnight screening of horror shorts. The director of the best short in the block was in attendance, and he spoke before the screening. He said something that I really agreed with about shorts, that most horror movies take a concept or characters that would be wonderfully suited for a 30 minute run time, and stretch it into an hour and a half. The stories lose their power when they are slowed down to fill a feature length time slot. His short, The Babysitter Murders, was a fun and creepy spin on the cliché horror plot of the babysitter being attacked by a murderer while at home alone with a kid. It had amazing production value and a crazy twist that I didn’t see coming. It was a wonderful illustration of the director’s point about length. And, as tends to happen at cucalorus, several of the other shorts were really, really, weird.

            I cant really remember the names of all the other shorts blocks and screenings, because I attended so many, but some were called Trinidad Scorpion, some kind of pepper name or something, and another one that happened on Saturday morning. They were all pretty good, and I was very inspired to work on some shorts of my own.