The “Midnight” section of any film festival is bound to be full of the weird stuff. The stuff it kind of feels like you wouldn’t normally find outside of flipping through channels in a sleep-deprived haze, or the kind you stay up intentionally just to see. Sometimes dark, often hilarious, but always strange. Final Girls Berlin’s Midnight shorts are a great midway point through the fest, offering an eclectic range, from handmade to heavily influenced, from possessed pillows to giant cockroaches.
Writer-director Ali Chappell’s “Verified” kicked off the block with a bitingly funny skewering of social media and influencer culture with a little bit of help from a zombie. Nicki (Arielle Edwards), a budding Insta-influencer is constantly comparing her numbers to those of her more successful peers. While her audience is growing, it struggles to reach beyond the double digits during any given stream. When she’s bitten by a zombie while live on Instagram, her popularity skyrockets and she decides to chronicle her journey instead of seeking medical treatment or going dark. What unfolds is a descent tinged with the bubbly panic we can all recognize from social media creation and consumption. Nicki’s battle between overcoming her injury—as she does not seem fully aware of its consequences for a surprisingly long time—and showcasing her pain for the enjoyment of others is a commonplace situation in today’s world, especially when it isolates us all as much as it continues to do. While certainly not a valiant battle on Nicki’s part, it speaks to the poisonous nature of platforms like Instagram that set us up to compare ourselves to one another and make our lives as shiny as possible even in the face of death, lest our veneer crack. But it is not all Nicki’s doing. Like the zombie that bit her, her growing audience feeds on her suffering with voracious and constantly shifting attitudes. Attention to her overflowing Insta live comments shows the full range of emotion, from concern to delight, and casual cruelty to melt it all together. When the screen stands between us, it seems, it’s easy to suspend your own humanity as well as someone else’s.
Whether it’s from behind a screen or through a bit of retail therapy, the pandemic has laid bare some of our deepest needs for connection. With such risk embedded in the idea of close physical contact—especially in 2020 and the first wave of panic at all the unknowns—films about that absence and anxiety have been popping up on the scene since 2019. What is horror for, after all, if not to give you the tools to battle what scares you, especially when what scares you is so intangible and pervasive? The latest short to contribute to the COVID conversation, however discreetly, is writer-director Jill Worsley’s “Arm”, written with Katharine Markwick. A woman (Markwick) battles the pent-up energy and longing for comfort at the heart of lockdown. She runs the full gamut of emotion, doing vigorous yoga one moment and sobbing uncontrollably the next. To help, she orders a one-armed comfort pillow intended to aid in her fraught sleeping. When it becomes uncomfortable to sleep with, something awakens and she must fight for her life amid the walls of her apartment. If it sounds ridiculous, well, it is. But it’s also a brilliant moment of exorcising and laughing at the strain the ongoing pandemic has put on us all. We must look to the small battles we can win in our own homes while we fight the one that proves to be a much bigger and thornier beast out in the wild.
In a slightly different approach to exploring the effects of monotony and isolation, writer-director Jessica Salgado’s “It Came from the Kitchen!” is a pastel-tinted creature feature not for the faint of stomach. After encountering a monstrously large cockroach in her kitchen, Jackie (Savannah Zito) descends into a sleep-deprived, nightmare-filled battle with herself and her house to prevent the creature from taking over the space. Her apartment, by all appearances not cleaned in months, reflects her fraught mental state in an all-too-familiar way, though its initial appearance does make the final battle ultimately more satisfying. Anyone stuck in an emotional and occupational slump would easily see themselves in Jackie’s place, though they may not have a giant bug to behead. But if turning it into one big showdown helps to motivate you onward, then by all means, slay on. More than its crunchy exterior and abnormal proportions may suggest, the cockroach is no easy victim, a physical manifestation of our toughest mental feats. Even as we succeed, they loom, though with the right tools we are always ready for the battle.
Riding the wave of colorfully-tinged melancholy is director Stevie Szerlip and writer Young Lee’s “Young Forever”, in which a skincare product saleswoman tells the story of her success to a potential new business partner while pitching her products. Sort of like if that pyramid scheme your friend keeps inviting you to on Facebook had an air of gravitas and perhaps even actually worked, Young Lee (who plays herself) unfolds the tale of her two husbands, her one love, and her drive to make a comfortable life for herself no matter the cost. It’s both surreal and a little heartbreaking to watch unfold, as she loses first one and then another of her deepest connections while being haunted by a specter of Korean beauty standards in her sleep. But, hey, if she’s happy and thriving, then the road was worth the journey.
From one successful woman to another, we next meet Donna (Heather Brittain O’Scanlon), a woman having a night out with her friend during America’s serial killer boom, 1970s New York, in writer-director Nancy Menagh’s “Victim No.6”. One of the Midnight block’s standout entries, this short nails the balance between going all out on ‘70s atmosphere and cheese and crafting a sense of distrust between the viewer and every character on screen. We gather from the scant information about the active serial killer that no one is safe—age, sex, race, none of it seems to matter—but no one is trustworthy either. It dances gleefully amid our own expectations, giving viewers space to project their own ideas and anxieties across the characters and story while reveling in the atmospheric cocktail of pleasure and unease at the heart of this time in American social history, making its reveals all the more impactful and fun to watch, while completely disarming some of the usual trope ideas behind serial killers in fictionalized media. Everyone involved seems to have been having the time of their lives embodying and bringing this story to life, and it’s evident in every frame.
Taking joy in your craft is one of the strongest ways to ensure its success in reaching an audience, no matter how unusual it may be. The double shot of creator-director Alisa Stern’s “Posted No Hunting” and Laura-Beth Cowley’s cheeky “Crafty Witch” prove the point perhaps more than most. “Posted No Hunting” is a stop-motion cryptid story told through the lens of a trail cam with enough atmosphere to have you laughing even as its final moments make you jump. “Crafty Witch” is the briefest short on hand, and a delightful turning of the tables on the old practice of witch hunting. With a finely crafted air of the silent film era and the tongue-in-cheek tone reminiscent of Terry Pratchett, it’s a bite-size runner up for favorite Midnight short, and testament to the kind of fun you can have putting your art on screen, even if the end product is quicker than the process.
Writer-director Grace Sloan’s “Death Valley” sits comfortably in the aesthetic of an early era DOCTOR WHO episode with the tense existential nightmares of one of the darker TWILIGHT ZONE entries. On New Year’s Eve in the year 2080, a radiologist decides to go down to the long-since abandoned Earth for some sunset yoga in the desert when she is tossed from the cliff by an earthquake and must struggle back to her ship. Its intense middle sequence uses repeated flashing of different images to depict the woman’s disorientation, but it serves just as well to put viewers off kilter. Not for the photosensitive, it’s a mashup of nightmare imagery we’re not sure is actually happening sandwiched in the middle of a story about a woman trying to find peace before a New Year party, like the sludge of our past trying to lay claim to any brighter future before it can happen.
The standout short of the Midnights block, for me, is Kenichi Ugana’s “Visitors”, which feels ripped right from the bloody cabin walls of EVIL DEAD. Concerned about their friend Souta’s weeks-long radio silence, Haruka, Nana, and Takanori decide to track him down. What they find in his apartment when they reach him is…unusual and deadly to some but seems run of the mill to him. While Nana fights off the undead, Souta fixes tea. When confronted with the strange goings on in his house, Souta is all but unfazed. What unfolds is a hilarious, dark, blood-drenched battle for their lives—and green tea—that delights in its gross out gore as much as its dry humor. The ensemble cast of Shiho, Saki Hirai, Haruki Itabashi, and Ryuta Endo are clearly having a blast playing in the world they’ve created, and Souta in particular is delightfully deadpan in his every action. Though it has certainly built itself around EVIL DEAD, it also solidifies Japan as a contender in zombie media not to be messed with, leaning into both the darkness and ridiculousness of the subgenre with extraordinary results.
Perhaps the most eclectic when it comes to styles on offer, Final Girls Berlin’s Midnights block surely has something to delight and inspire everyone, no matter what genre your heart falls into. The bloody good fun of “Visitors” is also a surprisingly good lead into the next section: Gluttony.
Tags: Ali Chappell, Alisa Stern, Arielle Edwards, Arm, Crafty Witch, Death Valley, Doctor Who, Evil Dead, Film Festivals, Final Girls, Final Girls Berlin, Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, Grace Sloan, Haruki Itabashi, Heather Brittain O'Scanlon, It Came From the Kitchen!, japanese, Jessica Salgado, Jill Worsley, Katharine Markwick, Kenichi Ugana, Laura-Beth Cowley, Nancy Menagh, Posted No Hunting, Ryuta Endo, Saki Hirai, Savannah Zito, Shiho, short films, shorts, Stevie Szerlip, Stop-Motion, Twilight Zone, Verified, Victim No. 6, Visitors, Young Forever, Young Lee, Zombies
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