Phobia

After watching too many awful and uncreative horror exploits by would be amateurs, it's about time I see some risk and courage taken from newcomer, Fernando "Mark" Paiz.

Without sacrificing the essentials of horror, (thrills, sex themes, teen parties, blood) these filmmakers decided to take an extra few leaps and create a backwards character arc for "Kat", a woman of dark malicious intent and disturbing exposition.

I was impressed with the direction this short wanted to go and I believe in a few ways they more than made the successful punch as an intelligent and overall, ambiguous story.

But what short is without it's flaws?(Seriously tell me, I would LOVE to see it) Not sure if it's a question of talent or just the nature of the story but I wanted to be more pulled in and invested in the characters, when they started getting murdered one by one, I didn't care so much for the "victims" but really admired and almost rooted for the killer herself. Plus points for "Deaths by carrot", genius actually! Very minor picky errors, one shot a lighting issue, the rest looked great. One shot I couldn't help but laugh at an obvious continuity issue but to be fair I didn't notice until the second viewing, but when a short succeeds, who cares I guess.

Really enjoyed this, had a hand in funding but were I to do it over again I would've taken the chance to work on the set and creatively help a talented producer/director. I see great work ahead for them and it will only get better as it goes! Glad to have seen this at the Mammoth film festival, great work!