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Welcome to the third installment of my ongoing series of articles that collects great horror short films.

If you have not already done so, please check out the first two installments of this series “Watch 15 Great Horror Short Films” and its follow-up “Watch 13 More Great Horror Short Films” not only because you’ll love them but also because films and filmmakers mentioned in those articles are referenced in this one.

Short form horror aficionados will also want to check out a recent article I wrote called “The Greatest Horror Anthology Film Segments of All Time”.

As you readers know, the horror short film is an artistic endeavor that can serve as a film industry calling card. A perfect example of this is the recent announcement of the feature film version of Can Evrenol’s superb horror short Baskin.

Combine successes like that with the very strong film festival presence of...

Why Watch? Most of the time, movies with great concepts pull their punches as if knocking out their audience would be one step too far. Elko takes that step. The short film from writer/director Alexander Yan features a boy responding to a young woman’s internet post requesting to be killed, achieving an uncomfortable intimacy as they spend time together in silence leading up to the act. Populated by the kinds of activities that should be engaging and connect two people, there’s always a sense of alienation present — some kind of connection to the digital world even as they’re surrounded by the wide open rural spaces of Nevada. That it tells its story without exposition, ceremony or exclamation magnifies the unease, and the blend of true film shots with grainy iPhone camera captures means we’re never allowed to settle in comfortably. Plus, the young man (Michael Desjardin) is effectively Hannibal Lecter with a...

Held back on Sept. 21-29, the 5th annual Arizona Underground Film Festival was a major blow-out event of extreme underground greatness. And, to top it all off, they handed out a gaggle of awards to both feature films and shorts alike.

The big winner was the Best of Fest award that went to Michael Melamedoff’s sly drama The Exhibitionists, about a bunch of hedonists gathered on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, the Audience Award went to the reality TV parody Ghosts With Shit Jobs by Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Munroe and Tate Young; and Kenton Bartlett’s torture flick Missing Pieces won the Director’s Award.

Some other winners include Spencer Parsons’ Saturday Morning Massacre for Best Horror Feature, a film that while not reviewed yet on Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film we’ve seen it and easily declare one of the best horror movies of the last few years.

AFI Fest 2012 presented by Audi, a program of the American Film Institute, today announced the remaining sections and films that will screen in the festival.s World Cinema, Breakthrough, Midnight and Shorts programs. AFI Fest, which annually presents the best of world cinema in the movie capital of the world, will take place November 1 through 8 at the historic Grauman.s Chinese Theatre, the Chinese 6 Theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

World Cinema showcases the most anticipated and prize-winning international films of the year, Breakthrough highlights work discovered only through the submission process and Midnight.s selections are always haunting. Both World Cinema and Breakthrough feature a number of films making their North American or U.S. Premieres, including The Angels. Share, Greatest Hits, Laurence Anyways, Nairobi Half Life, Pieta, White Elephant and Zaytoun.

Two of the shorts in competition are from AFI Conservatory.s recent class of...

Today, AFI 2012 announced its complete lineup, after previously debuting its New Auteurs, Young Americans, Galas and Special Screenings we finally get a look at the Midnight, Breakthrough, Shorts, and deliriously good World Cinema Selections.

The Shorts section, with almost too many to count, features new work from Nacho Vigalando, Nicolas Provost, and even Shia Labeouf (Cannes selected), among many others. The four Midnight titles all played in Tiff 2012’s Midnight Madness selection, and here we see John Dies at the End making a stop here after originally premiering at Sundance. They’ve nabbed three North American premieres in their Breakthrough section, including Kid from Fien Troch, Nairobi Half Life from David Tosh Gitonga, and Oh Boy from Jan Ole Gerster. But AFI has managed to really impress with it’s World Cinema selections. Just as they nabbed Cannes premiere Holy Motors for their Special Screenings, they’ve nabbed several high...

2012 appears to be the year for younger, i.e. under 10 years old, underground fests to blow it wide open and go for broke. This time it’s the 4th annual Oakland Underground Film Festival that is expanding its horizons into a blowout four-day, much more densely packed affair, running on Sept. 27-30 at several different locations.

Expanding on the types of films they screen, this year Oakuff is jammed pack with a wide variety of documentaries, thrillers, a bevy of short films and a special tribute to blaxploitation films hosted by BadAzz MoFo’s David Walker.

The fest opens on the 27th with skateboarding filmmaker Stacy Peralta’s latest, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, which documents his own involvement with California board culture along with peers like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen. Following that will be Ya’Ke Smith’s complex drama about the effects of child molestation.

Other documentaries in...

The 7th annual Wndx Festival of Moving Image, in addition to the fest’s usually fantastic lineup of new experimental film and video, is presenting a virtual smorgasbord of special events. So, be on the look out for them as they completely take over the city of Winnipeg on Sept. 26-30.

The fun kicks off on Sept. 26 with the debut of “Situated Cinema,” a roving microcinema created by Thomas Evans and Craig Rodmore that will screen at different venues throughout the entire festival. The opening night will take place at Raw Gallery and feature five films curated by Solomon Nagler that will connect viewers with their environment. The filmmakers presenting work at this unique screening experience are Heidi Phillips, Alexandre Larose, Caroline Monnet, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and Alex MacKenzie.

Another fantastic multi-part special event at Wndx will be hosted by underground film historian Jack Sargeant, the world’s foremost authority on Beat Cinema.

It’s a film festival! It’s a sideshow! It’s both! It’s the 12th annual Coney Island Film Festival, which will be taking over the world famous Sideshows by the Seashore and other venues on Sept. 21-23 at one of the most wonderful places on Earth: Coney Island!

This year’s fun begins on the 21st with the knock-’em-dead (literally) Opening Night film Play Dead, co-directed by underground journalist Shade Rupe and the world’s greatest silent magician, Teller. The film is a documentary performance of Teller and Coney Island’s own Todd Robbins hit live off-Broadway gore-a-thon.

Play Dead will then be followed by a wild Opening Night Party featuring a performance by Mr. Robbins, plus lots of burlesque performances, Go Go dancers and other crazy surprises.

Some of the other highlights of this year’s Ciff include the Mark Mori’s documentary Bettie Page Reveals All...

To celebrate their 5th anniversary, the Arizona Underground Film Festival has expanded to a whopping nine nights on Sept. 21-29 for a cinematic event the likes of Tucson has never seen before!

The shenanigans kick off with the opening night film The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, an experimental Italian feature directed by Davide Manuli and starring Vincent Gallo as the hero and the villain to a strange young boy, then end with the closing night film Jason M. Solomon’s nostalgic documentary 7 Years Underground: A 60′s Tale, which profiles the legendary Cafe Au Go Go in NYC that hosted such up-and-coming acts such as Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and more.

In between those two films lies a twisted carnage of movie mayhem, including Spencer Parsons’ demented homage to ’70s mystery cartoons Saturday Morning Massacre; Michael Melamedoff exploitative semi-doc The Exhibitionists; Stephen Amis’ Australian WWII sci-fi...

For their 9th annual edition, the Atlanta Underground Film Festival will be assaulting the south from its Goat Farm Arts Center screening center on Sep. 13-16 with four days and nights of independent feature films, shorts and documentaries.

Some of the feature films screening include Lisa Duva’s multi-dimensional Cat Scratch Fever, Jason Lapeyre’s thriller Cold Blooded and Brady Hall’s hilariously named Hello, My Name Is Dick Licker.

This year’s Auff is also packed to the gills with short films with multiple blocks of shorts screening per day. Some of the special ones to look out for are Neil Ira Needleman‘s A Few Words in Favor of God, Jim Haverkamp‘s When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl and Mike Salva‘s award-winning animated short Pound Dogs.

The full film lineup is below, but please visit the official Atlanta Underground Film Festival website for more details and to buy advance tickets.

For their seventh annual edition, the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival is really blowing things up!

Well, not literally. But the world’s premiere horror movie fest is expanding to over double its regular size, screening over 50 films on nine terrifying nights Oct. 10-18 at its new home, the prestigious AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The scares kick off on the 10th with the return of local fave filmmaker Richard Bates, Jr. with the feature-length version of Excision about a teenage girl obsessed with becoming a surgeon. The film co-stars John Waters, Malcolm McDowell and Traci Lords. Bates’ original short Excision on which the feature is based screened at Spooky Movie back in 2008.

A few other Spooky Movie alumni who are back with highly anticipated new films include Mike Davis‘ “green” horror movie President Wolfman, which is composed entirely of public domain footage mixed with a rip-roarin...

The 6th annual Sydney Underground Film Festival is taking over all three screens of the Factory Theatre for a blow-out four-day event on Sept. 6-9.

Making it’s World Premiere at the fest on the 8th is the highly anticipated President Wolfman, the latest “green movie” by director Mike Davis that he’s cobbled together from public domain footage and feature films and set to an outrageous new soundtrack. The film looks like it promises to be a rollicking good time.

Other highlights of the fest include Guy Maddin‘s latest trippy film noir, Keyhole, about a mobster revisiting his homestead’s old memories; Bob Ray‘s documentary about Austin, Texas’ homegrown Total Badass; Bobcat Goldthwait’s media takedown God Bless America; Michal Kosakowski’s underground murder fantasy documentary hit Zero Killed; Richard Griffin’s funky The Disco Exorcist; and more.

Some of the extra special events of the fest...

For their 5th annual edition, the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival is heating up by returning to the summer after being a winter event for the past three years. The fest will run on Aug. 17-19 with a killer lineup of films from all over the world — most of which probably will not be able to be seen in Minnesota except at this 3-day event.

Plus, there are two programming blocks of short films all made by local filmmakers, including Pam Colby’s Fertile Ashes, Ryan Becken’s Buffalo Shampoo, Janelle Sorenson & Melany Joy Beck’s Bring It 2 Peter, Jl Sosa’s Some of Angela and more.

The feature films screening this year cover an extremely diverse swath of subject matter, from every day people’s murder fantasies fulfilled — cinematically, at least — in Michal Koskowski’s German documentary Zero Killed; a tattoo comes to live to torment its wearer in...

The 18th annual San Antonio Film Festival will run for a solid week, June 18-24, at several locations around the city and will feature, as it always does, an expansive and impressive lineup of documentaries, thrillers, dramas and a ton of short films.

The fest kicks off on the 18th with the Canadian culture clash comedy French Immersion, directed by Kevin Tierney, followed by a block of homegrown short films from all over the great state of Texas. The next night’s programming, the 19th, pays tribute to San Antonio’s neighbors to the south with two feature films from Mexico, the drama Burros by Odin Salazar Flores and the documentary Die Standing Up by Jacaranda Correa, as well as a block of short films.

Some of the feature-length documentaries include Stephanie Hubbard’s Christian theme park quest Bible Storyland (watch the trailer); James Lane’s expose of the Oklahoma...

Having been around for eighteen years, the Chicago Underground Film Festival has continually changed what it defines as “underground.”

So its 19th annual edition, which will be held on May 31 to June 7 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, feels like its most experimental edition in recent years.

While things kick off on the 31st with the Vice-produced anthology film The Fourth Dimension by Alexsei Fedorchenko, Harmony Korine and Jan Kwiecinski, the rest of the fest is packed with feature-length and short experimental work, documentaries and alternative narratives.

Some of the experimental feature highlights include the vastly prolific Robert Todd‘s Master Plan, which examines theories of modern housing from private residences to prisons; Australia’s two-person art collective Soda_Jerk’s epic rip on media piracy, Hollywood Burn; Michael Kosakowski’s compendium on murder fantasies, Zero Killing; L.A. filmmaker Daniel Martinico’s meditation on the acting process, Ok, Good...

The 14th annual Boston Underground Film Festival is ready to kick ass and take names on March 29 to April 1 at the Brattle Theatre. And a few of those names will look familiar to Buff fanatics — and underground film fans the world over.

A trio of Buff favorites are returning to the fest with debut feature films after totally killing it with their amazing short films in the past. Jamie Heinrich‘s Happily Never After is a feature-length expansion of the short film that took home the Best of Fest Award in 2010, but with more solid and mature themes as the movie explores the problematic life of a degenerate photographer.

Another former award winner is Richard Bates Jr. who will be screening Excision, another feature-length extension of a short film, this one about a teenage girl who exercises her morbid obsession with surgery every chance she gets.

Steven Kostanski‘s feature...

The 9th annual Calgary Underground Film Festival will run on April 16-22 at the Globe Cinema with a mix of outrageous comedies, documentaries about controversial personalities, cult flicks and some frank depictions of sexuality.

The fest launches on the 16th with the new comedy by Bobcat Goldthwait, God Bless America, in which Joel Murray stars as a terminally ill man who decides to kill as many stupid people he can can before he perishes himself. Also on the comedic front are Rick Alverson’s The Comedy starring TV’s Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareham as troublemaking urban hipsters; and Mikkel Nørgaard Klovn (Clown) about a Danish loser who takes a young boy on a brothel tour.

On the cult film front are Jack Perez’s Some Guy Who Kills People starring Kevin Corrigan in the eponymous role; Alex Ross Perry‘s abusive sibling flick The Color Wheel; the brutal Father...