DISCLAIMER:
The following short essays
contain SPOILERS!
Turn away thine eyes,
lest ye be spoiled forever.

Incomplete
Directed & Written by Zoey Martinson
Starring Marchánt Davis & David Costabile

Horror / Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Zoey Martinson’s short film Incomplete—which played Fantasia 2023 and was also previously included in Season 2 of Bite Size Halloween—is the story of Evan (Marchánt Davis), a man confined to house arrest, obviously for a DUI-related incident. Evan’s living in a government house during his confinement, equipped with a breathalyser box that not only records his blood alcohol levels but snaps a photo to be sure it’s really Evan blowing into the machine. He starts to notice something strange one day when the box begins to malfunction. There seems to be a… presence… in the house with him.
That’s only the beginning of Evan’s troubles.
Evan’s haunting in “one of the suggested DOC rentals” is a racial one, immediately evident when we see a photograph full of white faces and a Black, ghostly figure in its surface’s reflection. Then, as Evan rushes to try making it downstairs so he can blow into the breathalyser, he misses a call from a contact in his phone listed as Overseer. The name Overseer is significant in terms of Evan’s racial haunting by way of the state. In the plantation system of American slavery, an overseer was a man tasked with overseeing the daily work of enslaved Black people; mostly this position was occupied by white men, though, occasionally, one of the enslaved Black people was promoted to such a position if they were trusted deeply by the slave master. Evan’s phone contact connects his house arrest to the plantation system, and even the house itself reaches out of America’s Gothic past, as the film suggests the American government, particularly its various Departments of Correction, has just replaced slavery with other structures, like the jail and its many little extensions like a home used for people on house arrest.

A great, albeit sinister moment comes after Evan receives a checkup visit from a sheriff (David Costabile) and the cop notices a Black Lives Matter sticker that’s been placed on the breathalyser box. The sheriff is almost delighted to see the sticker, however, there’s something unsettling about his reaction. He says he’s always wanted one of them, so Evan lets him take it; he chuckles at it, like BLM is a cutesy slogan like LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE, and not a rallying cry against the very institution the sheriff represents. What’s more, BLM rose to prominence after the deaths of several unarmed Black people at the hands of American police, one of whom was Eric Garner. Garner died while pleading with the cops killing him: “I can‘t breathe.” There’s something intriguing at work in Martinson’s film with the BLM sticker on the breathalyser box, as if another slice of commentary about how the state controls and also kills Black people; new post-slavery methods of subjugating Black people. The entirety of Incomplete is a haunting Gothic story about the current racial realities Black people face in America and how the origins of those realities stem from one of America’s original sins.

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Get Away
Directed by Michael Gabriele
Screenplay by Gabriele & Anthony Jefferson
Starring Erika Enggren, Steph Martinez, Lisa Jacqueline Starrett, Camila Ivera, & Adrian Quiñonez.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Michael Gabriele’s Get Away is a metatextual horror short about a trio of friends—Laurie (Erika Enggren), Nancy (Steph Martinez), and Alice (Lisa Jacqueline Starrett)—who go to a desert house for a little vacation together. There, they wind up watching a horror movie on VHS called Desert Dwellers III that starts to tear open the very fabric of reality. After they’re gripped by the film and the people in it, they find themselves stalked by the same shadowy terror, too. Although Get Away isn’t a slasher like Scream, Gabriele’s film shares similar thematic qualities with Craven’s game-changing slasher in that both of them are metatextual commentaries on the horror genre and its many recurring tropes. After the friends start watching Desert Dwellers III a while, one of the characters in it uses a phone that goes directly to the desert house and reaches the friends. The friends try to warn the couple in the film, telling them: “You guys should get out of there.” But even that can’t save the film’s characters; they’re fated to do whatever the screenplay tells them to do. Later, two of the friends try escaping in a car, and when it starts one of them remarks: “Normally the car doesn‘t start… until the monsters are behind you.” And then, after the car suddenly breaks down, the monster stalking them appears. Everything about Get Away is pretty clever. Even the title of Gabriele’s short is a double entendre: the women are on a desert getaway, and they’re later urged to “Get away” by the man from the movie who comes to help them with the shadowy terror.

There’s a slight influence of, or at least fraternity with, Craven’s Scream in Get Away, and there’s a moment reminiscent of Poltergeist in front of the television screen, but Gabriele’s film is all its own in the way it dives completely into the metatextuality at its core. At the end, Alice walks towards the camera, looking right into it, and literally touches the fourth wall, as she realises, in terror, that she and Nancy are trapped inside the film. Alice screams prior to being cut off by television static and the Zenith VHS machine spitting out the Desert Dwellers III tape; another cycle will potentially begin again, once the next visitors arrive at the desert house. Get Away is creepy and, more importantly, a lot of horror genre fun, if you enjoy the self-referential style Craven (and screenwriter Kevin Williamson) helped create, which Gabriel and co-writer Anthony Jefferson revel in with their own unique storytelling.

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Role Play
Directed by Bill Neil
Screenplay by Alex Henes & Matthew Merenda
Starring Jason Caceres, Ryan Kendrick, Ivan Djorovic, & Paul Etheredge.

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Bill Neil has edited a lot of film trailers, and now Role Play illustrates his obviously creative, horrifying artistry. Role Play tells the tale of two men—Mark (Jason Caceres) and Andre (Ryan Kendrick)—who go home together for a hot hookup. At Andre’s place, the men start to make out and touch. Before things get sexier, Andre suggests role play, to which Mark reluctantly agrees. They set a safe word, then prepare for fun. Unfortunately, this role play is not the type Mark understands. What began as a hopeful prelude to orgasm ends in abject terror for Mark after he witnesses strange, surreal things in Andre’s bedroom.
There’s a great commentary at work in Role Play about the threats of identity, or rather of not knowing someone’s identity and going home with them anyway. This happens in all realms of dating, though ‘anon encounters’ are a big thing in the queer community since many of us have crawled slowly out of the closet (and many are still trapped within its confines). One perfect image to capture this is when Mark finally goes up to Andre’s bedroom, where he sees only Andre’s shadow behind a closet door. This is when the terrors of unknown identity crash down on Mark. From within the closet (a delightful irony), Andre holds up cue cards: “Who is it / Who am I / What am I.” Mark’s then shocked when Andre appears in a mask and a robe, simultaneously recalling the image of BTK’s awful mask and one of the most gruelling scenes in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Andre, beneath the robe, reveals he has penises for breasts, a vaginal opening in his stomach, and a smooth, Barbie/Ken-like mound at the crotch. His non-normative body shatters Mark’s mind, and perhaps changes Mark as much physically as it does psychologically. Then there’s no way Mark is able to reconcile Andre’s incomprehensible body with any form of identity.

Now, this might lose some folks, HOWEVER, I refuse to believe that the hallway completely decorated with rose wallpaper isn’t a subtle reference to the ‘rosebud’—rectal prolapse—which has been prominently featured in hardcore porno over the years. While there’s no judgement here, ‘rosebudding’ is medically not a good thing to do; it’s not necessarily dangerous, it just has some not-so-awesome physical consequences. If we look at the rosebud hallway in conjunction with the terror of going home with someone whose identity you don’t know, they’re both about the potential for hazardous consequences when it comes to sex, queer or otherwise.

Role Play is one of the most effective horror films, short or not, that’s come out in the past several years. Queerness is not the monster in Neil’s short, even if there are queered bodies at play that act in potentially monstrous ways. What’s scary about Role Play is its depiction of how there are terrible horrors lurking in the real world—terrors that can alter us in irreparable ways, from our bodes to our minds. For queer people, those terrors aren’t always heteronormative; sometimes they come from within our own community, like the danger Andre presents to Mark. The dark body horror lurking in Andre’s apartment is a warning to young queer men like Mark about taking the wrong person home. Role Play isn’t a 1980s-era story trying to turn gay men/sex into an infectious monstrosity, it’s about being cautious in one’s personal life because men, regardless of sexual orientation, love to conceal their true identity for horrific purposes.