Defile
Directed & Written by Brian Sepanzyk
Starring Tanaya Beatty, Fletcher Donovan, Sara Canning, Adam Lolacher, & Ollie Kreeft

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

During Fogfest 2022, I covered Brian Sepanzyk’s fabulous, haunting short In the Shadow of God—genuinely one of the greatest short films I’ve ever seen with my human eyeballs—and in 2024 Sepanzyk returns with another creepy piece of work that, once again, stars the excellent Sara Canning. In Defile, a young couple dealing with some obvious relationship turmoil retreat to a cabin in the woods for a little time away, though soon a trio arrive at their door speaking of “divine will” and bringing with them unimaginable terrors lurking just beyond the night’s shadows.

“Gotta love the timing life gives you, huh?”

Sometimes films like Defile, in the hands of other filmmakers, go to great lengths within their short runtime attempting to tell an elaborate story, whereas Sepanzyk doesn’t spend his eleven-minutes-and-change setting up any kind of mythology for the horror he unleashes, he focuses on an atmosphere of religious terror, fear, and the surreal burden laid at the couple’s doorstep suddenly. The visuals in Defile are dark and glorious. You won’t have time enough to worry about why anything’s happening on screen; it simply happens to the viewer, as horrifically as it does the characters.

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Cultes
Directed & Written by David Padilla
Starring Calliste Dupin, Michaël Vander-Meiren, & Antony Cinturino

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

David Padilla’s Cultes is one of the more unique—as well as uniquely sweet and grotesque—shorts at Fogfest 2024 because of how it uses its brief story to explore the ways in which young minds grapple with the unknowable, whether that’s the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the Eucharist, or zombies. Padilla’s film takes place in a Catholic boys’ school, where a class is being treated to a special film reel. Except the priest teaching them doesn’t realise the reel contains a trailer for George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which terrifies the schoolchildren, as they witness the sight of zombies chomping into the flesh of the living. This leaves a deep mark on one of the boys.

“This film should not exist. It is an offence to God.”

As a man who was raised a proper little Catholic boy for the first dozen years of my life, who was always confused by the communion wafer being the body of Jesus and the wine being his blood, I absolutely adore the way Cultes depicts its protagonist’s surreal nightmare about Jesus Christ in zombie form while he struggles to understand the difference between what Romero was depicting and what the Bible claims happened. We get so much stale demonic possession horror that frequently uses Catholic imagery, iconography, and rituals/traditions, it’s nice to see horror look at Catholicism from a totally different perspective. Padilla’s film has a delightful heart within the otherwise somewhat disturbing subject matter. It’s a love letter to the world of cinema, which has helped so many of us make sense of the rest of the strange, confusing, and often hideous world around us.