DISCLAIMER:
The following two short essays contain
SOME SPOILERS.
Turn back, or be forever spoiled.

Brian Won’t Wear Condoms
Directed by Genna Edwards

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Genna Edwards’s Brian Won’t Wear Condoms is a feminist horror short about a young woman called Abby who’s had to get an IUD inserted because her boyfriend Brian refuses to wear condoms and the new device lodged insider her affects her in strange ways. Edwards’s short deals with several ideas at once, such as the ignorance of men, and likewise how that ignorance in hetero relationships can create physical horror for women’s bodies. Just one example is that Brian seems to think an IUD solves a need for condoms, not considering, or even realising, that an IUD won’t prevent a sexually-transmitted infection. If Brian’s not willing to wear a condom for Abby, which her friend rightly feels reveals how little he actually loves her, is he also not willing to do other things, like be faithful? If not and Brian’s sleeping around, the lack of condoms could be even worse and could create new body horror(s).

Also, in a number of ways, there are expectations in hetero relationships that fall upon women that are really expectations of putting the body through pain, such as pregnancy or the opposite, trying to prevent pregnancy; exactly what we witness in Brian Won’t Wear Condoms. Abby’s transformed into a near-zombielike creature because of the effects her IUD has after insertion. Brian’s insistence that she get an IUD to cover for his refusal to wear condoms comes back to bite him, and not figuratively. Brian Won’t Wear Condoms is a gruesome, unapologetic, feminist horror; one of the best shorts at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2025.

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Y.M.G.
Directed & Written by Alexandra Warrick
Starring Joe Gallagher & Meg Spectre

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Another great feminist horror short that appeared at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2025, Alexandra Warrick’s Y.M.G. is an effective horror(/horror musical) that begins with a guy (Joe Gallagher) talking about his girlfriend sweetly before rapidly diverging into creepiness that escalates to terror, and ends with a musical performance by a bunch of dead women in the guy’s apartment. If it sounds crazy, it is, and it’s horror perfection.

The disturbed man who narrates most of the short’s runtime is so creepy because he’s not just an outright awful man, he comes off as a somewhat ‘nice guy’ type who you might expect describes himself as a liberal. With a smirk, he talks about the issues women experience: “I blame men; all men, every man on the planet but me.” In a single sentence, he epitomises the performative male, no matter his political identity; a man who says all the right things and uses all the accepted rhetoric yet takes no accountability for his own toxic behaviour. The horror grows as he continues talking about his girlfriend, sometimes in double entendre—”My girlfriend is an angel,” he says while kneeling in a church pew, playing off angel as perfect and angel as dead—and occasionally while shopping for items that are likely used in the act of murder. What really pushes Y.M.G. into genius horror territory is the last bit of the short when one of the dead girlfriends in the guy’s apartment fronts a band performing a song, crooning for her killer with blood pouring from a serious head wound. Warrick’s film is a short, sweet feminist horror that pulls no punches and spares no man.