Arachne

From Simon Schwartz, this debut short chronicles a beauty pageant with a twist.

Forever confined to an isolated cottage, Ethan's only companion is his Father, who describes in great detail the horrific state of the outside world. What the young boy finds after sneaking out contradicts everything he's ever been told.

When Iris thinks of Ellie, she gets wet. Very wet. She’s heard it’s normal, but this seems different. And when you’re in high school, different is dangerous.

A strange woman arrives from the North to a prehistoric village bringing some bad news...

A pizza parlor is visited by a man on a mundane Tuesday and strange people follow him home.

A young woman’s fiercest self takes over to fight for her life when she’s attacked in this taut thriller from up-and-coming filmmaker Catherine Fordham. After waking up and noticing bruises on her body, the woman flashes back to last night’s perilous journey home. But as full memory of the attack she experienced comes back to her, we soon realize our heroine turned the tables in a surprisingly scary way. Fordham’s effective twist on the rape-revenge thriller marks her as a forward-thinking horror maker with a unique perspective in a historically misogynistic genre.

The demons of hell play music for Satan, whose delight turns to wrath when an insubordinate refuses to become food for Cerberus.

The Big Bad Wolf stalks Little Bo Peep and steals one of her sheep. She enlists Little Boy Blue and a dancing scarecrow to assist her and her mischievous black sheep in rescuing it. Singing, dancing, hilarity and impalement ensue.

A child is born. We see underwater swimmers representing this. He is young, in a jungle setting, with two fanciful "instincts" guiding him as swooping bird-like acrobats initially menace, then delight. As an adolescent, he enters a desert, where a man spins a large cube of metal tubing. He leaves his instinct-guides behind, and enters a garden where two statues dance in a pond. As he watches their sensual acrobatics of love, he becomes a man. He is offered wealth (represented by a golden hat) by a devil figure. In a richly decorated room, a scruffy troupe of a dozen acrobats and a little girl reawaken the old man's youthful nature and love.

Xiao Wei is a fox demon who feasts on human hearts in order to maintain his clean, youthful appearance. When General Pei Rong rescues him from the remains of a battlefield and offers him a home, trouble begins. The hearts of Pei Rong and her husband, Wang Sheng, are Xiao Wei's biggest desire - however, both are desired for very different reasons.

A brother and sister move into an old seaside house that has been abandoned for many years on the Cornwellian coast only to soon discover that it is haunted by the ghost of the mother of their neighbor's granddaughter, with whom the brother has fallen in love.