By Stephanie Buckley

The Creature Features showcase runs the gamut of dreamlike weirdness, horror-comedy satire, Twilight Zone-inspired period pieces, clever mockumentaries, and genre pastiches. These filmmakers draw inspiration across genres and the span of film history, resulting in a showcase that puts their passion on display in affectionate, disgusting detail.

The Confection

The showcase starts off strong with Christopher Jason Bell’s The Confection, the naturalistic, irreverent dialogue plunging the viewer into a familiar yet almost indiscernibly off scene. Two friends talk of grocery runs gone awry, ineffective dishwashers, and Thai spiciness ratings over a store-bought cake — until something strange happens. What follows is something like a stress dream, the Lynchian sound design eliciting a feeling of looming dread.

The film does a lot with a little — a simple premise, a single location — but its flourishes of impressive camera work, tight editing, atmospheric lighting, oppressive sound design, and smart dialogue make it a treat to watch — pun intended.

The Confection isn’t a straightforward “creature feature” — its trippy final act feels more reminiscent of films like I Saw the TV Glow — but it poses interesting questions about how oneself could become the “creature,” and the lengths we might go to hide it from ourselves.

Invasion ‘53

Invasion ’53 is a black and white period piece that evokes vintage B movies, Twilight Zone episodes, and Cold War paranoia. Director Danielle Weinberg uses pristine set design and clever practical effects to transport us back to a mythological 1950s, complete with a backdrop of consumerism and dogged obsession with social status and convention.

The (spoiler alert) aliens that invade this safe ‘50s enclave swiftly trample that convention, with a delightful performance by lead actor Jeffery Combs. A bit reminiscent of one of my favorite short films of all time, Stephen O’Reagan’s They’re Made Out of Meat, Invasion ’53 is full of clever comedic touches, including its playful ending.

One Night

Like Invasion ‘53, Ryan William Tocci’s One Night evokes familiar tropes and themes from the 1950s (think The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street). In this black and white short set in an unknown time period, a group of friends debate the existence of aliens, then begin to suspect one is among them. They pick at one another’s quirks and inconsistencies, looking to root out the outsider. Who is behaving strangely? Who does not belong here?

The paranoia reaches a fever pitch and devolves into violence before an unexpected twist snaps the characters back into reality. One Night uses a simple, time-worn premise to toy with viewer expectations, ratcheting up the tension to a satisfying and surprising end.

Magnet Brain

Witty mockumentary Magnet Brain follows a fictionalized version of George Romero and his endeavor to use “transcranial magnetic stimulation” technology and reanimate the dead and use them for free labor.

Kurt St. Thomas’s short, with comedy reminiscent of What We Do in the Shadows, also functions as cynical, cheeky economic satire for our current moment, a sly commentary on exploitation and work culture.

The standout performance in this short — made in only 48 hours for the Baltimore 48-Hour Film Festival — comes from Kathleen M. Darcy as Romero’s right-hand Paulina Griffith, who injects a bit of pathos into this hilarious satire.

Horror Spell

Daniel Ziegler’s Horror Spell, the longest short in Creature Features at just over 20 minutes, is a love letter to the horror genre. The film follows a college student who’s having trouble enjoying a Halloween movie night with her friends, still haunted by the murder of her roommate. She uses an old spellbook to wish away her trauma, only to find herself and her friends in a monkey’s paw situation when a slasher villain begins to stalk them.

Horror Spell excels in its technical attention to detail, in the costumes, lighting, set design, and editing, following the group through several very different eras of horror film. It plays with aesthetics and tropes of each era, switching both its form and content at just the right pace to keep the viewer’s attention.