One of the events I attended at Fantastic Fest was the Best of Bloodshots short film competition. Each competitor is given one prop, in this case corn, and one line of dialogue (“Is that thing real?”). The participating filmmakers are then randomly assigned a weapon and a horror sub-genre and given 48 hours to create a completed horror short.
In all honesty, it was the most entertaining block of short films I’ve seen at a festival. Some were amusing, some more amateurish than others, but most all of them displaying a good amount of imagination. The winner of the contest, “LARP”, was a tight, funny, gory little backwoods tale of live-action role-players who get lost in the woods. The second place winner was “Mobius”, from my boys and frequent collaborators at Bleutuna, one of the few films whose intention was solely to scare the audience. They made use of the corn and the line, and were saddled with “fire/explosives” as their weapon and “mutation” as the sub-genre. Without a doubt, they delivered some of the best horror visuals in the selected block of fifteen finalists. Congratulations to Bleutuna for taking second place in such a wonderful festival!
Here’s the “48-Hour Bloodshots Edit” of their short “Mobius”.
Filmcans 