10 Great Horror Movies That Started Out As Short Films
Every great horror movie has to start somewhere.
Making a feature-length film is so unbelievably complicated, it's amazing that anybody manages to do it at all, let alone well.
Rather than jump straight in at the deep end, most directors begin their careers with short films. Ranging anywhere in length between five and 40 minutes and made on a significantly smaller budget than a full-length movie, these petite pictures are a great way to learn the fundamentals of filmmaking without descending into a full-on stress spiral.
Some really famous movies started out life as shorter projects, including the likes of District 9, Fatal Attraction, Napoleon Dynamite, and Whiplash. The horror genre is also full of examples like this, with some making the transition to feature-length pictures more capably than others.
These short films (which are usually always made by the eventual directors of the feature) were the perfect proof of concept - a short extract that could prove their work was destined for something bigger.
While not every short film is guaranteed to translate to a longer running time, the following 10 examples all proved that great horror films can have small beginnings...
10. When A Stranger Calls
One of the best takes on "the babysitter and the man upstairs" urban legend, 1979's When a Stranger Calls stars Carol Kane as Jill Johnston, a young babysitter who becomes terrorised by a threatening phone caller over the course of an evening. She plucks up the courage to phone the police, who then trace the source of the calls to the house she's babysitting from.
When a Stranger Calls didn't get the best reviews at the time, but it's gone on to become hugely influential, inspiring among other things the opening to Wes Craven's Scream.
The film was directed by Fred Dalton, who took the idea from a short he'd made two years earlier called The Sitter. The 21-minute film is essentially the first segment of the full feature, with the remainder of the runtime playing out as a response to those events - even following the killer who stalked Jill following his escape from a psychiatric facility.
Dalton and his producer Steve Feke initially tried to get The Sitter nominated for an Oscar, but when that failed, it lay dormant for several years. It was only after the success of When a Stranger Calls that there was renewed interest in the short, which resulted in The Sitter finally seeing the light of day as a DVD extra in 2018.