10 More Horror Movies Way Darker Than Advertised

Stop-motion animator Robert Morgan's genius idea of making a film about a stop-motion animator - Stopmotion - paid dividends, allowing the director to fully utilise his animation style while crafting a live-action story in which the work begins to bleed into reality.

Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) is the unfortunate animator at the heart of this story, left adrift in the wake of her mother's hospitalisation, and permitted for the first time in her life to create a stop-motion based on her own ideas and designs. Setting up a studio in a semi-abandoned building managed by her boyfriend, Ella processes her grief and newfound sense of freedom simultaneously through her art, and even begins to lean on one of the building's young residents (Caoilinn Springall) for narrative ideas. 

Positioned as "spooky stop-motion animation comes to life," the film is in fact a harrowing unwinding of its main character. Ella loses touch with the world around her, and as she experiments with living and dead flesh puppets and increasingly macabre setups for her film, the story she tells in her studio hammers its way into the "real" of her own psyche. 

The supernatural would have been one thing, but the very lack of anything empirically sinister is what makes Stopmotion so dark, as Ella will do - and kill - anything to complete her project.