12 Great Horror Movie Shorts You Need To See

Mama is a beautifully filmed short that was later picked up by Guillermo del Toro and turned into a feature. The short film doesn’t take the time to go into its own lore. In fact, we are downright disoriented for most of it and that’s where the horror comes from.

We follow two girls as they remark that Mama is coming. The ordinarily comforting word Mama becomes distorted as the threat facing the girls grows. Our comfortable preconceptions about the domestic setting start to crumble and we are not given concrete answers that might allow us certainty about the situation we have found ourselves in. And, due to the one-shot style of the short, we’re stuck with these two girls, with outside information unavailable to us.

This sense of disorientation is so brilliantly imparted on the viewer, keeping the terror of the piece rising more and more, right until its unfortunate end.