8 Most Disturbing Horror Short Movies

Netflix’s anthology series Love, Death + Robots presented a veritable feast for sci-fi fans when it debuted in 2019. Spread across a whopping eighteen initial episodes, the series was conceived by Tim Miller and David Fincher after their reboot of 1981’s Heavy Metal failed to get off the ground. Each episode in the series was written and produced by individual studios from all over the world, with a different animation style for each one.

From android artists to wolf soldiers to mech-enhanced farmers, the episode that stayed with us for all the wrong reasons was Beyond The Aquila Rift. The story recounts a spaceman and his crew becoming stranded at the very edge of the universe, centuries having passed without their knowledge. Here they are looked after by old acquaintances, stranded there themselves, but nothing is really as it seems.

Based on a short story of the same name by Alastair Reynolds, the short film adaptation puts its animated format to excellent use, tinging the story with a deadly sense of unreality. This atmosphere of impending doom is compounded by crewmember Suzy succumbing to total, terrified madness.

When the final, Lovecraftian twist reveals itself, it’s somehow exactly what the audience was expecting but also so much worse at the same time. Beyond The Aquila Rift calls into question our own perceptions of reality, the passage of time, the infinite mysteries of space and the morality of monsters.