Dominatrix Mara’s Cocoon, winner of the festival’s WTF Award, finds sensuality and psychological tension in water, nylon stockings, thin latex, flowers, and two women engaged in what the filmmaker describes as a dynamic metamorphosis.
Mara wanted the film to challenge the usual media treatment of kink and BDSM. Rather than framing intensity through aggression or spectacle, Cocoon uses minimal narrative to reveal ritual, restraint, devotion, objectification, and sensation. The result is less concerned with explaining itself than making the audience feel something it may not have language for.
The production moved fast. Mara storyboarded the film in six hours and shot it in roughly four to five, working with what she described as her first all-female cast. Her favorite moment arrives during the final transformation, when the camera moves across the ground and brings the audience into focus.
Watching it at the festival gave Mara a rare chance to see her own work on a large screen.
“The reactions are a bonus validation,” she said.
Graceann Dorse’s Le Meow Mort, meanwhile, won Best Use of Challenge with a freeze-dried cat and a worldview blacker than the bottom of a litter box.
The film originated with a Women in Comedy Festival challenge that supplied two opening lines: “Try hard. None of it matters.” Dorse took the nihilism seriously and went in a dry, vaguely Bergman-esque direction. The finished short follows characters pondering mortality under a monotone February sky at Coney Island.
“Life is like a litter box, full of turds one day, empty the next,” the film declares.
The one-day shoot was quick, collaborative, and unpaid. Its great behind-the-scenes struggle was not artistic disagreement or production chaos. It was parking at Coney Island. Dorse also had to vacuum sand from her dead cat’s fur afterward.
The festival audience caught small jokes that had slipped past other crowds, including a quick shot of Dorse failing to puncture a Capri Sun pouch with its straw. She credited cinematographer Caroline Mariko Stuckey, actor and editor Jessica Schoen, French translator and voice performer Marie Griffin, and performer Nannette Deasy with helping the strange little cat elegy land.
Joseph Kowalski’s Best Comedy winner, For the Love of Money, spent nearly 20 years rattling around his head before becoming a film. Its origin was a line Kowalski used to yell jokingly at a college friend: “money changed you!!”
Scratch tickets eventually entered the picture. So did a barrage of improvised jokes.
Kowalski described the production as his first “real” movie involving hired actors and crew. The low-budget shoot was completed in about two days, with cinematographer Felix helping guide him through the process. Once the cast began riffing, the script loosened considerably. Changing sunglasses, a security guard regretting that he never became a Walmart greeter, and a cashier celebrating “Big Money Bri” were all developed on the fly.
The award carried a personal weight. Kowalski connected the Brooklyn screening to his late friend Brian Chepya, who had lived in the borough after college and inspired the name of one of the film’s central characters. Hearing an audience laugh brought back the rush Kowalski remembered from years of live theater.
The movie may be proudly ridiculous, but its victory meant something real.
Blood, Bugs, and a Devil Baby
The body does not fare especially well in this festival’s horror selections.
Gordon Phillips developed The Itch, winner of Best Psychological Thriller, from a case of sun poisoning he suffered at 17. The pain was severe enough to make him imagine peeling away his own skin. Phillips wrote a short story inspired by the experience, then waited 30 years to turn it into a film.
The result is a science-fiction horror story about the gruesome consequences of playing God. Phillips aimed for something strange and uneasy, with enough humor to keep the gore from becoming monotonous.
Its animal performers included a cockroach, housefly, fruit flies, rabbit, and crow. According to Phillips, none behaved like professionals. The cockroach presented the greatest challenge. It took roughly a dozen attempts to capture the insect crawling from the lead actor’s mouth.
That shot made the final cut. Entire scenes did not.
Phillips said the lead performance was emotionally forceful enough that he removed material to protect the character’s strongest moments. He was traveling with his newborn and could not attend the festival screening, but the psychological-thriller award offered welcome confirmation after a year spent largely removed from the film community.
Ed Castañeda’s Slated earned Best Kill with a horror-comedy ending built under pressure.
The film originated during the Room 237 Horror Film Competition, which required teams to write, shoot, and edit a movie within 28 days. Each production also had to incorporate a randomly assigned prop. Castañeda’s team drew an axe.
Composer Wallace Simpson proposed the concept that survived a rapid burst of five scripts written by Castañeda and Jim Dicus. The team shot for two days at Seattle’s Harbor Island soundstage, taking advantage of a half-finished set left by another production.
Then the calendar became the real killer.
The original edit ran 12 minutes, while competition rules imposed a five-minute limit. With only three days remaining, editor Dicus carved the film down to size. A Steadicam introduction that Castañeda compared to a Quentin Tarantino shot was among the casualties.
Even the winning kill involved improvisation. The team ran short on time, abandoned its initial effect, and assembled an alternate ending with Castañeda standing on a ladder and pressing the axe toward actor Mark Fox’s head. The construction may have been frantic, but the effect landed. At one festival screening, the reveal reportedly earned a slow clap.
No film in the lineup embraced low-budget blasphemy quite like Marina M’s The Bloody Tears of Slaughterina, winner of Best B-Horror Film.
Shot on Super 8, the movie follows Slaughterina, a serial-killing drag queen clown who murders and eats her model girlfriend before experiencing an anti-divine revelation involving maggots, clowns, and the birth of the Anti-Christ.
Marina shot the film primarily in black and white, allowing red to puncture the frame as its sole color. She drew from Universal and Hammer horror, American International Pictures, Roger Corman, exploitation cinema, and the New York underground’s Cinema of Transgression.
Production began in 2024 at Slaughterina’s apartment and later moved to Dollhaus Gallery in Bayonne, New Jersey, for the cannibalism and demonic-birth sequences. One camera malfunctioned on the final shooting day, validating Marina’s habit of keeping a backup close. The finished movie used period music and grindhouse-inspired trailers assembled after Marina taught herself DaVinci Resolve.
The props kept things resourceful. The human flesh served at the dining table was seitan. The devil baby was a doll painted red, fitted with horns and fur, and given glowing gold eyes. Real maggots appeared in a cereal sequence before returning to their regular job as food for Slaughterina’s pet tarantula.
Marina had not made a Super 8 film in 25 years. Winning after returning to the format felt like a creative affirmation. Watching the movie with a crowd felt, in her words, “Like being at the Oscars and at a toy store all at once.”
A 420 Award With Counterculture Credentials
For High Times readers, Aaron James Bragone’s Hard Times taking Best 420 Vibe / Most Elevated Experience is the obvious entry point. The deeper connection lies in the festival’s values.
These awards favor participation over permission. They recognize films made from thrift, nerve, subcultural knowledge, and a willingness to look ridiculous while chasing an image nobody else would attempt. That same current has run through cannabis culture, underground publishing, midnight movies, punk flyers, basement shows, and every other scene built before mainstream approval arrived.
The categories themselves tell the story. The festival made room for craft, gore, comedy, altered consciousness, and full-throttle WTF filmmaking without pretending those impulses needed to be separated.
The complete slate of winners (which can all be streamed on the Weird Short Films YouTube channel, paired with exclusive filmmaker interviews):
- Le Meow Mort — Best Use of Challenge, Graceann Dorse
- Cocoon — Best WTF, Dominatrix Mara
- Hard Times — Best 420 Vibe / Most Elevated Experience, Aaron James Bragone
- For the Love of Money — Best Comedy, Joseph Kowalski
- Slated — Best Kill, Ed Castañeda
- The Itch — Best Psychological Thriller, Gordon Phillips
- WHATWHATLOVE — Best DIY Film, Jiajing Ling
- Thirst Eye — Best Horror, Jorge Baldeon
- The Cure for the Clinically Unobservant — Best Script, Aidan Macaluso
- The Bloody Tears of Slaughterina — Best B-Horror, Marina M
That list moves from DIY production and screenwriting into weed, death, discomfort, and B-movie excess without asking anyone to clean up first. Plenty of festivals claim to champion unconventional voices. Weird Short built its awards around them.
Keep The Edges Sharp
The festival’s strongest quality was not strangeness for its own sake. Each winning filmmaker used the strange as a tool.
Mara turned restraint and ritual into sensual cinema. Dorse found mortality inside a dead cat and a Capri Sun. Kowalski buried grief beneath a flood of improvised jokes. Phillips converted adolescent pain into body horror. Castañeda transformed a deadline problem into an award-winning kill. Marina resurrected Super 8 for an anarchic feast of blood, blasphemy, and handmade monsters.
None of these films appear interested in behaving for the market. Good.
Culture gets dull when every rough impulse is tested against what might perform, convert, trend, or offend the fewest people. Short films remain one of the last places where a filmmaker can put a cockroach in an actor’s mouth, drag a freeze-dried cat onto Coney Island, or give birth to a horned devil doll and call it a completed artistic statement.
The Weird Short Film Festival found those people and handed them awards. Its next job is simple: Stay strange enough to make respectable people nervous.
